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The virus is called monkeypox because researchers first detected it in laboratory monkeys in 1958, but it is thought to transmit to people from wild animals such as rodents or from other infected people. In an average year, a few thousand cases occur in Africa, typically in the western and central parts of the continent. But cases outside Africa have previously been limited to a handful that were associated with travel to Africa or with the importation of infected animals. The number of cases detected outside of Africa in the past week alone — which is almost certain to increase — has already surpassed the total number detected outside the continent since 1970, when the virus was first found to cause disease in humans. This rapid spread is what has scientists on high alert.

But monkeypox is no SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, says Jay Hooper, a virologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. It doesn’t transmit from person to person as readily, and because it is related to the smallpox virus, there are already treatments and vaccines on hand for curbing its spread. So although scientists are concerned — because any new viral behaviour is worrying — they are not panicked.

Unlike SARS-CoV-2, which spreads through tiny air-borne droplets called aerosols, monkeypox is thought to spread from close contact with bodily fluids, such as saliva from coughing. That means a person with monkeypox is likely to infect far fewer close contacts than someone with SARS-CoV-2, Hooper says. Both viruses can cause flu-like symptoms, but monkeypox also triggers enlarged lymph nodes and, eventually, distinctive fluid-filled lesions on the face, hands and feet. Most people recover from monkeypox in a few weeks without treatment.

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) says that state-backed threat actors used five zero-day vulnerabilities to install Predator spyware developed by commercial surveillance developer Cytrox.

In these attacks, part of three campaigns that started between August and October 2021, the attackers used zero-day exploits targeting Chrome and the Android OS to install Predator spyware implants on fully up-to-date Android devices.

“We assess with high confidence that these exploits were packaged by a single commercial surveillance company, Cytrox, and sold to different government-backed actors who used them in at least the three campaigns discussed below,” said Google TAG members Clement Lecigne and Christian Resell.

WASHINGTON – U.S. defense contractor CACI International is funding an experiment to demonstrate space technologies for military use, including an alternative to GPS navigation.

As part of the company’s plan to grow its space business, CACI is launching two demonstration payloads on a York Space satellite scheduled to fly to low Earth orbit in January aboard the SpaceX Transporter 7 rideshare.

“We’re looking at an alternative PNT [positioning, navigation and timing] solution that will work in a contested space domain,” CACI’s president and CEO John Mengucci said during a third-quarter fiscal year 2022 earnings call.

Russian scientists have synthesized a new ultra-hard material consisting of scandium containing carbon. It consists of polymerized fullerene molecules with scandium and carbon atoms inside. The work paves the way for future studies of fullerene-based ultra-hard materials, making them a potential candidate for photovoltaic and optical devices, elements of nanoelectronics and optoelectronics, and biomedical engineering as high-performance contrast agents. The study was published in Carbon.

The discovery of new, all-carbon molecules known as fullerenes almost 40 years ago was a revolutionary breakthrough that paved the way for fullerene nanotechnology. Fullerenes have a made of pentagons and hexagons that resembles a , and a cavity within the carbon frame of fullerene molecules can accommodate a variety of atoms.

The introduction of metal atoms into carbon cages leads to the formation of endohedral metallofullerenes (EMF), which are technologically and scientifically important owing to their unique structures and optoelectronic properties.

Forty years after it first began to dabble in quantum computing, IBM is ready to expand the technology out of the lab and into more practical applications — like supercomputing! The company has already hit a number of development milestones since it released its previous quantum roadmap in 2020, including the 127-qubit Eagle processor that uses quantum circuits and the Qiskit Runtime API. IBM announced on Wednesday that it plans to further scale its quantum ambitions and has revised the 2020 roadmap with an even loftier goal of operating a 4,000-qubit system by 2025.

Before it sets about building the biggest quantum computer to date, IBM plans release its 433-qubit Osprey chip later this year and migrate the Qiskit Runtime to the cloud in 2023, “bringing a serverless approach into the core quantum software stack,” per Wednesday’s release. Those products will be followed later that year by Condor, a quantum chip IBM is billing as “the world’s first universal quantum processor with over 1,000 qubits.”

This rapid four-fold jump in quantum volume (the number of qubits packed into a processor) will enable users to run increasingly longer quantum circuits, while increasing the processing speed — measured in CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) — from a maximum of 2,900 OPS to over 10,000. Then it’s just a simple matter of quadrupaling that capacity in the span of less than 24 months.

Discovery, Development & Delivery Of Safe, Effective & Affordable Vaccines For Global Public Health — Dr. Jerome H. Kim, M.D., Director General, International Vaccine Institute (IVI)


Dr. Jerome H. Kim, M.D., is the Director General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI — https://www.ivi.int/), a nonprofit International Organization established in 1997 as an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), dedicated to the discovery, development and delivery of safe, effective and affordable vaccines for global public health.

IVI is headquartered in Seoul and hosted by the Republic of Korea with 36 member countries and the WHO on its treaty.

Dr. Kim served as the Principal Deputy and Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Virology and Pathogenesis at Military HIV Research Program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), in addition to being the Project Manager for the HIV Vaccines and Advanced Concepts Evaluation Project Management Offices, U.S. Army Medical Material Development Activity.

Dr. Kim was also a Professor within the Division of Infectious Diseases of the Department of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. From 2004 – 2009 he led the Army’s Phase III HIV vaccine trial (RV144), the first demonstration that an HIV vaccine could protect against infection, as well as subsequent studies that identified laboratory correlates of protection and sequence changes in breakthrough HIV infections after vaccination.

University of Sydney scientists have achieved a technology breakthrough with potentially life-saving applications—all using an improved version of radar.

Traditionally, is associated with airport control towers or military fighter jets, but a new, highly sensitive radar developed at the University of Sydney takes this technology into the human range.

Called advanced photonic radar, the ultra-high-resolution device is so sensitive it can detect an object’s location, speed, and/or angle in millimeters as opposed to meters. This could enable usage in hospitals to monitor people’s vital signs such as breathing and heart rate.