Biology Digest

NEW YORK, June 26 (Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson  (JNJ.N)  said on Saturday it will pay $263 million to resolve claims it fueled an opioid epidemic in New York state and two of its largest counties. The settlements remove the drugmaker from a jury trial scheduled to begin on Tuesday on Long Island, where several big opioid makers and distributors are also defendants. Johnson & Johnson did not admit liability or wrongdoing in settling with New York state, and with Nassau and Suffolk counties. The $229.9 million state settlement also calls for J&J to stop selling the painkillers nationwide. “The opioid epidemic has wreaked havoc" across the nation, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. "Johnson & Johnson helped fuel this fire." She said her focus remains "getting funds into communities devastated by opioids as quickly as possible." J&J said the settlements were consistent with its prior agreement to pay $5 billion to sett

Twenty years of lab conspiracies have came by in a flash   I noticed in recent biology and political talk that the Lab conspiracy in China keeps escalating especially here in the USA. I'm wondering if the conspiracy theories that the politicians keep ranting about as a ploy for the 2022 governor's and congressional elections even understand that here in the USA two decades ago we had the Anthrax attacks. There were FBI investigations at the time saying it came from a lab here in the USA and it was one of the sparking points on why biology majors are the least trusted group to the general public for the past 20 years. I agree it's virtue signaling among politicians in this recent China lab conspiracy in relation to SARS-CoV-2. TWIV 760 and TWIV 761 a Microbe.tv production recently went into discussions on how COVID-19 "Lab Conspiracy" is not true and the evidence the virologists had showed that the virus was naturally occurring. Parts of this escalation on Lab cons

 Growing up as a 6-year-old kid in Utah, I frequently practiced basketball in my driveway, trying to do all of the dribble moves and shots I saw my hero, John Stockton, do on TV, including a simple crossover. It was hard. The ball was too big for my little hands to control. But everything changed in one day — my seventh birthday. My mom got me a vanilla cake with Stockton somehow made in imaged icing on the top, a thrill just to look at, let alone eat. I devoured too much of it, got home from my birthday party (at the Fun Dome, maybe?), and took out a basketball. Now, I could do it. I could do a crossover. Like it was nothing, in fact. (Basically, it is nothing, but don’t tell young Andy that.) I, somehow, had ingested Stockton’s soul, and his skills were now mine. It was magic. I relate this story to you now because Stockton is involved with an anti-vaccine video project based here in Utah — spreading theories that have about as much scientific validity as my “I ate cake-icing Stockto

COLUMBUS, Ohio — No employer, either public or private, could require employees to receive vaccinations under GOP legislation pending in the Ohio House. Also, workers could not be fired as a result of refusing. The measure before the Republican-controlled House Health Committee has attracted multiple opponents of COVID-19 vaccines but goes further in addressing mandatory requirements for all vaccines, such as for the flu. "I believe in vaccines and scientific research. I also recognize that vaccination is a personal choice and that, for a variety of reasons, not all Ohioans can or want to receive vaccines," said Rep. Jennifer Gross, a Republican from West Chester in southwestern Ohio, in introducing the bill on May 18. Gross, a nurse practitioner, told fellow lawmakers she has received other vaccinations but not the one for COVID-19. The legislation does not mention COVID-19. But Gross made multiple references to employers including hospitals requiring proof of the COVID-19 v

 

Wastewater based epidemiology (WBE) has been established as a viable, valuable, and cost-effective means to monitor infectious disease within a community. In this webinar, a team of scientists from Colorado State University (CSU) will describe their experiences building a successful wastewater surveillance system from the ground up for use as a state-wide system to monitor viral loads in wastewater. The CSU team worked with GT Molecular to develop and validate a method to concentrate and extract SARS-CoV-2 RNA from wastewater samples provided by wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) or collected from sewers on the CSU campus. Levels of SARS-CoV-2 are quantified using Digital Droplet PCR assays. Using this method, the CSU team tracked trends in viral load over time for 21 Colorado WWTPs and connected this information to the area covered by each WWTP to inform public health decisions. They also monitored SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater from 20 locations, including CSU dormitories and off-cam

Presented By: Amanda Suttle Research Scientist - Eppendorf Dr. Ma Sha Head of Bioprocess Applications - Eppendorf Rich Mirro Business Manager - Eppendorf Webinar: Cell Culture Bioprocess Scale-Up Workflow from Bench to Pilot/Production Scale using Single-Use Bioreactors Webinar Abstract: Transferring a biologic candidate from the research and development phase to commercial production usually requires increasing the working volume of the upstream bioprocess. During scale-up, process performance optimized at small scale needs to be reproduced at larger scales, ideally without much need for process optimization at large working volumes. This requires reproducing the quality of the seed culture and the cells’ growth environment across scales. To streamline scale-up, bioengineers commonly use bioreactors with similar geometries at all scales and keep one or more parameters constant between vessels of different sizes, such as kLa, power input per volume or tip speed. Therefore, to design

  Presented By: Prof. Dr. Alexander Scheffold Felix Eppler, PhD Speaker Biography: Prof. Scheffold is the Director of the Institute of Immunology at the Universitätsklinikum, Schleswig-Holstein, and the Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel, Germany. Prior to this, he led the Cellular Immunology Group at the Clinic for Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology of the Charité-Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, and at the German Rheumatism Research Center (DRFZ) Berlin, Germany. He obtained his PhD in Immunology at the University of Cologne in 1997. As a global product manager, Felix is responsible for the development of applications, new protocols, and products for the MACSQuant® Tyto® Cell Sorter from Miltenyi Biotec. Before joining Miltenyi Biotec in 2018, Felix worked as a research associate at the LIMES Institute, University of Bonn, Germany, with a strong focus on Molecular Immunology and Cell Biology. He obtained his PhD in Molecular Biomedicine from the University in Bonn in 2017. Webinar:

  Belgian police have launched a manhunt for a heavily armed soldier with far-right tendencies who disappeared on Monday after threatening a virologist supportive of COVID-19 vaccines and coronavirus restrictions. The 46-year-old soldier, Jurgen Conings, left his home near the Dutch border on Monday morning and has not been seen since, police said in a search warrant published online. "There are indications that he is violent and, in the last 24 hours, evidence has emerged that the man poses an acute threat," Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne told VTM Nieuws. The manhunt started on Tuesday, after Conings threatened virologist Marc Van Ranst and his family, who were subsequently moved to safety. A number of weapons were found in his car on Tuesday night near Dilsen in western Belgium. Van Quickenborne said Conings was on a list of potential terrorists compiled by OCAM, an organisation responsible for assess the threat of terrorism in Belgium, because of far-right tende

  A 41-year-old man in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu has been confirmed as the first human case of infection with a rare strain of bird flu known as H10N3, Beijing’s National Health Commission (NHC) said on Tuesday. Many different strains of bird flu are present in China and some sporadically infect people, usually those working with poultry. There is no indication that H10N3 can spread easily in humans. The man, a resident of the city of Zhenjiang, was hospitalized on April 28 and diagnosed with H10N3 on May 28, the health commission said. It did not give details on how the man was infected. His condition is now stable and he is ready to be discharged. Investigation of his close contacts found no other cases, the NHC said. No other cases of human infection with H10N3 have been reported globally, it added. H10N3 is low pathogenic, which means it causes relatively less severe disease in poultry and is unlikely to cause a large-scale outbreak, the NHC added. The World Health Organi

We've got a new way for you to hone your folding skills! Step into the Dojo to bridge the gap between Foldit's simple tutorial levels and our more hardcore science puzzles. 0:00 ​​ – intro 0:22 – DOJO MODE 1:30 – NEW LAB RESULTS 3:36 — PUZZLE UPDATES 5:06 – DESIGN OF THE MONTH 7:35 ​ – outro You don't have to be a scientist to do science. Download and play Foldit and you can help researchers discover new antiviral drugs that might stop coronavirus. The most promising solutions are being manufactured and tested at the University of Washington Institute for Protein Design in Seattle. Foldit is FREE and not-for-profit: https://fold.it/​​ This video features Foldit scientist Brian Koepnick, PhD. It was produced by Ian Haydon. Note: Foldit is an interactive computer game and not a distributed computing project. If you would like to donate spare CPU cycles to science, please check out the Rosetta@Home project on BOINC at https://boinc.bakerlab.org/ Astrovirus image by G