Bill Gates Weighs In on US Pandemic Response, Encryption, and Grilling Tech Executives

Bill Gates gave a wide-ranging new interview to Wired’s Steven Levy (also republished at Ars Technica.) The interview’s first question: as a man who’d been warning about a pandemic for years, are you disappointed with the response of the United States? Bill Gates: Yeah. There’s three time periods, all of which have disappointments. There is 2015 until this particular pandemic hit….

Lifestyle Changes Could Delay Or Prevent 40% of Dementia Cases, Study Says

Excessive drinking, exposure to air pollution and head injuries all increase dementia risk, experts say in a report revealing that up to 40% of dementia cases worldwide could be delayed or prevented by addressing 12 such lifestyle factors. The Guardian reports: The report from the Lancet Commission on dementia prevention, intervention and care builds on previous work revealing that about a…

Fastest US Supercomputer Enlisted in Fight Against Coronavirus

The fastest supercomputer in the U.S. is being put to work in the search for a vaccine to prevent the coronavirus and treat those infected by it. From a report: The Summit, housed in the U.S. Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is capable of 200,000 trillion calculations per second. It is being used to analyze health data as…

Google Promises Privacy With Virus App But Can Still Collection Location Data

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: When Google and Apple announced plans in April for free software to help alert people of their possible exposure to the coronavirus, the companies promoted it as “privacy preserving” and said it would not track users’ locations. Encouraged by those guarantees, Germany, Switzerland and other countries used the code to…

Covid-19 Immunity From Antibodies May Last Only Months, New Study Suggests

CNN shares some bad news. “After people are infected with the novel coronavirus, their natural immunity to the virus could decline within months, a new pre-print paper suggests.” The paper was co-authored by 37 researchers from seven different institutions:
The paper, released on the medical server medrxiv.org on Saturday and not yet published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, suggests that antibody responses…

CDC: Most COVID-19 Cases In New York City In March Traced To Europe

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: Up to 75% of the coronavirus strains circulating in New York City in early March shared genetic similarities with those seen in Europe and other areas of North America, according to an analysis published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings are significant, given that they are based on samples…

WHO To Review Evidence of Airborne Transmission of Coronavirus

After hundreds of experts urged the World Health Organization to review mounting scientific research, the agency acknowledged on Tuesday that airborne transmission of the coronavirus may be a threat in indoor spaces. The New York Times reports: W.H.O. expert committees are going over evidence on transmission of the virus and plan to release updated recommendations in a few days, agency scientists…

200 Scientists Say WHO Ignores the Risk That Coronavirus ‘Aerosols’ Float in the Air

“Six months into a pandemic that has killed over half a million people, more than 200 scientists from around the world are challenging the official view of how the coronavirus spreads,” reports the Los Angeles Times: The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintain that you have to worry about only two types of transmission:…

Moderate Drinking May Improve Cognitive Health for Older Adults, Study Says

“A new study found low to moderate drinking may improve cognitive function for White middle-aged or older adults,” reports CNN: The findings support prior research which found that, generally, one standard drink a day for women and two a day for men — which is the US guidance — appears to offer some cognitive benefits… “There is now a lot of…