USA Today reports: Ohio Governor Mike DeWine Sunday afternoon said federal officials have promised to ease restrictions on a technology to clean and reuse the masks deemed the safest for healthcare workers and first responders in the coronavirus outbreak....

Officials are scrambling for the N95 masks and other protective equipment for health care workers as the number of COVID-19 cases is expected to spike over the coming months. On Saturday, DeWine publicly pleaded with the FDA to approve an emergency-use permit for [Columbus-based research firm] Battelle's technology amid a shortage of personal protective equipment, including masks.... The U.S. death total has doubled in two days, climbing above 2,300 Sunday. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been a leading voice in the effort to curb the outbreak, said 100,000 to 200,000 Americans could die before the crisis is over.

DeWine said those numbers make it urgent for the FDA to clean as many masks as it can... The Battelle process uses "vapor phase hydrogen peroxide" to sanitize the N95 masks, allowing them to be reused up to 20 times, the company said in a statement. Each of the company's Critical Care Decontamination Systems can sterilize 80,000 masks per day, Battelle said... DeWine on Sunday said the FDA authorized Battelle to sterilize just 10,000 surgical masks a day. "They're only approved a fraction of what we can do," DeWine said during the press conference.
But DeWine said in his afternoon press conference that an FDA commissioner told him "this would be cleared up today."

An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal: Government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and how they may be affecting the spread of the disease...

The data comes from the mobile advertising industry rather than cellphone carriers. The aim is to create a portal for federal, state and local officials that contains geolocation data in what could be as many as 500 cities across the U.S., one of the people said, to help plan the epidemic response... It shows which retail establishments, parks and other public spaces are still drawing crowds that could risk accelerating the transmission of the virus, according to people familiar with the matter... The data can also reveal general levels of compliance with stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, according to experts inside and outside government, and help measure the pandemic's economic impact by revealing the drop-off in retail customers at stores, decreases in automobile miles driven and other economic metrics.

The CDC has started to get analyses based on location data through through an ad hoc coalition of tech companies and data providers — all working in conjunction with the White House and others in government, people said.

The CDC and the White House didn't respond to requests for comment.
It's the cellphone carriers turning over pandemic-fighting data in Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the U.K., according to the article, while Israel mapped infections using its intelligence agencies' antiterrorism phone-tracking. But so far in the U.S., "the data being used has largely been drawn from the advertising industry.

"The mobile marketing industry has billions of geographic data points on hundreds of millions of U.S. cell mobile devices..."

While many coronavirus tests provide results within hours or days, America's Food and Drug Administration "has authorized the emergency use" of a new rapid coronavirus test from medical device manufacturer Abbott that could results in less than 15 minutes, reports NBC News: The FDA told Abbott it authorized the test's use after determining that "it is reasonable to believe that your product may be effective in diagnosing COVID-19," based on the scientific evidence presented. The agency added that the "known and potential benefits" of the test outweigh potential risks, such as false positives or negatives. The technology being used for the new test is similar to the one found in rapid flu tests, according to the FDA's authorization letter and Abbott.

The FDA also said Friday it has issued at least 19 other emergency use authorizations for diagnostic tests to detect COVID-19, and that it is working with more than 220 test developers who are expected to submit emergency-use authorization requests soon...

Abbott said it is ramping up production to deliver 50,000 tests to the U.S. health care system starting next week.

An anonymous reader quotes Wired: Next week, blood banks across the Netherlands are set to begin a nationwide experiment. As donations arrive — about 7,000 of them per week is the norm — they'll be screened with the usual battery of tests that keep the blood supply safe, plus one more: a test for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Then, in a few weeks, another batch of samples will get the same test. And after that, depending on the numbers, there could be further rounds. The blood donors should be fairly representative of Dutch adults ages 18 to 75, and most importantly, they'll all be healthy enough for blood donation — or at least outwardly so...

Identifying what proportion of the population has already been infected is key to making the right decisions about containment... [B]ecause no Covid-19-specific serological [antibody] tests have been fully vetted yet, the FDA's latest guidance is that they shouldn't be relied upon for diagnoses. But in epidemiology circles, those tests are a sought-after tool for understanding the scope of the disease. Since February — which was either three weeks or a lifetime ago — epidemiologists have been trying to get the full scope of the number of infections here in the U.S... [A]s the disease has continued to spread and a patchwork of local "stay at home" rules begins to bend the course of the disease, projecting who has the disease and where the hot spots are has become more difficult for models to capture.

Instead, you need boots-on-the-ground surveillance. In other words, to fill the gap created by a lack of diagnostic tests, you need more testing — but of a different sort. This time you have to know how many total people have already fought the bug, and how recently they've fought it. "Of all the data out there, if there was a good serological assay that was very specific about individuating recent cases, that would be the best data we could have," says Alex Perkins, an epidemiologist at the University of Notre Dame. The key, he says, is drawing blood from a representative sample that would show the true scope of unobserved infections... Another motivation to develop better blood tests is the potential to develop therapeutics from antibody-rich blood serum.
Wired is currently providing free access to stories about the coronavirus.

ZDNet reports that Singapore is fighting the coronavirus with a new smartphone app named "TraceTogether". The app is able to estimate the distance between TraceTogether smartphones as well as the duration of such interactions. The data then is captured, encrypted, and stored locally on the user's phone for 21 days, which spans the incubation period of the virus. When needed in contact tracing, users will have to authorise the uploading of their TraceTogether data to Singapore's Ministry of Health, which then will assess the information and retrieve the mobile numbers of close contacts within that period of time.

Developed by Government Technology Agency (GovTech), alongside the health ministry, the app was designed to help speed up the contact tracing process and stem the spread of COVID-19, the government IT office said. GovTech said the current processed depended heavily on the memory of patients, who might not be ale to remember all close contacts or have the contact details and information of these individuals. The mobile app can plug the gaps and more quickly identify potential carriers, who then can monitor their health and take the necessary action sooner...

Data logs were stored locally on the mobile phone and contained only cryptographically generated temporary IDs. The data logs would be extracted only when needed by the authorities for contact tracing, it said.

America's Food and Drug Administration has approved a coronavirus test from a company called Cepheid.

It can deliver its results in about 45 minutes, "much faster than current tests that require a sample to be sent to a centralized lab, where results can take days," reports The Hill: The test has been designed to operate on any of Cepheid's more than 23,000 automated GeneXpert Systems worldwide, of which 5,000 are in the U.S., the company said. The systems are already being used to test for conditions such as HIV and tuberculosis. The systems do not require users to have specialty training to perform testing and are capable of running around the clock.

"An accurate test delivered close to the patient can be transformative" and can "help alleviate the pressure" that the COVID-19 outbreak has put on health facilities, David Persing, Cepheid's chief medical and technology officer, said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes UPI: Scientists have developed a technique for repairing damaged DNA. The breakthrough, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, could pave the way for new therapies for cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.

The accumulation of DNA damage is responsible for aging, cancer and neurological diseases like motor neuron disease, also known as ALS.

Until now, scientists have struggled to find ways to repair this kind of damage. However, researchers have discovered a new protein called TEX264 that can combine with other enzymes to find and destroy toxic proteins that bind to DNA and trigger damage.

Scientists are hoping to identify ways to use TEX264 and its protein relatives to repair the DNA damage linked with disorders like cancer and ALS. New therapies inspired by the latest research could also be used to repair the purposeful DNA damage caused by chemotherapy.

schwit1 quotes the International Business Times: Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche announced Friday it had received emergency approval from U.S. regulators for a new and much faster test for diagnosing the deadly new coronavirus...

The test can be run in high volumes on fully automated equipment, Roche said, suggesting it could provide more results far faster than other tests available. "We are increasing the speed definitely by a factor of 10," Thomas Schinecker, head of Roche's diagnostics unit, said in an interview with Bloomberg News. Widespread testing is essential in the race to rein in the spread of the virus, which has so far infected more than 130,000 people and killed nearly 5,000 worldwide. The new Roche tests, which will also now be available in markets that accept the European CE-mark certification, are run on Roche's widely available cobas 6800/8800 systems and can provide results within 3.5 hours, the company said.

In a 24-hour period, the largest machines can provide results on up to 4,128 tests, it said.
Fierce Biotech points out that "emergency use" of the test was quickly approved by U.S. regulators within 24 hours: In addition to the one-day approval, the FDA said it did not object to Roche pre-shipping its COVID-19 tests to laboratories ahead of time, so they could be used immediately following the authorization...

The test is designed to detect nucleic acid strands of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from nasal or oral swabs. However, the company said negative results do not preclude an infection and should be combined with clinical observations and the patient's history and contact with the disease...

"Roche is committed to delivering as many tests as possible and is going to the limits of our production capacity," the company said in a statement, and it expects to have millions of tests available per month.

Starting next week, Starbucks will roll out its spring menu in stores across Canada that will include a breakfast sandwich with Beyond Meat sausage. Engadget reports: Starbucks joins a growing list of brands that have added Beyond Meat's plant-based offerings to their menus. To date, those companies include McDonald's (also a Canadian pilot), KFC, Subway, Carl's Jr., Hardee's and more. The lab-grown, plant-based meat trend is a product of science and tech, but it's also driven by a growing awareness of the environmental impacts of meat production. Earlier this year, Starbucks said it was committed to a "resource-positive future," which includes expanding plant-based options and creating a more environmentally friendly menu. The upcoming egg, cheddar and Beyond Meat sausage breakfast sandwich is the first major step in that direction.

Singaporean company Shiok Meats aims to grow artificial shrimp to combat the negative environmental effects associated with farmed shrimp. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from The Economist: For a long time, beef has been a target of environmentalists because of cattle farming's contribution to global warming. But what about humble shrimp and prawns? They may seem, well, shrimpy when compared with cows, but it turns out the tasty decapods are just as big an environmental problem. The issue is not so much their life cycle: shrimp (as UN statisticians refer to all commonly eaten species collectively) do not belch planet-cooking methane the way cows do. But shrimp farms tend to occupy coastal land that used to be covered in mangroves. Draining mangrove swamps to make way for aquaculture is even more harmful to the atmosphere than felling rainforest to provide pasture for cattle. A study conducted in 2017 by CIFOR, a research institute, found that in both these instances, by far the biggest contribution to the carbon footprint of the resulting beef or shrimp came from the clearing of the land. As a result, CIFOR concluded, a kilo of farmed shrimp was responsible for almost four times the greenhouse-gas emissions of a kilo of beef. Eating a surf-and-turf dinner of prawn cocktail and steak, the study warned, can be more polluting than driving across America in a petrol-fuelled car.

All this has given one Singaporean company a brain wave. "Farmed shrimps are often bred in overcrowded conditions and literally swimming in sewage water. We want to disrupt that -- to empower farmers with technology that is cleaner and more efficient," says Sandhya Sriram, one of the founders of Shiok Meats. The firm aims to grow artificial shrimp, much as some Western firms are seeking to create beef without cows. The process involves propagating shrimp cells in a nutrient-rich solution. Ms Sriram likens it to a brewery, disdaining the phrase "lab-grown." Since prawn-meat has a simpler structure than beef, it should be easier to replicate in this way. Moreover, shrimp is eaten in lots of forms and textures: whole, minced, as a paste and so on. The firm is already making shrimp mince which it has tested in Chinese dumplings. It hopes the by-product of the meat-growing can be used as a flavoring for prawn crackers and instant noodles. Eventually it plans to grow curved "whole" shrimp -- without the head and shell, that is. While producing shrimp this way currently costs $5,000 a kilo, Shiok Meats thinks it can bring the price down dramatically by using less rarefied ingredients in its growing solution.

"Chinese researchers reportedly have applied for a local patent on an experimental Gilead drug that they believe could help fight the novel coronavirus outbreak -- and also significantly bolster Gilead's bottom-line going forward..." reports The Street. "If granted, Gilead will need to get Chinese patent owners on board when it wants to sell the drug for treating the novel coronavirus infection outside China."

"The move is a sign that China views Gilead's therapy as one of the most promising candidates to fight the outbreak that has now claimed almost 500 lives..." Time reports. "While Gilead's experimental drug isn't licensed or approved anywhere in the world, it is being rushed into human trials in China on coronavirus patients after showing early signs of being highly effective."

But China's move concerns Bloomberg Opinion biotech/pharma columnist Max Nisen: If the patent is granted, it will confirm long-standing drugmaker fears about China's commitment to IP protection, raising concern about the industry's future in a crucial market. It also could further erode the already weak incentives for pharma to invest in drugs to combat emerging infectious diseases... [T]he company could see any potential return on the medication curtailed if China starts manufacturing it.

China's increasingly affluent population represents a huge opportunity for drugmakers. Many are investing heavily in the region despite previous data integrity and sales scandals. Leadership has recently demonstrated a greater commitment to IP rights in its initial trade deal with the U.S., but granting this patent could erode trust in the government and scare off foreign drugmakers.

The consequences wouldn't be limited to declining corporate confidence in China, even if this is a one-time emergency event. The world dramatically under-invests in drugs to combat infectious diseases, and a move like this by the Chinese government wouldn't help. Developing such medicines isn't very profitable, compared to drugs for rare diseases and cancer. That's especially true when it comes to emerging viruses, in spite of the obvious risk. Outbreaks are more common in developing countries, which limits pricing power. By the time a company has managed to get approval for any given drug, often a years-long process, there's a good chance that the outbreak will be over.

Seizing the rights to treatments dents drugmakers' already limited incentive to invest in infectious-disease drugs, let alone spend heavily to develop and maintain the ability to respond rapidly to outbreaks and scale up manufacturing. Without the promise of some kind of return, investment is going to dry up. I'm not a rah-rah pharma guy. The industry often abuses the patent system, especially in the U.S., in order to profit for years off of old drugs to the detriment of patients and the health-care system. Its pricing practices are frequently unconscionable. This isn't one of those situations. It's arguably one of the rare cases where the ability of drugmakers to profit needs to be boosted rather than crimped.

Two months ago the Washington Post reported that Google "has partnered with health-care provider Ascension to collect and store personal data for millions of patients, including full names, dates of birth and clinical histories, in order to make smarter recommendations to physicians."

Now CNBC reports that the medical record vendor Epic Systems "has been phoning customers to tell them it will not pursue further integration with Google Cloud. The company is instead focusing on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, citing insufficient interest from customers in Google.

"The move comes as Google is facing criticism from privacy advocates about its work with Ascension, one of the largest U.S. health systems," CNBC adds. But could this start influencing which cloud provider hospitals choose for their records?

"We've historically seen hospital systems make these decisions independently of their medical record provider," said Aneesh Chopra, the president of health-technology company CareJourney and the former chief technology officer of the United States. "It will be interesting to see if Epic's thumb on the scale moves cloud market share...."

Epic isn't alone in its move.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Cerner decided against pursuing a data-storage relationship with Google despite being offered tens of millions of dollars in incentives. The company was on the hunt for a cloud vendor to help it store 250 million patient medical records. In the end, Cerner went with Amazon.
In 2017 CNBC reported Cerner's collaboration with Amazon would initially focus on a "popular health product...which enables hospitals to gather and analyze huge volumes of clinical data to improve patients' health outcomes and lower treatment costs."

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Only in the past five years has it become possible to raise thousands of healthy fish so far from the shoreline without contaminating millions of gallons of fresh water. A technology called recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) now allows indoor aquaculture farms to recycle up to 99 percent of the water they use. And the newest generation of these systems will help one biotech company bring its unusual fish to U.S. customers for the first time this year.

For AquaBounty Technologies [...] this technology couldn't have come at a better time. The company has for decades tried to introduce a transgenic salmon it sells under the brand name AquAdvantage to the U.S. market. In this quest, AquaBounty has lost between $100 million and $115 million (so far). In the final months of 2020, the company will harvest its first salmon raised in the United States and intended for sale there. Thanks to modifications that involved splicing genetic material into its salmon from two other species of fish, these salmon grow twice as fast and need 25 percent less food to reach the same weight as salmon raised on other fish farms. The report says Costco, Target, Trader Joe's, Walmart, Whole Foods, and roughly 80 other North American grocery store chains don't plan to carry it, but that could certainly change. "As of December, AquaBounty was unable to name any restaurants or stores where customers would be able to buy its salmon," the report adds.

"Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it," reports Ars Technica.

Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shared their report: This is one of those ideas that seems nuts but had so many earlier results pointing toward it working that it was really just a matter of time before someone tried it. To understand it, you have to overcome the idea that the immune system is always diffuse, composed of cells that wander the blood stream. Instead, immune cells organize at the sites of infections (or tumors), where they communicate with each other to both organize an attack and limit that attack so that healthy tissue isn't also targeted.

From this perspective, the immune system's inability to eliminate tumor cells isn't only the product of their similarities to healthy cells. It's also the product of the signaling networks that help restrain the immune system to prevent it from attacking normal cells... A number of recently developed drugs help release this self-imposed limit, winning their developers Nobel Prizes in the process. These drugs convert a "cold" immune response, dominated by signaling that shuts things down, into a "hot" one that is able to attack a tumor...

[More recently] researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn't get the flu. For more detailed tests, the researchers moved to mice, using melanoma cells that can form tumors when transplanted into the lungs of the mice... Having an active influenza virus infection reduced the ability of the melanoma cells to establish themselves in the lung. The effect isn't limited to the location of the infection, though, as tumors in the lung that wasn't infected were also inhibited. The effects were similar when breast cancer cells were placed into the lung, as well. All of this is consistent with the immune stimulation provided by a pathogen. The stimulation causes a general activation of the immune system that releases it from limits on its activity that prevent it from attacking tumor cells....

[T]he researchers obtained this year's flu vaccine and injected it into the sites of tumors. Not only was tumor growth slowed, but the mice ended up immune to the flu virus.... [T]he story does fit in well with the general consensus that the immune system can be a powerful tool against cancer, provided it can be mobilized properly. And, in at least some cases, a flu vaccine just might do the trick.

The debate over what to call cell-cultured meat remains unresolved -- and it could soon develop into a headache for the global lab-grown meat technology startups working to bring clean meat to consumers. Quartz reports: The window of opportunity to unify around a term for motherless meat is closing. If cultivated meat companies such as JUST, Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, and Finless Foods want to present a consistent face before the first cell-based meat is unveiled to consumers, they'll likely have to act in 2020. That's when industry insiders speculate Singaporean food regulators will be the first in the world to approve serving in vitro meat. Back in 2013, when the possibility of growing meat in a laboratory setting was first introduced in London (paywall), the term "lab-grown meat" dominated international headlines. The unveiling of a real product on the market will likely draw the same kind of attention -- offering a rare second chance to make a first impression on consumers. Unlike plant-based meat imitators, these alternatives are grown from actual animal cells into fat and muscle tissue, producing a real meat product without killing an animal. The process is said to leave a much smaller environmental footprint than conventional animal agriculture.

But what are people supposed to call this new meat when they talk about it with their friends and family? Producers say it won't be grown in labs in the future. Instead, it will be in standard food processing facilities. So what wording will distinguish it from conventional meat? Is it in vitro meat? Too weird, some say. Lab-grown meat? Not accurate. Animal-free meat? Nope. Motherless meat? Immaculate meat? Those are long shots, too. Ask people working in the industry about their collective indecision and many respond with groans. Some even say they don't rank the naming issue as a high priority. "Clean meat was the original label, and of course that's changed over time to cultured," says Brian Spears, the founder and CEO of New Age Meats. "Then there was cell-based. And now we are a cultivated company."

"The basic term for it should be something that is accurate and comforting," says Josh Balk, who co-founded JUST.

Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, started referring to the meat as "cultivated meat," arguing that use of the term was backed with real data (PDF).

Would you pay $1 million and fly to South America for a chance to live longer? From a report: Libella Gene Therapeutics, a Kansas-based company that says it is developing a gene therapy that can reverse aging by up to 20 years, is hoping your answer is yes. In an interview with OneZero, the company says it is ready to give an experimental anti-aging therapy to older people at a clinic north of Bogota, Colombia. But that's not all -- it's also charging people $1 million to participate. Scientists and ethicists say the company's experiment is not only dubious but it also raises concerns about how anti-aging treatments should be tested in people. The aim of Libella's therapy is to lengthen a person's telomeres, which sit at the tips of chromosomes like caps on the end of shoelaces. First discovered in the 1970s, telomeres have been linked to aging because they seem to shorten as a person gets older. By delivering a gene called TERT to cells, which in turn makes a telomere-rebuilding enzyme called telomerase, Libella thinks it can prevent, delay, or even reverse aging.

"I know what we're trying to do sounds like science fiction, but I believe it's a science reality," Jeff Mathis, CEO of Libella Gene Therapeutics, tells OneZero. Libella's therapy is based on studies published by American geneticist Ronald DePinho in 2010 and Spanish scientist Maria Blasco in 2012, which found that telomerase gene therapy could reverse signs of aging in mice. While intriguing, many have dismissed the idea of using gene therapy to reverse aging in humans because it would involve a permanent change to a person's DNA, a risk that's hard to justify in someone who's healthy. Behind Libella's technology is Bill Andrews, a molecular biologist who, 20 years ago, led a research group at the Bay Area biotech firm Geron to identify the human telomerase enzyme. He tells OneZero that he developed a telomerase gene therapy and licensed the technology to Libella. "I can't say it's the only cause of aging, but it plays a role in humans," he says about telomere shortening.

Software developer nickwinlund77 writes: A new study following Nick Lane, et al.'s protocell study mentioned on Slashdot offers an explanation for how ''protocells'' could have emerged on early Earth, eventually leading to the cells we know today.

The work suggests that molecules called cyclophospholipids may have been the ingredient necessary for protocells to form important internal structures called vesicles, which likely kicked off the evolutionary process.

Are protocells basically a form of preliminary software-like 'code' in evolutionary biology?

"Synthetic biologists have performed a biochemical switcheroo," reports Science magazine: They've re-engineered a bacterium that normally eats a diet of simple sugars into one that builds its cells by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2), much like plants. The work could lead to engineered microbes that suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into medicines and other high-value compounds.

"The implications of this are profound," says Dave Savage, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work. Such advances, he says, could "ultimately make us change the way we teach biochemistry...."

In all, the evolved bacteria picked up 11 new genetic mutations that allowed them to survive without eating other organisms, the team reports today in Cell. "It really shows how amazing evolution can be, in that it can change something so fundamental as cellular metabolism," Milo says.
"The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death," explains long-time Slashdot reader Tangential, "but had access to plenty of CO2 and formate.

"The process of evolution says that life finds a way to cope with stressful conditions like these, and some of the bacteria soon turned to the CO2 as a food source."

Last year nearly 400 million people experienced Dengue fever, according to All Things Considered. (Just Brazil alone had more than 2 million cases.) But The World Mosquito Project is trying an interesting solution: Scientists are cultivating and releasing mosquitoes, except these mosquitoes are special: They've been infected with a bacterium called Wolbachia. Wolbachia occurs naturally in many insects, but not normally in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread dengue. It has to be introduced into the mosquitoes in the lab. But then the bacterium is passed down to future generations. The bacterium appears to block Aedes aegypti from transmitting arboviruses, which include dengue as well as chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika...

"In Indonesia, we've [released Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in] a community of 50,000 people and compared it to a community that was left without Wolbachia," says Cameron Simmons, director of the impact assessment team for the World Mosquito Program. "We've seen a 75% reduction [of dengue cases] over the last 2 1/2 years in the Wolbachia-treated community...." The problem in the real world is that other people and other mosquitoes keep migrating into the areas being treated, messing up the experiments. But from a theoretical perspective Simmons sees Wolbachia as potentially a way to wipe out dengue entirely.

"If you had a big island," he proposes, "[and] you stop people from moving in and out of that island, and you put Wolbachia across all the mosquitoes on that island, the science suggests that you'll eliminate dengue in that location."

Some countries are trying to do just that. Australia started using Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes nearly a decade ago to control outbreaks of imported dengue in the state of Queensland. This year the government of Malaysia launched a campaign called "Wolbachia Malaysia" to attack dengue.

peterthegreat321 shares this story from Medium's new tech site, OneZero about Second Sight's experimental brain implant that offers a kind of artificial vision: From the outside, the Orion looks like a pair of sunglasses with a small camera and video processing unit attached to it. Implanted in the brain, however, is a postage stamp-sized chip containing 60 electrodes that sits on the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. When the device is switched on, the camera captures a person's surroundings, and the wireless video processing unit converts those images into electrical pulses using an algorithm. Those pulses are transmitted to the electrodes on the brain, which interprets them as visual clues... [T]he Orion, which shares much of its technology with the Argus II, bypasses the eye and optic nerve completely. "With the current system we're testing, you don't even need to have eyes for the device to work," says Dr. Nader Pouratian, the neurosurgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who implanted Jason Esterhuizen's device. As the primary investigator of the trial at UCLA, he has outfitted four patients with the device. The other two study participants received the implant from Dr. Daniel Yoshor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas...

Esterhuizen and the other participants have regained a limited amount of vision after being completely blind for years or decades. While they don't see color, shapes, or clear edges and can't yet read text, they are able to distinguish light from dark, they can recognize moving objects, and they have some degree of depth perception. People and objects appear as dots of light corresponding to where they're located, and as they get closer, more dots appear. "It's like learning a new language," Esterhuizen says. "You learn how to interpret what's going on...."

Electrodes in the brain also cause scar tissue to form over time, making them stop working, so it isn't clear how long these implants will last. Jessy Dorn, vice president of clinical and scientific affairs at Second Sight, says the electrodes used in the Orion device should work for at least five years. That means patients will probably eventually lose what little vision they acquire with the devices. Another major limitation of the Orion is that it's only useful for those who were born sighted and later lost their vision. In people who are born blind, the parts of the brain that are responsible for sight are not fully developed, and visual information cannot be effectively transmitted to the brain. A device that could help all people with blindness is still a long way off... Esterhuizen though is hopeful about the future of assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired. "It's just baby steps for now," he says. "But eventually I think this technology will change the lives of millions of people."