Biology Digest

The monkeypox outbreak has been declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization. The classification is the highest alert that the WHO can issue and follows a worldwide upsurge in cases. It came at the end of the second meeting of the WHO's emergency committee on the virus. More than 16,000 cases have now been reported from 75 countries, said WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. There had been five deaths so far as a result of the outbreak, he added. There are only two other such health emergencies at present - the coronavirus pandemic and the continuing effort to eradicate polio. Dr Tedros said the emergency committee had been unable to reach a consensus on whether the monkeypox outbreak should be classified as a global health emergency. However, he said the outbreak had spread around the world rapidly and he had decided that it was indeed of international concern. Too little was understood about the new modes of transmission which had allowed it

Coming join us in the lab to see how scientists make the proteins that players designed in Foldit. It all begins with an envelope full of custom DNA. 0:00 ​​ – intro 0:29 – in the lab 5:01 – design of the month 9:48 – outro You don't have to be a scientist to do science. Download and play Foldit and you can help researchers discover new drugs for cancer, antivirals, and more. 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/