Doctors Ansar And Robin Khan Bring Tranquility Of The Mind And Soul To Their Community With Sakoon The Spa – Forbes India

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Dr. Robin Khan and her husband, Dr. Ansar Khan, are founders of Sakoon The Spa, a Day Spa and Medical Spa located in Omaha, Nebraska. Dr. Ansar Khan, a native of Lucknow, is a renowned urologist with his own clinic in Fremont, Nebraska. Dr. Robin Khan is a successful dentist with her clinic "Dentistry For Health" in Omaha, Nebraska. With over 30 years of experience in providing physical healthcare to patients all over the world, this power couple opened Sakoon The Spa in hopes of enriching their community by providing wellness of the mind, body, and spirit.In addition to providing wellness to its local community, Sakoon The Spa is now working with XYZ Media and its founders - award-winning journalist XiXi Yang and Dr. William Puetz - to share its messaging of the importance of human connections inward and outward with a a global audience.

Dr. Ansar Khan, please share with us your childhood growing up in Lucknow, India. How has your heritage shaped the body of your work?

Dr. Ansar Khan: Growing up in Lucknow, I had the great fortune of being educated at La Martiniere School for Boys since the age of 10. My father and mother were physicians, so it was natural understanding that both myself and my sister would follow in their footsteps. My mother was an orphan raised in a Christian Community and was committedto charitable work and my father was of Sufi lineage and had come from a long line of Unani and western medicine traditions. The early life with my parents, extended family, and then my subsequent experience living among many close Hindu friends allowed me to see the beauty of unity as well as diversityin humanity. The poetic and artistic culture of Lucknow also played a major role in how I view and experience the world.

Dr. Robin Khan and Dr. Ansar Khan - After having success in your individual practices, what inspired the both of you to come together to open Sakoon The Spa?

Dr. Ansar Khan and Dr. Robin Khan: We both had been focusing on the physical dimensions of illness throughout our careers, and as we matured in our practices, we realized there are many facets to health that we wanted to explore further. We started pursing education from an optimized and holistic health model and we became convinced that in order to live life to the fullest of ones potential all aspects of an individuals life must be cared for. The human condition is complex and requires a caring and nurturing mindset on many levels. We have tried to optimize physical care within a functional medicine framework, mental health, and well being by providing a patio and social area to promote community and interpersonal relationships, and spiritually with relaxation modalities and aesthetic care.

How does wellness of the mind and spirit balance physical health?

Dr. Ansar Khan and Dr. Robin Khan:There is boundless research proving the positive effects of mental tranquility on the longevity of people who perceive they have a community of support and close intimate relationships.

What does it mean to you to name Sakoon The Spa an Urdu word? How has your community embraced Sakoon The Spa?

Dr. Ansar Khan and Dr. Robin Khan:Sakoon is an Urdu word meaning Tranquility of Mind and Soul. The purpose of Sakoon is to experience and know relaxation of the mind, body and soul. Omaha has received Sakoon with open hearts and minds. We feel very fortunate that the staff at Sakoon has completely embraced our vision.

It's not easy being a care provider, especially during unprecedented times. To what do you attribute your decades-long success as healthcare providers and business owners?

Dr. Ansar Khan and Dr. Robin Khan:The world is dynamic and shifting always. Medicine and business are no exceptions to that. We have had to make some adjustments based on safety for our guests and staff, but the general positive emotions about Sakoon persist. In both of our practices, we have always felt that if we lead by showing concern and care for our team of employees, they will in turn show the same regard for our patients and the business.

How have you adapted and grown?

Dr. Ansar Khan and Dr. Robin Khan:We like to adapt and grow by assessing the needs and desires of the community we serve. Each one of the guests that walks into Sakoon has inspired a piece of our journey. Growth happens when we're met with unprecedented times. Instead of resisting change, we choose to embrace change every single day because we believe it's a natural part of the human life. Whether it is at Sakoon or at our individual clinics, we have always put the needs and desires of our patients and guests first. We are inspired to give back to the world that has blessed us with an abundance of knowledge and resources. Sakoon is a reawakening of these disciplines in many ways. To be conscious of the need for self care as the foundation for service to ones family, community and humanity as a whole is a basic bedrock of life.

For additional information on Sakoon The Spa, check outwww.SakoonTheSpa.com!

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Doctors Ansar And Robin Khan Bring Tranquility Of The Mind And Soul To Their Community With Sakoon The Spa - Forbes India

Every Dog Year Is Not Equal To 7 Human Years, Researchers Now Say – CBS Boston

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(CNN) How do you compare a dogs age to that of a person? A popular method says you should multiply the dogs age by 7 to compute how old Fido is in human years.

But new research published Thursday in the Cell Systems journal debunks that method. And thats because the scientists behind a new study say dogs and humans dont age at the same rate.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have developed a new formula that takes into account that variance. Tracking molecular changes in the DNA of Labrador retrievers, and in particular the changing patterns of methyl groups in their genome, according to a release, the study shows how dogs age at a much faster rate than humans early in their lives, then slow down after reaching maturity.

This makes sense when you think about it after all, a nine-month-old dog can have puppies, so we already knew that the 1:7 ratio wasnt an accurate measure of age, lead author Trey Ideker is quoted as saying.

Based on the study, a one-year-old dog compares to a 30-year-old human, a four-year-old dog to a 52-year-old human. The rate of aging decreases after dogs turn 7.

The new formula is the first that is transferable across species, and scientists plan to test their findings on other dog breeds to study the impact of longevity on their findings, according to a release.

Researchers also believe that observing changes in the methylation patterns before and after the use of anti-aging products could help veterinarians make more informed decisions in terms of diagnostics and treatment.

A graphic in the study makes the age comparisons intuitive and provides some helpful context for dog owners, including the scientists themselves.

I have a six-year-old dog she still runs with me, but Im now realizing that shes not as young as I thought she was, Ideker is quoted as saying.

The-CNN-Wire & 2020 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

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One More Key to Human Longevity Found After Worm Research – International Business Times, Singapore Edition

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It is known that the mitochondria is called the powerhouse of the cell, without which there will be no energy production in the cell, thereby the body too! Along with this mitochondria has its role in other important functions, one crucial role being in aging.

Research has shown that age-related diseases are linked to mitochondrial functioning. Further, it is known that "mild inhibition of mitochondrial respiration" promotes longevity in many species, which means to mildly slow down mitochondria's energy-making process. Thus, the life-span extension compensates for the reduced mitochondrial respiration.

An enzyme called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) that promotes mitochondrial health is also known as anti-aging protein. The same enzyme plays a crucial role in life-span extension by reducing mitochondrial respiration.

Research on roundworms has shown that an enzyme called VRK-1 can extend their lifespan. VRK-1 does this by increasing the level of AMPK resulting in an increase in its activity, promoting longevity through phosphorylation.

This VRK-1 is also a gene that gives instructions in making a protein called VRK (vaccinia-related kinase), which is active in cells throughout the body. It plays a critical role in cell growth and division. It also influences proteins that control gene activity attaching itself to the DNA.

This is an important finding in the research of extending human lifespan too.

Korean scientists published a paper this Wednesday in Science Advances, that showed how the lifespan of worms was extended by varying VRK-1 levels.

Roundworms normally have a lifespan of about two to three weeks. But the genetically engineered worms in the experiment, having elevated levels of VRK-1 lived about 23.7 days on average - they lived longer. When they inhibited the function of VRK-1 in other worms, they found that their lives were shortened.

Lab-controlled worms that lived 20.3 days on average, lived only 12.7 days as VRK-1 was inhibited. That is, the worms died sooner.

A senior author of the paper, Seung-Jae Lee, professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology told Inverse that the key to activating longevity was in the anti-aging protein, AMPK, while the key to activating AMPK is VRK-1. The VRK-1 enzyme is found in worms and has its cousin in human cells, that's very similar to it.

"Therefore, it is possible that this mechanism can be applied to promoting human longevity in the future," he added.

Similar patterns were shown in cultured human cells in the experiment, Lee said, showing that the process holds even in complex organisms.

Replicating the study in animals, like mice will show it's likeliness in humans. However, scientists still don't know how exactly the process occurs.

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One More Key to Human Longevity Found After Worm Research - International Business Times, Singapore Edition

Time to tackle the tax dodgers – Social Europe

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With some bailed out companies continuing to pay dividends, the focus should shift to making big corporations contribute to the cost of recovery.

Remember the world after the pandemic? The Covid-19 crisis has caused mourning in hundreds of thousands of families and brought the worlds economies to their knees. But by forcing more than half of humanity to stop, it has also forced us to think, to dream of a more egalitarian, greener world. In that world, we would recognise the importance of quality public services, having seen health workers fighting heroically against the virus and teachers trying to keep in contact with their students, despite the lockdown and lack of resources.

Through timely and otherwise-welcome operations of solidaritydonating masks and gel or opening up their premisesbig brands have not hesitated to advertise on the back of the pandemic. But all over the world, many companies are paying out billions in dividends, even after benefiting from state handouts.

In France, for example, half the CAC 40 indexrepresenting the 40 top companies by market capitalisationstill decided to pay out between 35 and 41 billion in dividends, despite receiving state aid from the short-time-work scheme to compensate workers for reduced hours due to the pandemic. In Germany, the list is also extensive, with carmakers featuring prominentlyVolkswagen has placed around 80,000 employees on short-time contracts, yet still plans to pay around 3.3 billion in dividends. And in the UK, the worlds largest chemicals company, BASF, which received 1 billion in support funding, voted last month to pay out more than three times that amount in dividends to shareholders.

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The soaring dividends are feeding the billionaires, though the European ones are not the champions of indecency. In the United States, the assets of 600 billionaires grew by $434 billion, or 15 per cent, during the first two months of lockdown. The fortunes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg alonefounder bosses of Amazon and Facebook respectivelyincreased in sum by nearly $60 billion. This is no coincidence, as digital companies have benefited most from the pandemicsince they do not require any physical interaction with the publicoften at the expense of small and medium-sized distribution firms.

Ironically, these multinational digital companies are also the champions of tax avoidance. The GAFAGoogle, Apple, Facebook and Amazonare not the only ones who do not pay taxes according to their activities. But, because they are dematerialised, they are able to exploit the loopholes in the international tax system more easily.

By manipulating transactions between their subsidiaries, they are reporting record profits in tax havens and very low onesif not lossesin countries with higher corporate taxes, even though they are actually operating extensively in the latter. For example, Amazon, in spite of doubling its profits in the US in 2018, didnt pay a single dollar in taxes there, for the second year in a row.

This is why, while keeping in mind that the US administration has just announced that it no longer wants to take part in negotiations to overhaul the international tax system, it is urgent for countries to introduce, regionally or unilaterally, at least temporary taxes on the digital giants. This is one of five main recommendations proffered last month by the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT)of which I am a member alongside economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucmanto enable states to cope with the explosion in spending caused by the pandemic.

When the economies of the European Union are set to shrink by 7.4 per cent, the worst recession in the blocs historythe International Monetary Fund is expecting a global recession of 4.9 per centausterity is no longer appropriate. We need to invest in health, schools and infrastructure, but also in supporting businesses, especially the smallest ones. But even if some governments pretend to ignore the fact that we shall have to foot the bill in the end, we must, from now on, turn to those who benefit from the system without contributing to it.

In addition to digital companies, governments must also apply a higher corporate tax to firms in monopoly or oligopoly situationsespecially those profiting from the crisis, such as in the pharmaceutical sector. Above all, we must not succumb to the siren calls for tax cuts, for which big companies are already campaigning, claiming that they are necessary for reconstruction.

As you may know, Social Europe is an independent publisher. We aren't backed by a large publishing house, big advertising partners or a multi-million euro enterprise. For the longevity of Social Europe we depend on our loyal readers - we depend on you.

We already know that, in normal times, it is not taxation that pushes a company to invest in a country: it is more about the quality of infrastructure, the workforce, market access or political stability. And while expansion projects are constrained by uncertainty and corporate overcapacity, tax cuts will not stimulate private investment anyway. But they would certainly deprive governments of valuable resources.

To protect and increase these resources, we must finally make a major push for transparency, to uncover the amounts hidden in tax havens. This concerns those with large fortunes, of course, who should finally pay their fair share of taxes to fund the consequences of this crisissome countries, such as Argentina, are considering thisbut above all the multinationals.

They must declare where and how much they earn on a country-by-country basis. This would allow governments to tax them at a minimum rateat least 25 per cent, according to ICRICT.

In concrete terms, if a French multinational, for example, decided to declare its profits in the Cayman Islandsor, even closer, in the Netherlands or Luxembourgto take advantage of a very low tax rate, France would be able to recover the difference. This measure would quickly make the raison dtre of tax havens disappear.

And, for once, governments are in a good position to impose this transparency. All they have to do is announce, as France, Denmark and Italy, among others, have already done, that companies with headquarters or subsidiaries in tax havenswithout carrying out any real activity therewill not be entitled to any public aid to deal with the Covid-19 crisis.

There is no time to lose. The 2008 financial crisis already made us dream of a fairer worldwith results we all know about. Losing this new opportunity, at a time when social, human and climatic crises are multiplying throughout the world, would be unforgivable.

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Is there a science to staying alive longer? – Pursuit

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It is only relatively recently that enough people have actually reached old age to enable us to study why and how some people stay healthy while others die young.

In 1900, the worldwide average life expectancy was 31 years; now it is 71 years, and in developed countries like Japan, the UK and Australia it is over 80.

One of the greatest gifts of being a doctor for older adults is the constant reminder that life is fragile, finite and precious. This makes me want to protect my life and my health because I want to live as long and as well as possible, but it also reminds me to enjoy today, in case that is all there is.

The competing knowledge that our lifestyle choices can prolong life, but that death is also inevitable can present one of the most challenging conflicts of human existence.

It manifests in the small, everyday decisions we make. Will I eat this piece of cake now: the delicious taste versus the longer-term risk of diabetes? Will I have another glass of wine: the light-headed buzz versus the increased risk of cancer? Will I go to bed or just stream another episode, the gripping TV show now or decreasing my risk of dementia by getting adequate sleep?

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As a geriatrician, most of my patients have problems related to age.

This does not mean they are all old. There can be vast disparities in health between two people of the same age.

My own grandmother has the kind of life that many of us aspire to enjoy in their nineties: she lives independently, tends her garden, walks her dog and is on the board of a charity. I see others who are living lives far more constrained by physical or cognitive impairments some in their sixties and seventies needing carers on hand at all times.

While one of the best ways to reach very old age is to choose your parents wisely, for most of us, the number of healthy years lived will be influenced by our lifestyle choices.

While people love to tell stories of people who lived to ninety while smoking a packet of cigarettes a day, these people are memorable in their rarity. Those who died young of smoking-related illness are no longer here to tell their story.

The traditional medical model of health is defined as the absence of disease by avoiding risk factors. It wasnt until I started my PhD research, exploring a framework of health outside this traditional model, that I truly understood that there is no conflict between the way we feel today and doing the best for our future.

It was my PhD supervisor, Professor Ruth Hubbard, who first suggested looking at positive factors associated with recovery rather than negatives. These are called health assets, factors that are desirable in their own right that are also associated with the creation of wellbeing.

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This approach is based on an idea with the lovely name salutogenesis, a word coined by sociologist Aaron Antonovsky. Salutogenesis is a theory of health that posits that we and our communities have resources that we can use to optimise our wellbeing, and that these are desirable in their own right.

Basically, including more things that improve life today is a strategy to increase longevity. This concept of health also goes beyond the idea that health is purely physical; it also incorporates social and mental health, as well as the concept of happiness.

We rarely allow ourselves to think this overwhelming thought, but for every single one of us, life is fragile and uncertain. Even following all the right advice, we could develop an incurable disease tomorrow or even die suddenly today.

This is why the question of how to live well today is so urgent: we need to start thinking about what makes life worthwhile in the present.

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Most of us will have goals we are working towards bigger-picture goals that are important for our sense of self and that create structure in our lives but it is the day-to-day minutiae that make a life.

It is discovering a new and delicious food, going out for a walk and seeing the morning light reflecting on a building or running into an old, much-loved friend.

Living well means creating the right conditions to feel positive, energetic and engaged. And that does not mean always taking the easiest option making the choice to feel better can be effortful, especially if it means a change in habits.

Yet it is an inescapable truth that with age comes an increased risk of developing a chronic disease.

Almost everyone I speak to who is aged over 50 has something like high blood pressure, or has had some sort of medical event, even if it was just the removal of a precancerous mole. Even if these health conditions dont kill us (and many wont), they can make life a lot less enjoyable.

But I also want you to remember that almost all of these conditions share the same underlying causes. This is why prevention is such an excellent all-for-one deal.

Our days are full of small decisions: What will I make for dinner? Will I walk or drive? Will I see if my friend is free for coffee? While they may seem minor, its these decisions that accumulate over time to contribute to our future health.

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They also affect how well we feel today our sleep, our mood, our energy levels. These decisions require us to prioritise our own health and wellbeing which can be a challenge for so many people

There are important factors in expected gender roles that also influence ageing.

Women often take on more hours of caring than men, both for children and older relatives. Although caring for others can be enriching and rewarding, if it is constant and unrelenting it can have negative implications for health.

Many women will spend decades creating favourite meals for loved ones but would never take the time to make something special for themselves.

Similarly, women are less likely than men to undertake regular exercise; many feel self-conscious and fear being judged, missing out on the immediate and long-term health benefits.

Men are also more likely to engage in risky behaviours and to use higher levels of drugs and alcohol, perhaps as a response to rigid tropes of masculinity, where they are discouraged from expressing negative emotions.

Making day-to-day decisions that optimise a feeling of wellness today ensures that our finite days are as satisfying as possible, with the excellent happenstance of longevity.

This is an edited extract from Dr Kate Gregorevics new book Staying Alive: the Science of Living Healthier, Happier and Longer, published by Pan McMillan Australia. Its available now online or for more information, visit her website, Project Three Six Twelve.

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By Transforming a ‘Stroad,’ Denver Can Move Forward on a Safer, More Inclusive Transportation System – Streetsblog Denver

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(Safety-focused Lincoln Street redesign: Dedicated bus lane, traffic-calming lane reduction, bollards, and pedestrian improvements create the conditions for a people-focused multimodal thoroughfare.)

Amanda Roberts is a neighborhood advocate working towards a multimodal future for kids growing up in Denver. Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMtn.

Like many rapidly growing cities across the United States, Denver wrestles with its car-prioritized legacy of interstate building and exit expansions through its increasingly traffic-snarled communities. Just off the Lincoln/Broadway exit today, the dangerous, multilane urban arterial roadway we know as Lincoln Street whisks cars as quickly as possible from I-25 into downtown. Not surprisingly, drivers take full advantage. They speedand they crashplacing Lincoln in the High Injury Network.

Fortunately, Denver has adopted a Vision Zero Action Plan and has started to build out multimodal networks to address its growing traffic crash rate, dedicating bus lanes along downtown and adjacent streets such as Broadway. However, there is one last piece of the puzzle in this transit-oriented area that needs a safety-centric touch: that unique, urban, and mostly residential segment from I-25 to Speer, considered Baker on the west side and Washington Park West on the east side.

Today, its a car-centric stroadan unproductive, unsafe hybrid of a street and a road, on the brink of decline in some areas. But, with a few improvements to the Corridor to increase access and safety for those walking, cycling and taking transit, it can be transformed into a community-first place worth arriving at.

A walk down Lincoln today reveals just how much the street prioritizes cars over people. Drivers regularly travel at speeds well above the posted speed limit of 30mphtypically in the range of 40-50mph, and higher at night. Holding a conversation with another person with street noise at 75-80 decibels is a challenge. Vibrations from fast-moving heavy vehicles such as buses can be felt in adjacent structures, particularly where tree lawns were removed and the distance from doorways to speeding vehicles is minimal. While attempting to access grocery stores, shops, bus stops and light rail, or simply taking a stroll down the street, pedestrians are dodging cars, even in crosswalks. Cyclists have taken to riding on the sidewalks to stay safe.

(North-facing Lincoln Street today, just off the I-25 exit ramp. Though this is a transit-rich area, walking is dangerous since buffer zones to protect pedestrians have been removed to ensure interstate traffic is whisked quickly downtown.)

While the problems of Lincolns dangerous design are numerous and complex, the solutions are already laid out in city plans: Blueprint Denver and Denver Moves: Transit. By reclassifying streets, Blueprint Denver communicates a key distinction between Lincoln and its one-way couplet partner, Broadway. While Broadway maintains its commercial thoroughfare status as a Main Street Arterial, Lincoln Street is reclassified as a Residential Arterial. This new classification takes into account the adjacent land use, and implies that Lincolns street design be similar to parallel north-south Residential Arterials in the area, Logan and Downing. Both of these streets are considered thoroughfares like Lincoln, yet they have two general purpose travel lanes instead of three, two-way traffic flow, and traffic calming elements such as medians and buffer zones with tree lawns and/or parking.

Lincoln Street, however, is unique: as part of the Lincoln/Broadway Corridor, it is also considered a High Capacity Transit Corridor by Denver Moves Transit. This means its a candidate for Bus Rapid Transit or rail, each of which require full bus or rail stop amenities. Fortunately, implementing the goals of each of these documents is straightforward and in line with the Citys goals for Complete Streets Design, which are the citys new guiding principles for the citys public right of way, detailing how we allocate space to transportation, utilities and other public infrastructure. Lincoln Streets general travel lanes can be pared down from three to two, to bring it inline with its new street classification. To meet the citys transit goals for the street, another lane can be dedicated for bus service. And the final lanewhich was removed in the past to move cars and currently is a multi-purpose, difficult-to-manage flex lane that splits bus hours with car parkingcan be permanently transformed into a transit-friendly, easy-to-manage buffer zone.

(Red Carpet Lincoln: Dedicated Offset Bus Lane to provide adequate space for shelters, a buffer zone for a variety of parking types, mixed with in-street tree planters, bollards to limit curb-jumping from crashes, and an asphalt overlay to ensure the longevity of the red paint.)

To get larger numbers of people out of their cars and sustain our urban transit system long-term, we need to go a step further by designing it for human beings. Ill leave this with some questions for consideration. Would you rather:

To address transportation pollution impacts and rising traffic deaths head-on, we need to make the entire experience of transit something that large numbers of people can safely and comfortably opt into. That means we need to invest in repairing the urban spaces that have been cut away in the past to move cars, and redesign our public streetscapes for people so they will choose healthier, safer modes.

The time to do this is now by replacing travel lanes with lower cost tactical transit lanes. Only when we take that step forward will we see a safe, sustainable future for moving people in, out, and around Denver.

Streetsblog Denver informs the movement for sustainable transportation and a livable city. Give $5 per month.

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Asia’s First-ever Continuous Galvanized Rebar Manufacturing Facility Launched by Madhav KRG Group in Association With International Zinc Association,…

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The first-of-its-kind facility, situated near Gobindgarh in Punjab, will produce a new product, Continuously Galvanized Rebar (CGR). CGRs are value added rebars for higher life and low maintenance of infrastructure to provide significant cost savings compared to other corrosion resistant rebar systems. It offers on-site formability of the finished product, superior corrosion resistance in concrete at a price cheaper than other corrosion resistant rebar (Epoxy Coating & CRS rebar).

With an annual capacity of over 30,000 tonnes, the plant will manufacture ZNCOAT TEMPCORE TMT BARS under the brand name - JYOTI - a name that is now synonymous with excellence in steel manufacturing. This will be the first brand in Asia to apply CGR technology that will not only be superior but will also enhance life span of the rebars thereby reducing the overall maintenance cost.

YouTube Link - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_2TDrP7F7Bq0hwagE3qLCW1mXR0sXc-S?usp=sharing

Commenting about the new facility, Mr. Sudhir Goyal - Managing Director, Madhav KRG Group said, "Unlike painting and epoxy which are solely barrier-type coatings, CGRs are known to provide superior corrosion protection - both barrier and sacrificial - that further enhances the lifecycle of the underlying steel. I would like to thank the entire team of International Zinc Association and Hindustan Zinc Limited for their support in helping us bring this technology to India that will further help minimize the damage cause by corrosion and put India on the global map for its sustainable usage of zinc."

Addressing the audience, the steel minister Shri Dharmendra Pradhan assured the industry of full support from the government and deliberated on how zinc will play an important role towards building infrastructure for the nation. "As India is on its way to large-scale infrastructure expansions, use of galvanized rebar in construction is set to rise. India has a coastal line that extends over. 8000 kms. Coastal areas are prone to corrosion because of salty atmosphere leading to frequent maintenance requirement thereby adding to loss of material and impact on the productivity. Galvanizing ensures that the zinc coating is of a standard quality and offers resistance to erosion so that there is no risk of cracking due to bending. Galvanized steel and rebars are environment friendly and cost effective and possess properties that enhances life of any structure with minimum maintenance. The commissioning of the new CGR facility will further increase the usage of zinc in steel industry and will support the much awaited need of supplying galvanized rebar in the construction industry. I would like to congratulate the entire team International Zinc Association and Madhav KRG Group for their efforts in setting up the first-ever Continuous Galvanized Rebar (CGR) facility in Asia that will not only boost to domestic steel market but will also put India on the global map, aligning it to GoI's efforts in making India self-reliant or Aatmanirbhar Bharat."

Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Sunil Duggal - Group Chief Executive Officer-Vedanta Limited, & CEO-Hindustan Zinc said, "Infrastructure, especially around the coastal areas face maximum risk of corrosion owing to humidity and constantly changing climate. A long-term answer to this far-reaching problem is use of zinc protected steel during the structure's initial construction stages, i.e. Galvanized rebar that not only ensures longevity of the structures but is also significant initiative towards safety. It's time to mandate use of galvanized coated rebar's in all infrastructure projects.

"In the last ten years, Indian zinc demand grew at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4-5%. However, usage of galvanized rebars and especially CGRs has been limited despite the fact that it bonds in par with concrete than uncoated rebar, thereby doubling the life of big concrete structures. As the government of India looks to strengthen Indian infrastructure, it calls for the need to adopt durable and proven corrosion protection methods, like structure galvanization. With continuous support from players like Madhav KGR and Hindustan Zinc Limited, we are confident of the shift to better national practices to help support India's efforts towards sustainable evolution." said Dr. Andrew Green, Executive Director, International Zinc Association (IZA) addressing the audience.

Galvanizing has been used for more than 100 years to protect structures exposed to different environmental conditions from corrosion.Realizing the importance of this technique, Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi had outlined a plan to spend about $1.5 trillion earlier this year, to upgrade and build infrastructure over the next five years to shore up economic growth, boosting the outlook for zinc, use of galvanized steel to prevent corrosion.

Over 1000 delegates (India and International) including ministry officials, opinion leaders, zinc producers, galvanizers, end users of galvanized products, industry executives from Railways, highway authorities, NHSRPL and design consultants attended the launch event.

About International Zinc Association

The International Zinc Association (IZA) was created in 1991 by a group of leading zinc & steel producers to represent the zinc industry globally. IZA's activities are to sustainably grow markets and maintain the industry's license to operate through effectively managed initiatives in research and development, technology transfer, and communication of the value of zinc. Operating internationally and locally through its regional affiliates, IZA helps sustain the long-term global demand for zinc and its markets by promoting such key end uses as corrosion protection for steel and the essentiality of zinc in human health and crop nutrition.

IZA's main programs are Sustainability & Environment, Technology & Market Development and Communications. Headquartered in Durham, North Carolina (USA), IZA also operates regionally through their offices in China, Europe, Latin America, North America, India and Southern Africa.

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1197554/CGR_launched_by_IZA_and_Madhav_KRG_Group.jpg

SOURCE International Zinc Association (IZA)

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Researchers find the worlds cleanest air at the tip of the planet – The South African

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The worlds cleanest air, free from particles, more specifically, aerosols, caused by human activity was found over the Southern Ocean close to both Antarctica and Australia according to a study published this past week titled, Airborne bacteria confirm the pristine nature of the Southern Ocean boundary layer.

In an ever-evolving world, it is certainly difficult to find parts of the world that are untouched by human impact. This was the first study to measure the bio aerosol composition of the Southern Ocean, where the lower clouds over the Southern Ocean were found to be free of human activity and air pollution.

Co-author of the study, Thomas Hill stated, The Southern Ocean is one of very few places on Earth that has been minimally affected by anthropogenic activities.

Researchers thought that they might find traces of human DNA and bacteria. In fact, the only bacteria found in the region was linked to marine bacteria from the sea spray. The research findings are important to the science field as it disproves other studies that state that oceans in the Northern Hemisphere as well as the subtropics have microbes that drift in from upwind continents. The study revealed that aerosols were not travelling south and into the air as previously stated.

Air pollution is considered to be a global health crisis and claims seven-million lives each year, this according to reports released from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Burning fossil fuels does not only pose a threat to human longevity and quality of life but also has a detrimental effect on the environment which in turn, leads to warmer weather and climate change.

With more than 80% of people living in urban areas exceeding the WHO health guidelines an effort to reduce air pollution needs to be a priority.

This content has been created as part of our freelancer relief programme. We are supporting journalists and freelance writers impacted by the economic slowdown caused by #lockdownlife.

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Researchers find the worlds cleanest air at the tip of the planet - The South African

Precision Medicine Software Market Breaking New Grounds and Touch new Level in Upcoming Year by Syapse, Allscripts, Qiagen, Roper Technologies, Fabric…

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Precision Medicine Software Market report focused on the comprehensive analysis of current and future prospects of the Precision Medicine Software industry. This report is a consolidation of primary and secondary research, which provides market size, share, dynamics, and forecast for various segments and sub-segments considering the macro and micro environmental factors. An in-depth analysis of past trends, future trends, demographics, technological advancements, and regulatory requirements for the Precision Medicine Software market has been done in order to calculate the growth rates for each segment and sub-segments.

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Top Key Vendors of this Market are:

Syapse, Allscripts, Qiagen, Roper Technologies, Fabric Genomics, Foundation Medicine, Sophia Genetics, PierianDx, Human Longevity, Translational Software, Gene42, Lifeomic Health.

Various factors are responsible for the markets growth trajectory, which are studied at length in the report. In addition, the report lists down the restraints that are posing threat to the global Precision Medicine Software market. It also gauges the bargaining power of suppliers and buyers, threat from new entrants and product substitute, and the degree of competition prevailing in the market. The influence of the latest government guidelines is also analyzed in detail in the report. It studies the Precision Medicine Software markets trajectory between forecast periods.

The report provides insights on the following pointers:

Market Penetration:Comprehensive information on the product portfolios of the top players in the Precision Medicine Software market.

Product Development/Innovation:Detailed insights on the upcoming technologies, R&D activities, and product launches in the market.

Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of the market strategies, geographic and business segments of the leading players in the market.

Market Development:Comprehensive information about emerging markets. This report analyzes the market for various segments across geographies.

Market Diversification:Exhaustive information about new products, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments in the Precision Medicine Software market.

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The report summarized the high revenue that has been generated across locations like, North America, Japan, Europe, Asia, and India along with the facts and figures of Precision Medicine Software market. It focuses on the major points, which are necessary to make positive impacts on the market policies, international transactions, speculation, and supply demand in the global market.

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Table of Contents

Global Precision Medicine Software Market Research Report 2020 2026

Chapter 1 Precision Medicine Software Market Overview

Chapter 2 Global Economic Impact on Industry

Chapter 3 Global Market Competition by Manufacturers

Chapter 4 Global Production, Revenue (Value) by Region

Chapter 5 Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions

Chapter 6 Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type

Chapter 7 Global Market Analysis by Application

Chapter 8 Manufacturing Cost Analysis

Chapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers

Chapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders

Chapter 11 Market Effect Factors Analysis

Chapter 12 Global Precision Medicine Software Market Forecast

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Is Your Immune System Ready to Fight COVID-19? The Answer is in Your Genes – Longevity LIVE

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COVID-19 has caught everyone by surprise. Theres no vaccine or defense, other than the one offered by nature right now your immune system. The world is worried about their health. Knowing how your immune system works at a genetic level may give you some answers you need to improve your odds of recovering from or even avoiding being infected with a virus like COVID-19.

Dr. Yael Joffe, is the Chief Science Officer at 3X4 Genetics. She says COVID-19 can be damaging and may be fatal. The virus triggers the hosts immune system and causes the body to react. Understanding your genes can help. Heres what you need to know.

The problem is that this immune response, in certain cases, can overreact. In order to kill the virus, the immune system floods the body with its in-built cellular defense system. However, when left unchecked the response may cause damage to your own cells, and with COVID-19, particularly the cells in your respiratory system. This being said, these responses differ widely amongst individuals. Partly because of how their genes respond.

Knowing how prepared your immune system is to defend yourself against the virus is a must. Youre gifted with a complex immune system, or cellular defense mechanisms. It springs into action when a toxin or pathogen (viruses and bacteria) overwhelms the body. Dr. Joffe explains: The way these mechanisms act can differ from person-to-person because of your genes. By taking a genetic test you will then be able to tell how ready your immune system is, and whether your cellular defense processes work optimally.

Genes are switches. When a protein or enzyme is needed by the body, the gene is switched on to make that protein. This is true for how the cellular defense system responds.

A number of genes switch on when the virus is detected to mobilize against it and switch off when the virus is killed off and flushed out. The problem with a virus-like COVID-19 is that the response is so powerful, cellular defense mechanisms like inflammation and oxidative stress are turned up so high that the body can be flooded and overwhelmed by the defense mechanisms themselves, causing damage to the cells. How efficiently these on and off processes work differs between individuals. Its partly due to their own genetic makeup. Once you know how optimally your cellular defense processes are working, you can understand better how resilient your immune system is. Then you can take steps to address shortfall.

Dr. Christine Houghton, Founder and Chief Science Officer at Cell-Logic is an expert on the relationship of genes with nutrition. She says knowing more about your genes can help your healthcare practitioner make positive changes through nutrition to improve and optimize these metabolic processes.

While many will be reaching for mega doses of supplements, your system is unique, nuanced, and very complex. A single nutrient like vitamin C, by itself, is nothing compared to the many small, calculated tweaks required at a molecular level to have your immune system work at its prime.

Your bodys core cellular defense processes such as inflammation, oxidative stress, detoxification, and methylation are required to fight off COVID-19. They are activated and switched off via genes. Their reaction time and how efficiently they respond can be adjusted using a personalized, wholesome, and healthy diet, together with targeted nutrigenomic supplements.

Nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) is a master switch that is responsible for switching on (and off) hundreds of genes involved in cellular defense. It responds to the presence of any pro-oxidant molecule in the body that then activates many of the genes involved in the cellular defense processes. If it switches on quickly, you can flush the coronavirus out better. Although there are Ts and Cs to this process. Complications can occur with underlying chronic health conditions.

Houghton says that one way in which we can optimize the function of Nrf2s is by the ingestion of a nutrigenomically active molecule called Sulforaphane. The precursor to Sulforaphane is found abundantly in raw, calciferous vegetables such as broccoli, broccoli sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage. Unfortunately, its destroyed during cooking, and a quality broccoli sprout supplement may be required.

As there are many variables, it is important to consult a specialist who can help you prepare your immune system to be strong and resilient. This is especially true in times when there is an unchecked virus on the loose.

Can you prepare your immune system now? Dr. Joffe says the short answer is yes. You can start to optimize your immune system response for COVID-19-like threats through a tailored nutrigenomic dietary plan.

Make an appointment with an accredited nutrigenomic health practitioner and get a nutrigenetic test done to learn about the variability of your genes and your response to diet and lifestyle choices. This will inform them what cellular processes require the most attention. They will then recommend a nutrigenomic plan. They will also let you know what foods to eat to bolster your immune system to fight off a virus. This might also require some nutrigenomic supplements which mimic and optimize natural processes in your body.

Having a healthy immune system supported by an optimally functioning cellular defense mechanism could not only give you the edge in the fight against COVID-19, but will help you live a better, healthier, and longer life.

WATCH Longevitys Q&A with Dr Yael Joffe on genes and COVID-19. CLICK HERE.

As a dietitian who was both disappointed and disillusioned with the dietetics profession, Dr. Joffe was fortunate enough to start working in the field of nutrigenomics in 2000. She obtained my PhD from the University of Cape Town. She explored the genetics and nutrition of obesity in South African women. Today Dr. Joffe regularly speaks at conferences and workshops. She was also part of the team that built the first Nutrigenomic genetic test in 2000 in the United Kingdom. This was three years before the mapping of the human genome.

Dr. Joffe co-authored Its Not Just Your Genes, The SNP Journal, and Genes to Plate. The first gene-based recipe book. She has also published in peer-reviewed journals and been involved in the development and supervision of nutrigenomics courses around the world. Dr. Joffe is currently an Adjunct Professor, teaching Nutrigenomics at Rutgers University and at Maryland University of Integrative Health. She went on to establish Manuka Science in 2014, an online Translational Nutrigenomics training course for health practitioners. More recently she launched the 3X4 Clinic in Cape Town, and 3X4 Genetics. The company brings together expert nutrigenomic practitioners with the best genetic test and user experience. When not working to disrupt health care, she seeks equal parts discomfort and inspiration in open water swimming.

Dr. Christine Houghton Founder Director Senior Scientist Cell Logic has enjoyed a fulfilling and varied career in Nutritional Medicine spanning more than 30 years. Her work continues to stay at the forefront of this rapidly evolving profession. As a clinician, author, and educator, she is dedicated to promoting a model of health care that closely reflects diet and lifestyle choices. She holds a BSc in Biochemistry from The University of Queensland. As well as a Graduate Diploma in Human Nutrition from Deakin University in Victoria. Dr. Houghton is an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Science at The University of Queensland.

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Is Your Immune System Ready to Fight COVID-19? The Answer is in Your Genes - Longevity LIVE

Teachers, board happy with new agreement | Worcester County News Bayside Gazette – baysideoc.com

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By Morgan Pilz, Staff Writer

(May 28, 2020) The Worcester County Public Schools Board of Education signed and approved a ratified 2020-2021 contract agreement between the Worcester County Teachers Association and the Worcester County Educational Support Personnel Association on Tuesday, May 19.

The agreement was presented by Supervisor of Human Resources Dr. Dwayne Abt during the board of education teleconferenced meeting.

Lou Taylor

Normally, the signing would have taken place at the same time, but according to Abt, signatures were obtained prior to the teleconference.

We did have some language modifications, edits and additions, he said.

According to the agreement, the teachers contract has been agreed upon for one step increase to eligible employees and a 2 percent cost of living adjustment (COLA).

The contract will also offer step increases to eligible employees in a 2.5 percent COLA in the food service scales that will be adjusted to meet the minimum wage requirements by law over the next five years.

We also increased our longevity payment $100 from $1,300 to $1,400, Abt said. It is my pleasure to say that we have two signed agreements with our employees and Id like to thank Mr. Gary McCabe, Beth Shockley-Lynch and Mr. Ivory Smith, as well as the committees from the board as well as the association.

Shockley-Lynch, the president of the Worcester County Teachers Association, expressed her gratitude for the support of the agreement.

We would just like to thank the board in all of our support through all of this, she said. Our negotiated contract was ratified at 100 percent. I had no one that was displeased with it. We are very grateful to have the relationship with the board and with the leadership team. So thank you.

Superintendent of Schools Lou Taylor also expressed his gratitude for the camaraderie between the organizations.

It is a pleasure to work with you, Mr. McCabe and Mr. Smith, Taylor said. Its been a true team effort through negotiations, and thats carried and even gotten deeper as weve gone through these uncertain times. So thank you for your partnership and for most importantly, keeping our kids first, and all of us doing the right things. It takes both sides and we appreciate that way of working together.

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Herald Editorial: Pandemic reveals necessity of support network – Daily Herald

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Human beings are wired for connection.

Many studies over the years have confirmed this, and many scientists agree that the emotional pain associated with having our social ties damaged or severed can have negative consequences on our overall health.

It may therefore come as no surprise that law enforcement and other first responders in Utah County recently reported an uptick in the number of mental wellness calls during COVID-19 quarantine efforts.

Its terribly unfortunate to see this, and although it doesnt make up the entirety of mental health issues being reported, its a reflection of the toll isolation and a lack of social support can have on individuals over an extended period of time.

It also raises an unbelievably important question: When was the last time you made a friend?

Not an acquaintance. Not a good working relationship. A friend.

Friends can increase your sense of belonging, reduce stress and boost self-confidence. They can also add meaning to your life and challenge you to grow as a person. Health outcomes such as increased happiness and longevity are also experienced when a healthy support network of friends is available.

Quarantine efforts, however, seem to exacerbate an already existing problem. Friends, for a recognizable percentage of the population, are difficult to come by.

A YouGov survey from 2019 revealed that millennials are a rather lonely generation. Thirty percent say they always, or often, feel lonely; and 27% say they have no close friends. That same survey indicates that 20% of Generation X respondents felt the same way.

A similar study in 2019 from OnePoll surveyed 2,000 Americans and learned that 45% of adults found it difficult to make new friends. So difficult, in fact, that the average adult has not made a new friend in the last five years.

Quarantine certainly did not make efforts to gain friends any easier. The inability to hug, or put a hand on another persons shoulder was difficult for nearly everyone to endure. Even if the attempt was made to go out in public, the expectation to stay 6 feet apart, avoid shaking hands and taking precautions when a transaction takes place added even more obstacles.

We do have social media at our fingertips to meet others. At last check, though, the health of the discourse in that landscape could easily be described as a disaster.

Maybe its unfair to suggest that all of the 34% year-over-year increase in mental wellness calls between February and May in Utah County involved suicide attempts, and maybe its unfair to attribute a majority of that increase to quarantine and a lack of human connection. Its perfectly reasonable, however, to see the correlation when theres a sustained and irregular increase in reported mental wellness incidents during an international pandemic.

Having more, and better, friendships may not have prevented some of these calls to local law enforcement, but most mental health professionals would agree those numbers would have been reduced with a healthy support network.

If theres one thing COVID-19 lockdown efforts should have taught many to appreciate, its connection with our friends, family and neighbors.

Now, with quarantine largely at an end in the state of Utah, the opportunity to form a close connection with others is on the upswing.

Sure, its vulnerable and sometimes nerve wracking to put yourself out there and meet new people. Just remember that the numbers say youre not alone in your loneliness. There are others looking for connection who dont have any, and many more who do have close connection and friendships who would like more.

Use this opportunity, a renewal of interacting with others socially, to form connections, reduce stress, increase happiness and challenge yourself to grow.

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Herald Editorial: Pandemic reveals necessity of support network - Daily Herald

What Kind of Country Do We Want? | by Marilynne Robinson – The New York Review of Books

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Magnum PhotosDoa Ana County, New Mexico, 2017; photograph by Matt Black

In my odd solitude I stream the America of recent memory. The pretext for drama, in the foreground, seems always to be a homicide, but around and beyond the forensic stichomythia that introduces character and circumstance there is a magnificent country, a virtual heaven. In a dystopian future, children would surely ask what it was like to live in such a country. Candid memory would say, By no means as wonderful as it should have been, even granting the broad streaks of pain in its history. Before there was a viral crisis whose reality forced itself on our notice, there were reports of declines of life expectancy in America, rising rates of suicide, and other deaths of despair. This is surely evidence of another crisis, though it was rarely described as such. The novel coronavirus has the potential for mitigation, treatment, and ultimately prevention. But a decline in hope and purpose is a crisis of civilization requiring reflection and generous care for the good of the whole society and its place in the world. We have been given the grounds and opportunity to do some very basic thinking.

Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economicsgreat industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at allinsofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design.

Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.

No theoretical language I know of serves me in describing or interpreting this era of American unhappiness, the drift away from the purpose and optimism that generally led the development of the society from its beginnings. This can be oversimplified and overstated, but the United States did attract immigrants by the tens of millions. It did create great cities and institutions as well as a distinctive culture that has been highly influential throughout the world. Until recently it sustained a generally equitable, decent government that gave it plausible claims to answering to the ideals of democracy. This is a modest statement of the energies that moved the generations. Optimism is always the primary justification for its own existence. It can seem naive until it is gone. The assumption that things can get better, with the expectation that they should, creates the kind of social ferment that yields progress. If we want to avoid the word progress, then call it the creative unrest that made 2019 an advance on 1919.

In recent decades, which have been marked by continuous, disruptive change and by technological innovation that has reached assertively into every area of life, a particular economics has become a Theory of Everything, subordinating all other considerations to some form of cost-benefit analysis that silently insinuates special definitions of both cost and benefit. If neither of these is precisely monetizablecalories might have to stand in for currency in primordial transactionspersonal advantage, again subject to a highly special definition, is seen as the one thing at stake in human relations. The profit motive has been implanted in our deepest history as a species, in our very DNA.

This kind of thinking has discredited ideals like selflessness and generosity as hypocritical or self-deceived, or in any case as inefficiencies that impede the natural economy of self-interestsomehow persisting through all the millennia that might have been expected to winnow out inefficiencies, if the pervasiveness of this one motive is granted. I consider the American university to be among the highest achievements of Western civilization. And I know at the same time that varieties of nonsense that would not last ten minutes if history or experience were consulted can flourish there, and propagate, since our entire professional class, notably teachers, go to university. There has always been learned nonsense, of course. But when angels danced on the heads of pins, at least the aesthetic imagination was brought into play.

Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.

The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word developing in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.

In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values.

Any reader of early economics will recognize the thinking that has recently become predominant, that the share of national wealth distributed as wages must be kept as low as possible to prevent the cost of labor from reducing national wealth. This rationale lies behind the depression of wages, which has persisted long enough to have become settled policy, a major structural element of American society and a desolating reality for the millions it defrauds. Polarization is no fluke, no accident. It is a virtual institutionalization in America of the ancient practice of denying working people the real or potential value of their work.

Institutionalization may be less a factor here than inculcation. Long before the pandemic struck, the protections of the poor and marginalized that largely defined the modern Western state had been receding, sacrificed to the kind of policy that presents itself as necessity, discipline, even justice tendentiously defined. Wealth can be broadly shared prosperity, or it can be closely held, private, effectively underwritten by the cheapening of the labor of the nonrich, which reduces their demand for goods and services. When schools and hospitals close, the value of everything that is dependent on them falls. Austerity toward some is a tax cut for others, a privatization of social wealth. The economics of opportunism is obvious at every stage in this great shift. And yet Americans have reacted to the drove of presumptive, quasi, and faux billionaires as if preternatural wealth were a credential of some kind.

All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.

The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk.

Lately, higher education has been much on the minds of journalists and legislators and, presumably, potential students and their families, who are given to understand that higher education is crucial to their financial prospects and also that the costs and debts involved may be financially ruinous. Worse, the press speaks of elite universities as if there were only a dozen or so institutions in the country where an excellent education can be had. In fact there are literally hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that educate richly and ambitiously. Many of the greatest of them are public, a word that now carries the suggestion that the thing described is down-market, a little deficient in quality. Anyone who notices where research and publishing are done knows that these schools are an immense resource, of global importance. In the midst of this great wealth of possibility, an imaginary dearth is created, and legislatorsout of an association between political courage and parsimonyrespond with budget cuts that curtail the functioning of these magnificent, prosperity-generating institutions. It should be noted that elite schools are also embracing the joylessly vocational emphasis that is the essence of these panicky reforms.

How is it that we can be told, and believe, that we are the richest country in history, and at the same time that we cannot share benefits our grandparents enjoyed? When did we become too poor to welcome immigrants? The psychology of scarcity encourages resentment, a zero-sum notion that all real wealth is private and is diminished by the claims of community. The entire phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that much of the capital that accumulates in these conditions disappears, into Mexico or China or those luridly discreet banks offshore.

The minimum wage has become the amount an employer can get away with paying. It is neither the amount a worker needs to sustain a reasonable life nor, crucially, to be important enough as a consumer for his or her interests to align with other interests. Because workers are underpaid, they are often treated as dependents, as a burden on the safety net, which is actually a public subsidy of the practice of underpayment. Workers often do not fall into the category of taxpayer, a word now laden with implication and consequence. It implies respectability, a more robust participation in citizenship, and, fairly or not, an extreme sensitivity to demands made on his or her assets for the public benefit. Equitable policies are often precluded in the name of the taxpayer so forcibly that the taxpayerthat is, a fair percentage of the publicis never really consulted. In this time of polarization, such language reflects an ugly, alienating division in our society, with bad faith at the root of it. Proud people are insulted, those same people we now call essential because they work steadily at jobs that are suddenly recognized as absolutely necessary.

Behind all this there is a scarcely articulated variant of an old model, once prevalent throughout the West, that invoked national wealth as the summum bonum of collective life. For the purposes of the theory in its present iteration, the absurd wealth that has accumulated at the top end of polarization is reckoned as part of the national wealth no matter how solidly it is based in poverty. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, great engines of wealth built global empires that filled the world with colonialism, militarism, and racialism, as well as monuments and marching bands. These trappings of power generated the excited identification of the masses with the nation no matter how hostile the system was to their own interests.

As adapted for what was recently the present, this wealth is still a product of national policiesfavorable taxation, imaginative banking regulations, and low production costs, including depressed wages and lowered safety and environmental standards. The cinch that tightens such slack as remains in the lives of the underpaid is called austerity or fiscal discipline. Austerity has not touched the beneficiaries of these arrangements, nor has fiscal discipline. These policies amount to continuous downward pressure on the accommodations made to the fact that wages are not sufficient to meet basic needs. Austerity and discipline retain their brisk, morally coercive force, amazingly. The work ethic persists through impoverishment, unemployment, deindustrialization driven by pools of cheap labor elsewhere, and the de-skilling that is the effect of all these declines.

This is to say that the kind of shame suffered most sharply by proud people has been put to use to sustain this ugly economic and social configuration, too opportunistic and unstable to be called a system. It offers no vision beyond its effects. Obviously the depletions of public life, the decay of infrastructure, the erosions of standards affecting general health are not intended to make America great again. They are, in the experience of the vast majority of Americans, dispossessions, a cheapening of life.

The theory that supports all this is taught in the universities. Its terminology is economic but its influence is broadly felt across disciplines because it is in fact an anthropology, a theory of human nature and motivation. It comes down to the idea that the profit motive applies in literally every circumstance, inevitably, because it is genetic in its origins and its operations. Selfishness, its exponents call it, sometimes arguing that the word in this context has a special meaning, though the specifics of the sanitizing are unclear. Behind every act or choice is a cost-benefit analysis engaged in subrationally. This is to say that thinking itself is the product of this constant appraisal of circumstance, which is prior to thinking, therefore not subject to culture, moral scruples, and so on, which are merely a scheme of evolution to hide this one universal intention from the billions of us who, in our endless diversity, make up the human species. Greed is good, or at least good enough to have brought us this far. For an important part of any population, these would be glad tidingsmoral considerations not only suspended but invalidated, moralists revealed as hypocrites and fools as well, since they have no idea that the genius and force of evolution are against them. By its nature, this worldview is based in the moment, in any new occasion to seek advantage.

This view of things is radically individualistic, indifferent to any narrative of identity or purpose. It takes a cynical view of people as such, since no ones true motives are different from those of the consciously selfish. Because there is only one motiveto realize a maximum of benefit at a minimum of costthose who do not flourish are losers in an invidious, Darwinian sense. Winners are exempt from moral or ethical scrutiny since advance of any sort is the good to be valued. Progress is likewise exempt from the kind of scrutiny that would raise questions about the real value this process generates, reckoned against other value that is precluded or destroyed.

Americans never believe that Americans are actually influenced by the education they require of themselves and one another, on which they lavish much wealth. To do so would smack of intellectualism, a trait we do not grant ourselves. The same economic model is prevalent in Britain and France, perhaps Europe in general, though it is asserted in other terms. Austerity has prevailed there for decades. The issues raised by the Yellow Vest movement in France are highly consistent with the situation in America. The retraction of policies that acknowledged the claims of the population at large on the wealth of their nation can be described, historically, as the return of the ancien rgime, or as the final triumph of capitalism, or as proof of the waning of Judeo-Christianity, or as recognition of the fact that, when all is said and done, self-interest is indeed the one unvarying human motive. All these could be true simultaneously, each reinforcing the others.

This theory has all the power among us of an ideology, though it lacks any account of past or future, any vision of ultimate human well-being. It promotes itself as nationalism, though its operations are aggressively global. The supposed nationalism plays on a nostalgia for the postwar decades, when the prestige of countries and regions was measured by living standards. Perhaps it derives also from the myth of ideological conflict, the notion that if the Russians had communism, America must have an equal and opposite ideology. This would be called and in time would become capitalism, though the economy Marx critiques under that name is the highly exceptional colonial, industrial, and mercantilist Britain of the nineteenth century.

It is one of the stranger turns in modern history that, for the purposes of this epochal controversy, one man, Karl Marx, named and described both of these ideologies. This is a great concession made to someone whose thought his antagonists claimed to deplore, though it is fair to assume both that they had not read him and that they were simply content to be spared the effort of arriving at definitions of their own. Also, he had the chic of being dangerously European. The pastiche, or the motley, we are inclined to think of as American self-awareness is strange under scrutiny. If we are uniquely characterized by entrepreneurialism, for example, why is the only name we have for it a word of unassimilated French? That sort of thing is usually a signifier for pretentiousness or embarrassment. This little oddity is germane to the larger case against the status quo ante, in which many of our governing assumptions are flimsy and nonsensical, and have stood in the place of meaningful thought, especially in lofty circles, in institutions of great influence, the universities.

Because of this quaint adherence to Marxian categories a narrative has emerged over time that capitalism is the single defining trait of American civilization, the force that has propelled the country not only to unprecedented wealth but also to high levels of personal and political freedom. These assumptions are in need of scrutiny, not by comparison with other countries but of this country with itself a few generations ago. The other half of the great binary, communism, was never realized anywhere, never successful anywhere so far as it was attempted. That somehow legitimizes Marxs schema, even though this is not at all the result he predicted.

Never mind. We are left with the certainty that a civilization can be wholly described by its economy, and that ours is exhaustively and triumphally capitalistmaking anomalous the many well-established features of the culture to which the word public might attach: schools, lands, and, more generally, public works, public services, the public interest. If the furthest implications of the reign of selfishness are not yet fully actualized, no doubt custom, manners, image, shame, or the occasional laws are the obstacle, since the theory itself is so simple and natural in its operation that it should be as small an intrusion on the order of things as multiplying everything by one. It could be used to rationalize stealing the pennies from a dead mans eyes, true, even considering the nugatory value of the contemporary penny. Judgment as to whether it has reached this extreme must await a fuller knowledge of its global impact. Closer to home, it has scuppered the old habit of measuring wealth by standard of living. Averaging helicopters, yachts, and offshore accounts against imminent eviction would not yield a meaningful result.

The cult of cost/benefitof the profit motive made granular, cellularnot only trivializes but also attacks whatever resists its terms. Classic American education is ill-suited to its purposes and is constantly under pressure to reformthat is, to embrace as its purpose the training of workers who will be competitive in the future global economy. What this means, of course, is that universities and students themselves should absorb the cost to industry of training its workforce. Since no one knows what the industries of the future will be, a wrong guess about appropriate training could be costly, which means it would be all the smarter, from a certain point of view, to make colleges and students bear the risk. If this training produces skills that are relevant to future needs, their cost to the employer will be lowered by the fact that such skills will be widely available. In any case, the relative suitability of workers will be apparent in their school history, so industry will be spared the culling of ineffective employees. Those who fail to make the cut will be left with the pleasures of a technical education that is always less useful to them, skills that will be subject to obsolescence as industries change. Certain facts go unnoticed in all this. The great wealth that is presented as endorsing an American way of doing things was amassed over a very long period of time.

Lifetime earnings as well as longevity are adduced to demonstrate the value of university education. Obviously, these are measures of the well-being of people who were educated a generation or two ago. Otherwise, there would be no way of measuring workers peak earnings or their longevity. So there is clear evidence of the economic value of an education based on the humanist model that is now under siege. There is no evidence that education designed to train a workforce would be equally productive of wealth, but it would be profitable in another way, cheapening labor by diminishing the participation of the public in whatever wealth is produced. This is the embrace of inequality, accumulation on one side accelerated by deprivation on the other.

Historically, we have offered our youngthough never enough of themexposure to high thought and great art, along with chemistry and engineering. There is an opulence in all this that has no equivalent in the world. What were those earlier generations thinking when they built our great city-states of research and learning? All those arches and spires induce the belief in undergraduates that they have a dignified place in human history, something better than collaborating in the blind creep of a material culture that values only itself, that is indifferent on principle to the past, and inclined, when it considers a future, to imagine the ultimate displacement of the human worker and at the same time to develop systems of social control of which even Bentham could not dream. Why control people for whom no role or use is imagined? If these futures seem incompatible, the theory of cost/benefit does not admit of such criticism. Present trends, inevitably understood in light of emergent possibilities, are, in the nature of things, ineluctableor they were until a few weeks ago, when the system that had become more or less coextensive with our sense of reality abruptly collapsed.

Emergencies remind us that people admire selflessness and enjoy demands on their generosity, and that the community as a whole is revivified by such demands. Great cost and greater benefit, as these things are traditionally understood. If in present circumstances we are driven back on our primitive impulses, then we should be watching our collective behavior carefully, because it will be instructive with regard to identifying an essential human nature. In more senses than one we are living through an unprecedented experiment, an opportunity it would be a world-historical shame to waste.

Its value as experiment is enhanced by the near absence of leadership from the central government. In various forms, the crisis will persist indefinitely. Over time communities will organize themselves according to their senses of decency and need. Since this crisis is as novel as the virus that has caused it, and since the lack of a helpful central government is unique in the modern period, old thinking and new thinking will emerge over time, and the calculus of cost will be reckoned against the cost of failing to sustain the things that are valued. Benefit will be realized in the fact that needs are identified and served, with all the satisfactions this will entail. Allowing for regional variations, to the degree that democratic habits persist, the country will get by.

As Americans, we should consider our freedomsof thought, press, and religion, among othersthe basic constituents of our well-being, and accept the controversies that have always arisen around them as reflecting their vitality. Not so long ago they were something new under the sun, so if there is still a certain turbulence around them this should remind us that they are gifts of our brief history. We should step away from the habit of accepting competition as the basic model of our interactions with other countries, first because it creates antagonisms the world would be better off without, and second because recent history has shown that the adversary is actually us, and for ordinary people there is no success, no benefit.

And we have to get beyond the habit of thinking in terms of scarcity. We live in the midst of great wealth prepared for us by other generations. We inherited sound roads and bridges. Our children will not be so favored. Since the value of basic investments is not realized immediately, we cannot rationalize the expenditure. We are the richest country in history, therefore richer than the generations that built it, but we cannot bring ourselves even to make repairs. Our thrift will be very costly over time. The notion or pretense that austerity is the refusal to burden our children with our debts is foolish at best. But it is persuasive to those who are injured by it as surely as to those who look at a pothole and see a tax cut. Hiding money in a hole in the ground has seemed like wisdom to some people since antiquity. And there are many who are truly straitened and insecure, and are trusting enough to assume that some economic wisdom lies behind it. Legislators all over America, duly elected, have subscribed to this kind of thinking and acted on it.

We have seen where all this leads. It creates poverty, and plagues batten on poverty, on crowding and exhaustion. If the novel coronavirus did not have its origins in the order of things now in abeyanceother possibilities are even darkerthat order was certainly a huge factor in its spread.

As a culture we have spent a great deal of time in recent decades naming and deploring the crimes and injustices in our history. This is right and necessary. But the present crises have exposed crimes and injustices deeply embedded in the society we live in now. So we provide our descendants with a weighty burden of guilt to lament. This ironytoo mild a wordcasts grave doubt on the rigor of our self-examinations.

All this comes down to the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one. The authenticity of our understanding must be demonstrated in our attempting to act justly even at steep cost to ourselves. We can do this as individuals and as a nation. Someday we will walk out onto a crowded street and hear that joyful noise we must hope to do nothing to darken or still, having learned so recently that humankind is fragile, and wonderful.

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What Kind of Country Do We Want? | by Marilynne Robinson - The New York Review of Books

Atomwise Partners with Global Research Teams to Pursue Broad-Spectrum Treatments Against COVID-19 and Future Coronavirus Outbreaks – Business Wire

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SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Atomwise, the leader in using artificial intelligence (AI) for small molecule drug discovery, announced today it has fifteen research collaborations underway with leading global universities to explore broad-spectrum therapies for COVID-19 and other coronaviruses.

Coronaviruses are RNA viruses and include the causative SARS-CoV-2 strain of the current COVID-19 global pandemic as well as MERS and SARS-CoV-1 from prior regional outbreaks. Although drug repurposing may offer a rapid response to the current outbreak, the longevity of such an approach may be limited due to the accumulation of mutations and evolution of the virus. By using predictive models and AI, Atomwise and its collaborators seek to raise the probability of success for future therapies.

Each collaborative project will develop drug candidates with demonstrable broad-spectrum capability, providing potential long-term benefit for future coronavirus outbreaks. Overall, the 15 global research efforts span a wide variety of approaches, including different mechanisms of action, a mixture of viral and human/host target proteins, and targeting conserved regions of proteins that may be recognized even in mutated strains. In addition, many proteins targeted by the academic collaborators have previously been deemed undruggable due to their unknown structure or involvement in complex protein-protein interactions. Taken together, the combination of novel approaches could expand the repertoire of therapeutic approaches available for a future outbreak.

Several projects are part of Atomwises Artificial Intelligence Molecular Screen (AIMS) program, which enables researchers to accelerate the translation of their research into treatments. In support of each collaboration, scientists at Atomwise will use AtomNet, the companys patented AI screening technology, to predict the binding of millions or billions of small molecules to a protein of interest identified by the academic researcher as a potential target for COVID-19, narrowing down to a few hundred predicted hit molecules. Atomwise then sources and ships a subset of these predicted compounds to partnering laboratories for testing biochemical potency and selectivity, advancing the most promising compounds for further development as drug candidates.

Atomwises AI screening technology is used to predict the binding of more than 10 million small molecules to a protein of interest, and far exceeds what could be accomplished through traditional laboratory screening methods, said Dr. Stacie Calad-Thomson, vice president and head of Artificial Intelligence Molecular Screen (AIMS) Partnerships at Atomwise. With Atomwises AIMS Awards program, our hope is to democratize access to AI during the early stages of preclinical drug development and enable academics to contribute to the pandemic response who might not have the opportunity otherwise.

Research partners will include:

Target

Researcher

Institute

IL-6 Signaling Pathway

Dr. Mark Fry

University of Manitoba

Nucleocapsid (N-protein)

Dr. Luana Fioriti and Dr. Eric Kandel

Columbia University

NSP15

Dr. James L. Cole

University of Connecticut

Papain-Like Protease (PLpro)

Dr. Konstantin V. Korotkov

University of Kentucky

RdRp in NSP12

Dr. Jorg Stetefeld

University of Manitoba

Spike-ACE2

Dr. Gokhan Cildir

University of South Australia

Spike-ACE2

Dr. Alexander Freiberg

University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) Health

Spike (heptad region)

Dr. Abdullah Algaissi

Jazan University, Saudi Arabia

Undisclosed

Dr. Hari Arthanari

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Undisclosed

Dr. Yogesh Gupta

University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

Undisclosed

Dr. Mel Fernand Bedi, Dr. Tim Mueser, and Dr. Amanda Bryant-Friedrich

University of Toledo

Atomwise and its partners will continue to focus research efforts on broad-spectrum approaches for COVID-19 and other coronaviruses so that drug discovery solutions are applicable for this pandemic, as well as for mutations, recurrences, or other coronavirus strains that may take place in the future.

Researchers interested in applying for the AIMS Awards program or pursuing industry partnerships with Atomwise are encouraged to contact academics@atomwise.com or partner@atomwise.com for more information.

About Atomwise

Atomwise Inc. invented the first deep learning AI technology for structure-based small molecule drug discovery. Created in 2012, today Atomwise performs hundreds of projects per year in partnership with some of the worlds largest pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies, as well as more than 200 universities and hospitals in 40 countries. Atomwise has raised over $50 million from leading venture capital firms to support the development and application of its AI technology. Learn more at atomwise.com or follow @AtomwiseInc.

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Atomwise Partners with Global Research Teams to Pursue Broad-Spectrum Treatments Against COVID-19 and Future Coronavirus Outbreaks - Business Wire

Digital welfare states: boundaries and opportunities – Social Europe

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A Dutch court case has set out a framework within which the emergent digital welfare state can respect the right to privacy.

Public authorities are increasingly using new technologies to perform public services. The latest ideas concern health-care apps to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. Worldwide, there are many more examples of what the United Nations calls digital welfare states. Although governments argue new technologies make their services more efficient and cost-effective, many however express concern about the surveillance of citizens.

Such controversies tend to attach to individual episodes. Given the widespread emergence of digital welfare states, universal guidelines are needed to explore the opportunities they offer but also their legitimate boundaries. In a first court case, human rights have proved to offer relevant guidance.

Many welfare states have started using big data and algorithms in their social-security provision. Digital welfare states may be defined as having systems of social protection and assistance which are driven by digital data and technologies that are used to automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target and punish. For instance, data-driven tools are used to detect social-security fraud. Likewise, some governments use location data to track-and-trace the whereabouts of their citizens, aiming to halt the coronavirus.

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At first sight, such apps offer quick solutions to governments. Yet hasty decisions hinder proper research and in-depth debates on their effectiveness, necessity and side-effects. A suggestion by the Dutch government to create track-and-trace apps drew a public response from 60 experts. They warned against rapid implementation, urging that the purpose, necessity and effectiveness of such apps be weighed against the fabric of society, including fundamental rights and freedoms.

Quoting Michel Foucault, the experts wrote: Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action. They expressed fear that the apps would set a precedent for future use of comparably invasive technologies, after the Covid-19 crisis had subsidedand so stressed that any app should be temporary, necessary, proportionate, transparent, completely anonymous, voluntary and managed by an independent body.

Other discussions of new technologies refer to similar principles. Universal guidelines are thus needed to underpin the development and functioning of any new technology used in digital welfare states. The recent judgment by the district court of the Hague shows that international human rights form a proper basis to create such guidelines.

The first ever court case using human rights to assess new technologies in digital welfare states focused on the Dutch System Risk Indication (SyRI). The SyRI lawsuit was taken against the Dutch state by a coalition of non-governmental organisations, supported by the then UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, who wrote an amicus brief to the court.

SyRI was established to detect welfare fraud, collating no less than 17 categories of personal data gathered by different public agencies. These included information on employment, detention, sanctions, finances, education, pensions, childcare allowances, benefit receipt and health insurance. SyRI has been used recurrently, especially in neighbourhoods with poorer and more vulnerable people. It has analysed data using an algorithm with risk indicators, thus selecting potentially fraudulent claimants. The algorithm and its indicators were kept secret out of fear citizens would start gaming the system.

The court ruled that SyRI violated important human rights and therefore should be ended immediately. For the UN this was nothing less than a landmark rulingfor the first time arresting, on grounds of human rights, the use of digital technologies and abundant information-processing by welfare authorities. It set an important legal precedent and could inspire NGOs across the globe to influence the public debate or even to go to court themselves.

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The court stressed the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence in article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and paid special attention to achieving a fair balance between the collective importance for society to fight fraud and thereby limiting the individual right to respect for private life. The state had a special responsibility to safeguard this fair balance when using new technologies, the court said.

SyRIs lack of transparency about its functioning prevented scrutiny of whether there was such a balance. It could even result in unfair judgments involving discriminatory distinctions between people, for instance based on socio-economic or migrant status. This might have severe negative consequences, not only for the individuals concerned but also for society at large. Not only fraudsters were caught up in large data processing but, in the case of SyRI, everyone living in a certain neighbourhood and anyone flagged as potentially claiming illegitimately.

The court did not say that the government could never use new technologies. It found fighting fraud a legitimate aim. Equally, however, new technologies sparked questions on the right to protection of personal data. Adequate protection of privacy contributed to trust in government, whereas inadequate protection and too little transparency had the opposite effect: they could make citizens afraid and less willing to share their data. In addition, SyRI did not convince in terms of its necessity and proportionality and the purpose of data-processing.

Here, the court used European Union data-protection regulations to explain the principles of a fair balance between rights and purposes: transparency, purpose limitation and data minimisation. Such principles also appear in the guidelines for contact-tracing apps recently promulgated by the EUs eHealth Network.

All these sources could be used to convert similar messages into universal guidelines for digital welfare states, enabling them to benefit from new technologies in a responsible manner. Then, new technologies could contribute to the economic and social wellbeing of all citizens.

An article on the SyRI court case will appear in the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, vol 50.

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Digital welfare states: boundaries and opportunities - Social Europe

UWA health and medical research receives $2.7 million funding boost – University News: The University of Western Australia

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Wednesday, 20 May 2020

Two University of Western Australia research projects looking to improve health and patient outcomes have received a combined $2.7 million from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

They include a study that will examine Familial Hypercholesterolaemia, a condition where a gene alteration causes a high blood level of cholesterol to pass from one generation to the next and a research project that will look into ways of improving health and development outcomes in infants.

The NHMRC grants aim to support world-leading health and medical research projects to improve the lives of Australians and deliver better care as we look towards recovery from COVID-19.

Dr Jing Pang from the UWA Medical School has received $645,205 in funding to lead the study into Familial Hypercholesterolaemia and will be developing a tool to aid early diagnosis of the condition.

Those with Familial Hypercholesterolaemia are at very high risk of early coronary artery disease causing an estimated $4 billion burden on the Australian economy between 2017 and 2018.

Professor Jane Pillow from the UWA School of Human Sciences was awarded $2.06 million to examine ways of reducing global mortality and severity of disease in newborn infants.

Disruptions to normal growth and development can adversely affect lifelong health and longevity and affect multiple body organ systems in infants born prematurely.

Professor Pillows team will look into low-cost treatments that minimise the need for technology and technical skill.

Jess Reid (UWA Media and PR Adviser) 08 6488 6876

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UWA health and medical research receives $2.7 million funding boost - University News: The University of Western Australia

Afraid of touching objects amid COVID-19? This Virginia Tech professor has a solution – Bristol Herald Courier

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Since earlier this year, William Ducker has not liked going to the supermarket and navigating a shopping cart around the aisles.

Everybody is very worried about touching communal objects, and Im one of those guys, said Ducker, a professor at Virginia Tech.

But unlike everybody, Duckers field of expertise made him realize he could alleviate that worry.

Im a surface chemist. ... I look at surface coatings, he said. I thought I could fix this problem.

So Ducker and a team of graduate students at Tech created a liquid coating that destroys SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, when the coating solidifies on everyday items such as doorknobs and pens.

The thin layer of copper-based coating retains its virus-disabling property for at least six weeks, meaning such surfaces would no longer need frequent cleanings. Ducker says he thinks the coating could be effective for years but is only confident about a few weeks because the coating has only existed for that long.

Last week, Ducker and colleagues became one of the first teams if not the first to publish an academic paper showing that such a coating is effective against the new coronavirus. A Surface Coating that Rapidly Inactivates SARS-CoV-2 appeared July 13 in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, a journal published by the American Chemical Society.

The surface coating is made from particles of cuprous oxide, which can be made out of recycled copper pipes and wires, bound with polyurethane, a varnish commonly used to finish wood.

Although previous research has established cuprous oxide as effective against viruses, SARS-CoV-2 is a novelty. While conducting a Google Scholar search on the longevity of the virus on surfaces, Ducker came across the research of Leo Poon, a professor at the University of Hong Kong and a leading expert on emerging viruses.

Ducker emailed Poon: Would he be interested in testing the new coronavirus on his coating? Poon replied about 20 minutes later, and they began a collaboration.

Honestly, I was unbelievably excited when Poon said he agreed to test it, Ducker recalled. And then after we found out it worked, oh my God, I was just so excited. I think this is just such a great thing.

After about an hour on glass or stainless steel painted with the coating, the effectiveness of virus samples was reduced by about 99.9% on average, the paper says.

Poons team put bits of SARS-CoV-2 in little drops that mimic as a respiratory droplet which is how COVID-19 spreads and plopped them on the coated surfaces. After varying periods of time, they lifted off the droplets and measured their virality by attempting to infect a monkey kidney cell, a standard mimic of a human cell.

After being exposed to the coating, droplets could no longer infect the monkey cell, Ducker said.

Swapan Ghosh, a polymer scientist in India who has developed a silver-based anti-viral coating, said the novelty of the paper lay in the experiments ability to test it on SARS-CoV-2.

Its good work, because in this pandemic its very diligent work, so I appreciate it Ghosh said.

Ghosh questioned whether the surface coating would work in the dark, since light activates the antiviral properties in cuprous oxide. He also wondered whether the toxicity of the copper elements should be measured.

Ducker agreed testing the coating in the dark would be interesting but doesnt foresee that happening because the experiments are done in high-level biological safety labs that make such a test tricky. .

The actual product, I think what Im after, is people being and feeling safe, Ducker said, which is why he wants to call the material SafetyCoat. That was always my objective.

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Afraid of touching objects amid COVID-19? This Virginia Tech professor has a solution - Bristol Herald Courier

7 Health Benefits Of Tidying Up – Longevity LIVE

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Marie Kondo is the star of Netflixs hit series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. In the show, the best-selling author shares how audiences can organize and declutter their homes. Aside from creating a cleaner space, spring cleaning and decluttering can also provide you with many health benefits.

In her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo explains how the Japanese art of tidying up can help us clear our lives and homes of clutter which, in turn, does wonders for our health.

Clutter can accumulate when you inherit stuff from loved ones. Attaching sentimental value to things can also make it harder to let go of them. Before you know it, you have a big pile of stuff that you love but have zero use for.

It also doesnt help that youre spending all your days indoors, causing you to buy stuff in an effort to pass the time, only to have zero use for your new purchases.

Read on to find out why you should get into tidying up your house as soon as possible.

A studypublished in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletinfound that a cluttered and disorganized house can increase stress levels as if you didnt already have enough to worry about.

Moreover, a Scottish Health surveyfound that just 20 minutes of housework can help to cut stress by 20%. So, next time youre feeling overwhelmed with the worlds events, why dont you try to clean out the garage? Youll be surprised at how much calmer you feel once you complete the task.

According to the same aforementioned study, cluttered homes seem to leave their occupants increasingly depressed throughout the day.

The same study found that coming home to an organized and clean space can help to improve mood and even reduce the risk of depression.

Staying fit and active is challenging on its own, and its made even harder during a pandemic. However, you may be surprised to know that household chores such as cleaning are its own effective workout. In fact, researchfrom Indiana University found that those who are motivated to clean are more likely to be motivated to exercise.

Instead of spending all your time scrolling through newsfeeds, why dont you set aside some time to do a little spring cleaning? In addition to slowly helping to declutter your house, experts have found that sitting for just half an hour less every day can help to lower your mortality risk (1).

It can be hard to focus a disorganized space, with one studyfrom Princeton University presentingthat a cluttered space can make it harder to concentrate. So, if youre working from home, its best that you do so in a clutter-free environment especially if you want to get any work done.

This is because, according to the same study, clutter limits the brains processing capacity yet clearing out the clutter can help to free up the brain and allow it to make more decisions.

Sticking to healthy eating practices is easier said than done, especially when youre spending more time indoors in the midst of a pandemic.

That said, a study published in Psychology Science found a strong association between a cleaner space and healthier food options. I suppose the cleaner the home, the cleaner the food?

A cluttered home may be responsible for a number of senior falls and child injuries.

Both of these accidents can be prevented if you rid your home of unnecessary junk that may be making it difficult to navigate through the home.

Battling with allergies? Well, astudyby the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunity found that keeping your home clean and decluttered can help you avoid allergy symptoms.

If youre battling with decluttering your home, here are a few things we can learn from Marie Kondos book:

The best criterion for choosing what to keep and what to discard is whether keeping it will make you happy, whether it will bring you joy. she writes in the book.

Changing how you see the act of decluttering your home can make the process much easier.

..We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of. writesMarie.

Keep only those things that speak to your heart, Marie explains. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest. By doing this, you can reset your life and embark on a new lifestyle.

Being health-conscious should involve keeping your home safe and healthy too. So here are our hacks to a healthier home.

Dohrn, I. M., Kwak, L., Oja, P., Sjstrm, M., & Hagstrmer, M. (2018). Replacing sedentary time with physical activity: a 15-year follow-up of mortality in a national cohort.Clinical epidemiology,10, 179186. https://doi.org/10.2147/CLEP.S151613

McMains, S., & Kastner, S. (2011). Interactions of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in human visual cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience,31(2), 587597. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3766-10.2011

Saxbe, D. E., & Repetti, R. (2010). No Place Like Home: Home Tours Correlate With Daily Patterns of Mood and Cortisol. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(1), 7181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167209352864

Vohs, K. D., Redden, J. P., & Rahinel, R. (2013). Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity. Psychological Science, 24(9), 18601867. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613480186

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7 Health Benefits Of Tidying Up - Longevity LIVE

Mesenchymal Stem Cells Market Market Will Witness Substantial Growth in the Upcoming Years – 3rd Watch News

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CMI announced that its published an exclusive report namely Global Mesenchymal Stem Cells Market by Manufacturers, Regions, Type, and Application, Forecast to 2027 in its research database with report summary, table of content, research methodologies, and data sources. The research study offers a substantial knowledge platform for entrants and investors as well as veteran companies, manufacturers functioning in the Worldwide Mesenchymal Stem Cells Market. This is an informative study covering the market with an in-depth analysis and portraying the current state of affairs in the industry.

Download PDF Brochure Of This Report @ https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-pdf/720

The report presents an overview of Mesenchymal Stem Cells Market consist of objectives study and definition of Mesenchymal Stem Cells. The next section focuses on market size, region-wise Mesenchymal Stem Cells growth rate estimation from 2020-2027.

This research report categorizes the global market by players/brands, regions, types, and applications. This report also studies the global market status, competition landscape, Market share, growth rate, future trends, market drivers, opportunities and challenges, sales channels, distributors, and Porters Five Forces Analysis.

Key Manufacturers Analysis:Pluristem Therapeutics, LonzaThermo, Fisher, ATCC, Bio-Techne, MilliporeSigma, Genlantis, Celprogen, Cell Applications, PromoCell GmbH, Cyagen Biosciences, Human Longevity Inc., Axol Bioscience, Cytori Therapeutics, Eutilex Co.Ltd., ID Pharma Co. Ltd., BrainStrom Cell Therapeutics, Cytori Therapeutics Inc., Neovii Biotech, Angel Biotechnology, California Stem Cell Inc., Stemcelltechnologies Inc., and Celgene Corporation Inc.

The top manufacturers, exporters, and retailers (if applicable) around the world are analyzed for this research report with respect to their company profile, product portfolio, capacity, price, cost, and revenue.

Mesenchymal Stem Cells Market 2020 Forecast to 2027 Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers

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The politics of identity and inclusion – Social Europe

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Karin Pettersson argues that struggles around race and gender are fundamentally about inclusion on an equal footing in the political community.

Anonymous, camouflage-clad men taking protesters away in unmarked carsfederal agents, sent by the United States president, Donald Trump, with the obvious intent of escalating violence. This is whats happening in the city of Portland. Can we call it fascism yet? asked the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.

Trump responded by saying that the push should be extended to more Democrat-led cities. And, across the US, a battle is going on, for values, dignity and democracyand over power and words.

A couple of weeks ago, the 80-year-old civil-rights activist John Lewis died. When Barack Obama was elected president, he gave Lewis a handwritten note: It read: Because of you, John.Many interpreted the election of Obama as an end to the struggle of the civil-rights movement. They got it wrong the moment Trump won the presidency on a platform of racism, thinly disguised as concern for white, working-class men.

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The Black Lives Matter protests are rooted in racial oppression, where African-Americans are imprisoned, die prematurely, lose their jobs and are disproportionally hit by the pandemic. But the fight is also about something morethe right to be seen as a full human being.

You could call it a struggle for democracy. One could also call it, as some have, identity politics.

Is there a point when one persons freedom struggle turns into anothers loss? The answer, in a way, is yes. Social status is not just about money but also about hierarchy. When women move up, men do not have to suffer in absolute termsbut relationships change. In this place of friction, conflict and a feeling of loss can emerge. It is this pressure-point populists exploit and try to amplify.

Within the left, class and identity are often set against each other. Among left-wing debaters, dismissing transgender people or advocating harsh treatment of immigrants has become a way of capturing the conservative moment, without purportedly having to give up ones own identity as a champion of justice.

The alleged conflict between class and identity is partly due to the fact that social-democratic movements today lack an idea of how economic equality can be achieved. But the answer to this failure should not be to ignore demands for justice. In a left-wing analysis, the struggle for expanded minority rights cannot be detached from economic justice: they presuppose each other.

An argument sometimes put forward is that too much focus on identity politics is counterproductive, because it might alienate the majority. If Obama had not been so black, Trump would not have been elected. If women had not pushed so hard for equality, men would not have felt so much resentment. The one who makes demands is seen as the one who creates polarisation.

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This analysis contains three fundamental flaws. First, it is morally dubious, as it makes the oppressed responsible for their oppression. Secondly, it is based on the same, stereotyped misconception of which identity politics is often accused. Anyone who believes that focusing on issues of racism will automatically create a backlash among the white working classa verbal construct of very recent vintagemakes the prejudiced assumption that the latter is a homogeneous group, with given, deeply-rooted, conservative views.

The third error in the reasoning is that it does not seem to correspond to reality. In the two major political rights projects that have emerged in recent years, #metoo and Black Lives Matter, the result has been rather the opposite. The loud demands have not led to a marginalisation of these movements. Instead, they have raised awareness of, and sensitivity towards, the issues far beyond those directly affected. Identity politics has engendered recognition, solidarity and broad alliances.

Where does the intense anger come from in the culture wars, these storms of hatred? A real fear of lost privileges, a grief over a world that is disappearing? Yes, but to a large extent the rage is inflated and synthetic.

In her acclaimed recent history of the US, These Truths, the Harvard professor Jill Lepore identifies social media as where the civic idea of conversation and deliberation shaping democracy comes to a dead end. On their platforms a specific type of speech is rewardedangry and resentfuldistorting not only politics but also professional journalism. It is easy to whip up a Twitter storm, while to be the target of one can be very painful.

What liberals such as Yascha Mounk call threats to freedom of speech are often (though not always) something elsemassive, organised criticism in a public sphere which incentivises and exacerbates hatred. This is probably why the culture wars of recent years have often felt constructed and Twitter-optimisedperformative outbursts with the primary purpose to strengthen one or other debaters personal brand or position in the Parnassus.

It is important to recognise that the left has problems with intolerance. There are dangerous tendencies within the so-called cancel culture, especially when the reaction to a provocative statement is not to respond to it but to try to get the person fired. Yet it is important to be careful and precise.

The fact that it is not as easy today to express certain viewsunchallengedis not in itself a sign of illiberalism. That people forcefully object when transgender individuals are attacked or when the N-word is used should be understood as an extension of rights and liberties to those previously denied themnot a restriction.

Sometimes it sounds as if movements fighting for expanded rights are as big a threat as the forces that want to restrict them. But that is simply not true. At the moment, there is a real push against democracy and civil rights by authoritarian politicians all over the world.

Trump, writes Masha Gessen in her new book Surviving Autocracy, is not an exception but a logical consequence of history. He stands on the shoulders of 400 years of racial oppression and 15 years of intense mobilisationin laws and language, in the media and on the internetagainst Muslims, immigrants and, generically, the Other.

Lewis and Martin Luther King fought for the rights of black Americans as a way to expand the definition of who belongs. Trumps projectas with the Sweden Democrats, Hungarys Viktor Orbn and Polands Andrzej Dudais actively to expel people from the group that constitutes the political we.

Gessen quotes the German philosopher Hannah Arendts explanation for why people are attracted to fascism and authoritarian leaders. It is about the temptation to throw off the mask of hypocrisyto not have to try to be moral, with the failure that always entails.

Conflicts over race and genderare different from other political arguments: a discussion of tax rates does not call into question anyones existence. Conflicts over identity are much more visceral. For they ask the question: who has the right to belong? And they demand an answer.

This article is a joint publication bySocial EuropeandIPS-Journal. A Swedish version appeared in Aftonbladet.

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The politics of identity and inclusion - Social Europe