Trial of Canadian Ebola vaccine suspended

This undated file image made available by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shows the Ebola virus. AP

Helen BranswellThe Canadian Press
Swiss researchers have temporarily halted a clinical trial of a Canadian-made Ebola vaccine after seeing an unexpected side-effect in a few people who received the serum.

None of the other teams currently testing the vaccine has reported seeing the same side-effect, and the Swiss scientists acknowledge that the symptoms they have spotted are mild.

But they said Thursday that they want a little time to assess the situation before they resume vaccinating subjects in the clinical trial.

“We want to make sure that it doesn’t move into something more severe before we inject anybody else,” said Dr. Angela Huttner in an interview from Geneva.

“So far all signs are really positive.”

French inventor creates pill that will make your fart smell like chocolate

A 65yr old French inventor Christian Poincheval (pictured above) has created a sweet smelling pill that makes farts smell like chocolate.

The chocolate pill is a new addition to his other products which include pills that make farts smell like roses or violets and fart-reducing powder for pets.

According to him, necessity was the mother of this invention. He said he was was eating dinner with friends in 2006 when he realised the group had caused a gas attack at the restaurant.

Ebola Outbreak: Deployment of robot-like decontamination equipment to aid fight

In this Oct. 8, 2014, file photo, a sign points to the emergency room entrance at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where U.S. Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan was being treated, in Dallas. (AP / LM Otero, File)

A U.K.-based company is getting a lot of attention for its role in the fight against Ebola.
Shares of Bioquell jumped earlier this month as the company continues to deploy robot-like decontamination systems in western hospitals with suspected or confirmed Ebola cases.

Bioquell makes portable, remote-controlled systems that can decontaminate hospital rooms with a 35-per-cent hydrogen peroxide solution, which is released as a vapour. The company says the vapour enters “every nook and cranny” in a room to remove pathogens. It can also be used on electronic devices.

he technology is not new; it has been used before in the battle against hospital “superbugs,” such as MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

But Ebola fears have now put Bioquell and its equipment in the spotlight.

Photo | Ebola Detectors At ITU Conference

Delegates from 170 member countries of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) walk through body-heat sensors at teh Conference Center in Busan, South Korea, 20 October 2014, before attending the opening ceremony of the 2014 ITU Conference. Three Ebola-hit West African countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, have decided not to send delegates to the ITU meeting.  EPA/YONHAP SOUTH KOREA

Ebola outbreak: Canada sends plane to Sierra Leone rescue scientists

The Public Health Agency of Canada says three scientists will be assessed by a quarantine officer and officers from Canada Border Services when their plane arrives back in the country. (Olivier Matthys/Associated Press

            

Canada is sending a charter plane to repatriate scientists who have been operating the country's mobile Ebola laboratory in Sierra Leone.

The Public Health Agency of Canada says the three scientists remain in good health and appear to be at low risk of having contracted the often deadly virus.

The agency announced late Tuesday that it was pulling the team from a World Health Organization outpost at Kailahun, in eastern Sierra Leone, after learning three people at their hotel complex tested positive for Ebola.

The agency says the three will be assessed by a quarantine officer and officers from Canada Border Services when their plane arrives back in the country.

Once they have been cleared for entry, they will travel to private residences where they will be in voluntary isolation for the remainder of the 21-day incubation period.

For privacy reasons the Public Health Agency is not releasing the names of the scientists and won't say when they will return

Marriage Body Language Expert Analyze Beyonce & Jay Z at the VMAs

 

Body language expert analyze Beyonce & Jay Z at the VMAs, says they have marriage problems . Beyonce and Jay Z can't go a day these days without one report or the other about the state of their marriage. After their appearance at the VMAs on Sunday night, The NY Post hired a body language expert to analyze Beyonce and Jay Z's body language during the award ceremony.

Below is what body language expert, Susan Constantine, who works with a Florida court had to say;

Beyoncé’s face:
“She’s giving a false smile,” Constantine says. If she were really happy, her eyebrows would be lifted and her eyes would be more open. 

Jay Z’s face
“This is what we call a flat face,” Constantine says. “There’s no expression whatsoever.” Happiness would be indicated by upturned corners of the mouth. But he’s less strained than Beyoncé.

Their Eyes:
“Neither one of them is looking at each other,” says body language expert Susan Constantine. “Their interest is more in their daughter.”

Beyoncé’s hand over midsection
She’s blocking her stomach area — the home of emotions in the body — indicating a feeling of vulnerability. Were she feeling comfortable, she’d expose her midsection.

Beyoncé’s hip
Her hips are angled away from her husband, indicating disassociation. “In other [older] photos, you see Beyoncé leaning into her husband,” Constantine says.

Blue Ivy
Her hands are clasped in a prayer-like way. Happiness would be indicated by raised arms and an extended body. Instead, she’s making herself small. “Maybe she’s praying her parents get back together,” Constantine says.

Canadian creates simulated universe to spur galactic consciousn​ess

Matt Mazur sits for a photograph with a projection from his "Multiverse" universe simulator at his home in Vancouver, B.C., on Thursday August 21, 2014.

When a storm of magazines and major dailies published an astronaut’s photograph of the Earth cresting above the moon in January 1969, the image spurred a new era of global consciousness.
We were a small, united society sharing one large playground.

Today, a 41-year-old Vancouver man with a laptop, cache of space telescope images and 15-year passion for outer space is mapping our corner of the universe in a quest to do the same on a galactic scale.

Matt Mazur has built a universe simulator that projects a three-dimensional rendering of the Earth’s galactic neighbourhood onto two massive white screens, giving any user the power to scroll far beyond our own solar system with a hand-controlled motion sensor device.

“It’s hard to think about something until you can visualize it,” said Mazur, noting that people living thousands of years ago believed the Earth was just a big, flat area because they lacked the tools to view a sphere suspended in space.

“I think global consciousness is a stepping stone in consciousness. The next logical step is a type of galactic consciousness.

“Some people might say, ‘That’s too science fiction.’ But you’ve got to start at some point. Galactic consciousness still might take a while before it actually kicks in, but it’s a process.”

By day, the ex-computer programmer with degrees in computer science and interactive multimedia animates ads for YouTube. But by night, he scans cyberspace for high-quality photographs of star systems.

Mazur has already digitally stitched together and enhanced 64 galaxies and is cataloguing 50 more, as he charts the brightest galaxies in the region labelled the Virgo Supercluster. He hopes to eventually render 250 galaxies, amounting to 1/38-millionth of the observable universe.

The project is dubbed “Multiverse.”

Mazur, who moonlights as a live visual artist under the moniker “VJ Elfmaster,” has been touring it around the music and festival circuit in British Columbia, giving workshops and demonstrations.

“I think anything that gets people going, ‘Oh wow’ — that captures their imagination, that makes them look up at the stars, think about our place in the universe — is valuable,” said Jennifer Kirkey, a physics and astronomy instructor at Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C.

The human species will benefit from reminders in our daily lives that we’re all aboard the “Big Blue Marble,” said Kirkey, who observed Mazur’s simulator last month at the opening party for MakerLabs, a Vancouver studio for technology-oriented artists.

“To me, it’s definitely more than a toy.”

The project is a labour of love, but Mazur envisions Multiverse as a teaching instrument combining the addictive pleasure of motion-controlled video games with the sparkle and magic of computer-generated artistry.

He’s striving to make space education as accessible to youngsters as to university students, because he believes the future of humanity lies light-years beyond our planet.

“Either we’re going to annihilate each other within the next 100 years, or, we figure something out … and then space is going to have a very pivotal role,” he said.

It’s therefore critical people begin shifting their mindsets now towards accepting space as a viable reality, he said.

“And from a children-perspective, (I hope the project) inspires them, so that they might grow up and seriously want to become engineers so they can build spaceships — like, for real, build spaceships.”
The United States government’s cuts to its NASA space program is “a theft from the future of the world,” Mazur said.

The Multiverse images were mainly obtained from the NASA Hubble space telescope and European Space Agency.

Mazur is motivated to provide the vicarious exploration of the universe by the hope that a critical mass of such projects will spur society to adopt space as a plausible future home amid a galactic community.

Science: Why Scientists Can't Kill HIV

By Roxanne Palmer, World Science Festival 

Humanity's war against the HIV has been a constantly shifting battle, thanks to the wily nature of the virus. But humans, being quite wily themselves, have persevered in the search for a cure despite setback after setback. Recently, scientists found a way to snip HIV's genetic code out from the genomes of infected cells. The technique's only been tried in cultured cells so far, but it could represent a powerful new weapon in the arsenal against AIDS.

 

But just what makes HIV such a formidable foe?

 

In most viruses, the genetic transfer of information mimics a host's: DNA is transcribed to RNA, which is translated into a protein. But HIV is a retrovirus (in the family Retroviridae), meaning that it carries its genes around in the form of a single strand of RNA, rather than a DNA strand or double-helix. In infected persons, HIV hacks the cells of the body with the help of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, which allows it to create a DNA version of the viral genome after it invades the cell. The viral DNA strand becomes integrated into a host's genome, and the cell copies out the instructions in those genes, creating new copies of the virus that can burst forth and infect other cells.

 

 

In normal DNA replication, a cell employs a variety of molecular proofreaders to help avoid changes to the genetic code. But in reverse transcription, there aren't those checks, meaning that a retrovirus' genome can mutate very quickly. This is one reason HIV is particularly good at ducking treatments — it mutates so quickly, it's hard to figure out what anchor a drug or vaccine can latch onto.

HIV is also a member of the Lentivirus genus within the retroviruses, giving it another nasty set of armaments. Other retroviruses can only infect cells in the midst of division; lentiviruses aren't bound by that restriction.

FDA Says Female Sex Drive Drug Needs More Research

A leading drug candidate for low sexual desire in women hasn't gotten approved for use in the United States, but the company backing it isn't giving up.

Sprout Pharmaceuticals announced Tuesday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the company "clear guidance" on "the path forward" for its drug to treat low libido in women, called flibanserin. The FDA had rejected an application to approve the drug last year, which Sprout appealed.