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cvanderloo

Sewage-testing robots process wastewater faster to predict COVID-19 outbreaks sooner - 0 views

theconversation.com/vid-19-outbreaks-sooner-156467

covid testing sewer UCSD robots technology research

shared by cvanderloo on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • By using a sewage-handling robot, our laboratory has been able to detect coronavirus in wastewater 30 times faster than nonautomated large-scale systems.
  • When clinical studies emerged showing that people who test positive for SARS-CoV-2 shed the virus in their stool, the sewer seemed like an obvious place to look for it.
  • Surveillance depends on concentrating the viral particles from the wastewater to detect these low levels.
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  • Wastewater surveillance is especially useful as an early-alert system for high-risk areas, such as communities where undocumented residents may be cautious about individual testing.
  • Our new protocol concentrates 24 samples in a single 40-minute run.
  • The sewage-handling robot is equipped with a specialized magnetic head that snags the magnetic beads, with viruses attached.
  • Overall, our system can process 96 samples in 4.5 hours, dramatically reducing the time from specimen to result.
  • We’re now using the viral genome sequencing part of our system to track the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.
sissij

Online and Scared - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...online-and-scared.html

new york times social media bias technology

shared by sissij on 12 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • That is to say, a critical mass of our interactions had moved to a realm where we’re all connected but no one’s in charge.
  • And, I would argue, 2016 will be remembered as the year when we fully grasped just how scary that can be — how easy it was for a presidential candidate to tweet out untruths and half-truths faster than anyone could correct them, how cheap it was for Russia to intervene on Trump’s behalf with hacks of Democratic operatives’ computers and how unnerving it was to hear Yahoo’s chief information security officer, Bob Lord, say that his company still had “not been able to identify” how one billion Yahoo accounts and their sensitive user information were hacked in 2013.
  • Facebook — which wants all the readers and advertisers of the mainstream media but not to be saddled with its human editors and fact-checkers — is now taking more seriously its responsibilities as a news purveyor in cyberspace.
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  • And that begins with teaching them that the internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information, where they need to bring skepticism and critical thinking to everything they read and basic civic decency to everything they write.
  • One assessment required middle schoolers to explain why they might not trust an article on financial planning that was written by a bank executive and sponsored by a bank.
  • Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite to be true.
  • sissij on 12 Jan 17
     
    Internet has always been a big issue since more and more people, especially teenager spend most of their time on. Internet as a social media deliver information faster and wider than any other traditional media. The mode of information spreading is more of that the internet reveals issue and the traditional media such as television follows up and provide more detailed information. However, as internet develops, we also need to develop some rules and restrictions. We underestimate how dangerous internet can be if it is weaponized. However, there is a dilemma. Since internet is popular because of the unlimited freedom people feel online, as the police and authority gets involved in, people would ultimately lose that freedom. The censorship in China is a good example to see how people will respond to setting rules to the internet. There should some sort of balance that we can strive for in the future. --Sissi (1/11/2017)
katherineharron

Plastic waste is booming from the coronavirus pandemic - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 04 May 20 - No Cached
  • Surgical masks, gloves, protective equipment, body bags -- the Covid-19 crisis has spurred a rapid expansion in the production of desperately-needed plastic products, with governments racing to boost their stockpiles and regular citizens clamoring for their share of supplies.
  • But all that plastic ends up somewhere -- and environmental campaigners fear it is just the tip of a looming iceberg, with the pandemic causing a number of serious challenges to their efforts to reduce plastic pollution.
  • "Right outside my house there are discarded gloves and masks all over the neighborhood," says John Hocevar, oceans campaign director at Greenpeace USA.
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  • "We know that plastic pollution is a global problem -- it existed before the pandemic," Nick Mallos of US-based NGO Ocean Conservancy tells CNN. "(But) we've seen a lot of industry efforts to roll back some of the great progress that's been made.
  • "It's been raining here for two days, so these are very quickly washed down into the sewer. Here in Washington DC, they end up in the Anacostia River, out in the Chesapeake Bay, and then the Atlantic Ocean."
  • Over time, those products break down and add to the vast collections of microplastics in our seas, air and food. And the irony is that, while we produce and discard plastic to fight one public health crisis, we may be slowly contributing to another.
  • "As Covid-19 hits, it seems to be shifting the tide toward single-use plastics," Peszko concluded.
  • "We are oversaturated daily with news around the pandemic ... there is so much information streaming to us daily that many of these types of messages can be missed," he says. "It may not seem like a significant action at the moment, but it will manifest in very dangerous ways down the road."
Javier E

Opinion | Hurricane Helene: Storm Decision Fatigue Is Getting to Me - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...da-georgia-south-carolina.html

response climate change crisis psychology despair

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • For us, decisions about whether to stay or leave and where to go have become more tortuous in ways that may be difficult to understand for those who don’t experience hurricanes regularly.
  • Many don’t have the resources to flee monstrous storms such as Helene. But for those who can evacuate, there is a sense of not being able to outrun them or that the destinations may become just as perilous. Every possibility feels both right and wrong and also like disaster deferred for only days — while dithering only shrinks the window for escape.
  • more than the sheer repetition of extreme weather, the stakes have grown — for our homes, our communities and our lives. These storms, increasingly supercharged by climate change and hotter water in the Gulf of Mexico, get bigger faster and are more likely to ravage and flood the interior than storms past.
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  • Meanwhile, a disconnect seems to have occurred in our daily lives in Florida. The weekly forecasts, the hourly detail have seemingly become less accurate as the weather patterns have become more erratic.
  • That’s because the situation has fundamentally changed. This is not so much like a proverbial frog in a hot pot as a more insidious effect, in which we come to experience the stress of hurricane season more viscerally. Perhaps all of us will be hunkering down at some point, too exhausted to do anything else, whether we want to or not.
  • Now, with mini-droughts punctuated by torrential downpours, we prepare for flooding, overflowing sewers, loss of electricity and erosion. So we are already adrift as a result of climate change, unmoored without realizing it, when a hurricane looms large.
  • Encountering, then, meteorologists’ spaghetti models of a hurricane’s possible track, with their different futures, both help us make decisions and deepen a sense of anxiety. In one reality, the roof of our house blows off, and we are exposed to the elements. In another, just a hair’s breadth different, we’re standing, relieved in the yard, sun shining, just a day later.
  • We miss the gentle 3 p.m. rain of prior summers because it was part of our schedule, our routine, our understanding of and comfort with the rhythms of the seasons.
  • Apparently, my mind could not hold more than one extreme weather event at a time. So I write this from a hotel that could experience loss of electricity, high winds and flooding when Helene arrives. But to drive further would be dangerous, so I’m hunkering down, the window for decision making closed. I wonder sometimes if I should go back to Florida at all, which may feel like betrayal but also a relief.
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