who might have natural immunity to the ebola?

National Center for Biotechnology Information Infections by the Ebola (EboV) and Marburg (MarV) filoviruses cause a rapidly fatal hemorrhagic fever in humans for which no approved antivirals are available1. Filovirus entry is mediated by the viral spike glycoprotein (GP), which attaches viral particles to the cell surface, delivers them to endosomes, and catalyzes fusion between viral and endosomal membranes2. Additional host factors in the endosomal compartment are likely required for viral membrane fusion. However, despite considerable efforts, these critical host factors have defied molecular identification3,4,5. Here we describe a genome-wide haploid genetic screen in human cells to identify host factors required for EboV entry. Our screen uncovered 67 mutations disrupting all six members of the HOPS multisubunit tethering complex, which is involved in fusion of endosomes to lysosomes6, and 39 independent mutations that disrupt the endo/lysosomal cholesterol transporter protein Niemann-Pick C1 (NPC1)7. Cells defective for the HOPS complex or NPC1 function, including primary fibroblasts derived from human Niemann-Pick type C1 disease patients, are resistant to infection by EboV and MarV, but remain fully susceptible to a suite of unrelated viruses. We show that membrane fusion mediated by filovirus glycoproteins and viral escape from the vesicular compartment requires the NPC1 protein, independent of its known function in cholesterol transport. Our findings uncover unique features of the entry pathway used by filoviruses and suggest potential antiviral strategies to combat these deadly agents

those thirteen year old incident response plans may fool a lazy auditor, but they won't fool ebola

mcclatchydc |  A Liberian man who arrived by ambulance at a Dallas hospital with symptoms of Ebola sat for "several hours" in a room with other patients before being put in isolation, and the nurses who treated him wore flimsy gowns and had little protective gear, nurses alleged Tuesday as they fought back against suggestions that one of their own had erred in handling him.

The statements came as Nina Pham, a 26-year-old nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, fought off the Ebola virus after contracting it from the Liberian, Thomas Eric Duncan. The statements by the Dallas hospital nurses were read by representatives of the Oakland, Calif.-based group National Nurses United.

RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, said the nonunionized Texas nurses could not identify themselves, speak to the media independently or even read their statements over the phone because they feared losing their jobs. In a conference call, questions from the media were relayed to the unknown number of nurses by National Nurses United representatives, and the responses were read back to reporters.

DeMoro said all of the nurses had direct knowledge of what had transpired in the days after Duncan arrived at the hospital on Sept. 28.

Among other things, they said that Duncan "was left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area where other patients were present."

When a nurse supervisor demanded that he be moved into isolation, the supervisor "faced resistance from other hospital authorities," the nurses said.

They described a hospital with no clear guidelines in place for handling Ebola patients, where Duncan's lab specimens were sent through the usual hospital tube system "without being specifically sealed and hand-delivered. The result is that the entire tube system, which all the lab systems are sent, was potentially contaminated," they said.

"There was no advanced preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol; there was no system. The nurses were asked to call the infectious disease department" if they had questions, they said.

The nurses said they were essentially left to figure things out for themselves as they dealt with "copious amounts" of body fluids from Duncan while wearing gloves with no wrist tapes, gowns that did not cover their necks, and no surgical booties. Protective gear eventually arrived, but not until three days after Duncan's admission to the hospital, they said.

The nurses' allegations conflict with what hospital officials have been saying since Duncan's admission: that they have strict protocols in place for handling such patients and that a mistake led to Pham becoming infected while she treated him.

The hospital released the following statement after the nurses' comments:

"Patient and employee safety is our greatest priority and we take compliance very seriously. We have numerous measures in place to provide a safe working environment, including mandatory annual training and a 24-7 hotline and other mechanisms that allow for anonymous reporting. Our nursing staff is committed to providing quality, compassionate care, as we have always known, and as the world has seen firsthand in recent days. We will continue to review and respond to any concerns raised by our nurses and all employees."

DeMoro said the nurses came forward and asked Nurses United to publicize their statements out of anger they were being blamed for what had happened to their colleague.

The nurses statements come as an additional 76 health care workers who were involved in the treatment of Duncan are being watched for symptoms of Ebola and as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pledged to improve its response to hospitals in the event of more Ebola cases.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/10/14/243412_dallas-nurses-describe-ebola-hospital.html?&rh=1#storylink=cpy

second texas nurse has ebola...,

               
        

nbcnews |  A second Texas health care worker who provided care for Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan has contracted the virus, according to preliminary test results released early Wednesday. The worker reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, state health officials said in a statement. Confirmatory testing will be carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. "Health officials have interviewed the latest patient to quickly identify any contacts or potential exposures, and those people will be monitored," the Texas Department of State Health Services said. "The type of monitoring depends on the nature of their interactions and the potential they were exposed to the virus." It is the third case diagnosed in the U.S. 

The worker was among those who took care of Duncan, who died a week ago after he was diagnosed with Ebola earlier this month. The first Texas Health Presbyterian nurse to become infected, Nina Pham, said in a statement Tuesday that she was "doing well" and grateful for her care. The CDC described the latest case involving a health care worker as a "serious concern." In a statement, it added: "As we have said before, because of our ongoing investigation, it is not unexpected that there would be additional exposures." Ebola is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids of a sick person or exposure to contaminated objects such as needles. People are not contagious before symptoms such as fever develop.

exponential increase and widening geographic footprint...,

NYTimes |  The World Health Organization reported sobering new figures Tuesday about the Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa, saying the number of new cases could reach 10,000 per week by December, about 10 times the rate of the past four weeks.

While the number of deaths so far is roughly half the number of confirmed, probable or suspected cases, the organization also said that the mortality rate is closer to 70 percent.

The updated figures were provided by Dr. Bruce Aylward, the health organization’s assistant director general, during a telephone news conference from its Geneva headquarters.

He said that as of Tuesday, the total number of confirmed, probable or suspected Ebola cases over the course of the epidemic had reached 8,914, with 4,447 deaths. The vast majority are in the three most afflicted countries: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Just on Friday, the organization said that the deaths totaled 4,024 — indicating that hundreds more people have died in a matter of days.

Dr. Aylward, an infectious diseases specialist who just completed a visit to West Africa, said the survival rate was now “30 percent at most in these countries, ” even as the international campaign to fight it has escalated.

The epidemic has continued to expand geographically and now affects more areas in the three countries than a month ago, including close to Guinea’s border with Ivory Coast, Dr. Aylward said, and the number of infections was still rising in the capitals of the three worst-hit countries.

Ebola's progression in Africa

Datasciencecentral Having found a dataset on Ebola cases, thought of checking it out quickly what the statistics really look like.

The dataset contains 3 countries and within each there are multiple regions.

So just using the high level information at the country level this is what we can see in a simple line chart.

In the below Chart,

The blue line > Total Death cases

The green line > Total Cases

The Orange line > Currently admitted

And the Red line > Total recovered.

lucy in the sky with diamonds....,

BI |  John Badding of Penn State University and his team discovered that liquid benzene, when subjected to extreme pressure (around 200,000 times the pressure at the surface of the Earth) and then slowly relieved of that pressure, forms extremely thin, tight rings of carbon that are structurally identical to diamonds.

In other words, if you could unravel a diamond like you can a piece of fabric, you'd get these far-out threads. The result is a chain, thousands of times thinner than a human hair, that has the potential to be the strongest, stiffest material ever discovered. 

The discovery was something of an accident, but far from a hapless one. The team used a large, high-pressure device called the Paris-Edinburgh device at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to compress a 6-millimeter wide quantity of liquid benzene — a huge amount compared with previous experiments. The volume of liquid benzene, coupled with the size of the device, forced them to relieve the pressure more slowly than they would have otherwise.

"It's been known for a long time that if you put benzene under pressure, it’d make a type of polymer," Badding told Business Insider. "An Italian team did a similar experiment and found it was amorphous, disordered, with no pattern to the way material’s held together, kind of like glass. We were trying to make the same material everyone else had made, but in larger quantities."

When they released the pressure, "something interesting happened: the material became ordered," Badding said. The carbon atoms in the liquid benzene arranged themselves so that each was linked with four others, in what's called a tetrahedral structure. Structurally, the threads formed by the liquid benzene are identical to diamond, with each carbon atom linked with four others. You can see what they look like below. 

It was the breakthrough that Badding had been seeking for 20 years.

"Luck favors the prepared mind," Badding said. "I’d love to be able to say I predicted this was going to happen for benzene. I don’t think I can say that. But in a way our studies in benzene were a step in this larger goal, and we just happened to find that faster than we thought we would."

Now that Badding and his colleagues have shown that this structure is possible, the next step is to confirm the precise structure of the material and look for any imperfections that might exist.

"Theory suggests that if you can make the structures perfect, they could be as strong or stronger than carbon nanotubes, but we have not confirmed that experimentally," Badding said.

Going up

Towards the end of his life, science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke predicted that a space elevator would be built ten years after everybody stopped laughing. By the time he died, in 2008, everybody had.

something strange happens to civilizations, strange in a bad way...,

aeon |  ‘I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary,’ he told me, ‘in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because humanity would be extinct. It would be like, “Good news, the problems of poverty and disease have been solved, but the bad news is there aren’t any humans left.”’

Musk has been pushing this line – Mars colonisation as extinction insurance – for more than a decade now, but not without pushback. ‘It’s funny,’ he told me. ‘Not everyone loves humanity. Either explicitly or implicitly, some people seem to think that humans are a blight on the Earth’s surface. They say things like, “Nature is so wonderful; things are always better in the countryside where there are no people around.” They imply that humanity and civilisation are less good than their absence. But I’m not in that school,’ he said. ‘I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.’

Musk told me he often thinks about the mysterious absence of intelligent life in the observable Universe. Humans have yet to undertake an exhaustive, or even vigorous, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, of course. But we have gone a great deal further than a casual glance skyward. For more than 50 years, we have trained radio telescopes on nearby stars, hoping to detect an electromagnetic signal, a beacon beamed across the abyss. We have searched for sentry probes in our solar system, and we have examined local stars for evidence of alien engineering. Soon, we will begin looking for synthetic pollutants in the atmospheres of distant planets, and asteroid belts with missing metals, which might suggest mining activity.

The failure of these searches is mysterious, because human intelligence should not be special. Ever since the age of Copernicus, we have been told that we occupy a uniform Universe, a weblike structure stretching for tens of billions of light years, its every strand studded with starry discs, rich with planets and moons made from the same material as us. If nature obeys identical laws everywhere, then surely these vast reaches contain many cauldrons where energy is stirred into water and rock, until the three mix magically into life. And surely some of these places nurture those first fragile cells, until they evolve into intelligent creatures that band together to form civilisations, with the foresight and staying power to build starships.

‘At our current rate of technological growth, humanity is on a path to be godlike in its capabilities,’ Musk told me. ‘You could bicycle to Alpha Centauri in a few hundred thousand years, and that’s nothing on an evolutionary scale. If an advanced civilisation existed at any place in this galaxy, at any point in the past 13.8 billion years, why isn’t it everywhere? Even if it moved slowly, it would only need something like .01 per cent of the Universe’s lifespan to be everywhere. So why isn’t it?’

Musk has a more sinister theory. ‘The absence of any noticeable life may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me. ‘Like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars in the background, but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like mould in a petri dish.’ Musk flipped through a few more possibilities, each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’

why dispersal may be our only option...,

robinwestenra |  Following on from my recent post regarding the attempt by Dr Gavin Schmidt to rubbish the research of Russian scientists, led by Dr Natalia Shakhova and Dr Igor Semiletov, it now emerges that the latter were not even invited to the high profile meeting at the Royal Society.

The event, held a fortnight ago, is still causing controversy beyond the negative tweeting by NASA Goddard Director, Dr Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt aimed his presentation at discrediting the Russian’s work, using theoretical models, without expertise in methane, or credible data. The end result is that the Russian team have composed a letter to Royal Society President, Sir Paul Nurse, asking for an opportunity to present their findings, including contributions from over 30 scientists working in the region for over 20 years.

One of the longstanding major triumphs of the scientific community has been a commitment to apolitical analysis of important research. We all know there are geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West, but are these now making an unwelcome entree into an area that could pose enormous risk for humanity at large?

The risk of large-scale releases of the deadly greenhouse gas, methane, from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) may be a subject of debate in the scientific community, but to purposefully exclude one side of the debate and openly denounce their findings is not just immoral, it is reckless.

The letter, signed by Semiletov and Shakhova on behalf of more than 30 scientists, does state to the Royal Society President that the evidence shown by Dr Schmidt (based on work by Dr David Archer) is purely theoretical and that, despite both being very skilled climate modellers, neither has expertise in methane or the area in question, The East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

Whilst the meeting was in process, an expedition in the ESAS was in progress, with over 80 Russian and Swedish scientists. So why would such high profile Western scientists try to discredit a large and growing body of research? It is a hard question to answer, but the intent is certainly evident.

It is a matter for all of our concern if there is a posed risk of environmental devastation emanating from any region of the world. The Earth system does not acknowledge sovereignty or nationalist interests. International collaboration and respect are vital if we are to understand the changes that are going on as a result of man made climate change. The Earth is heating up and many feedbacks from the heating, such as methane releases, are not fully understood but are known to have caused enormous changes in the global climate.

The division between the climate modelling camp and the scientists carrying out observational research is completely nonsensical. It seems perfectly logical that the data collected by one group should be used by the other in order to make the models more accurate. If climate models have no basis in reality, then how can we trust their reliability?

The disdain shown by Dr Schmidt for his international colleagues should now be put aside and the doors of the Royal Society opened to allow the Russian team to present their findings. It is in all of our interests that this takes place, so, Sir Paul, over to you…

species final exams: dmitri orlov offers a prudent and scalable ebola mitigation strategy

cluborlov |  I have already mentioned that it may be a good idea to make arrangements through which survivors would be able to feed themselves, and provide them with the few other necessities for survival.

Beyond that, there are the basic mechanics of handling the pandemic. The current strategy treats it as a medical problem, best handled by doctors and nurses working in hospitals and clinics. This strategy only works for as long as the epidemic can be said to be under control; once it can be said to be out of control, the surviving doctors and nurses (medics are usually the first to be exposed—and to die) would be well advised to specifically refuse to handle Ebola patients.

In absence of any curative or preventive therapies, Ebola patients need shelter, hydration, hygiene, palliative care and, if and when they die, sanitary disposal of the remains. The goal is to do what is possible to give patients a chance to recover more or less on their own. To this end, it is very important to do all the things necessary to make sure that people are dying just from Ebola, and not from exposure, dehydration, or from any of the opportunistic diseases that thrive in disrupted circumstances, such as cholera and typhus. Sanitation is the most important aspect of the entire operation.

These services need not be provided by trained medics. The main two requirements for such service are: 1. psychological immunity to scenes of horrific suffering and death; and 2. immunity to Ebola. The first of these requirements comes down to natural talent; some have it, some don't. The second requirement is being provided free of charge by the Ebola virus itself, in cooperation with the survivors' immune systems.

English lacks a good word to describe this type of specialist, but we don't have to reach far to find one: the Russian word for it is “sanitar.” A popular Russian saying goes “wolves are sanitars of the forest” because they take care of disposing of the sick, the weak and the lame, thus giving those that survive a better chance. A sanitar need not be medically trained, but some training is needed: in diagnosis, palliative care, sanitation procedures and corpse disposal.

A third requirement is one that applies to the sanitation service as a whole: the number of sanitars has to scale with the rate of infection. Since the number of those infected is increasing exponentially, the number of sanitars assigned to serve them has to be able to increase exponentially as well. It seems outlandish to think that sufficient numbers of people will spontaneously volunteer for the job, and this means that they have to be press-ganged into service. And a super-obvious way to do just that is to simply never discharge Ebola survivors: once you are in, you are in until the pandemic is over, or until you die, whichever comes first. If you recover, you are given a bit of training, and then you go to work.

If you don't like the mitigation strategy I am proposing, please feel free to propose your own. Keep in mind, however, that what you propose has to automatically scale with the increase in the rate of infection, which is exponential. Sure, you can propose setting a public health budget, but then it has to double every couple of weeks—and keep doubling until the number of patients is in the billions.

elforsk ain't hesitate to interrogate (it gets cold in sweden and putin ackin a fool)...,

elforsk | Yesterday, astounding results from month-long measurements on a so-called “energy catalyser” were reported. The report, written by researchers from Uppsala University, KTH and the University of Bologna, describes a release of heat that cannot be explained by chemical reactions alone. Isotope changes in the analysed fuel instead indicate that nuclear reactions might have occurred at low temperatures. It implies that we may be facing a new way to extract nuclear energy possibly without ionizing radiation and radioactive waste. The discovery could potentially become very important for the world's energy supply.

The central part of the reactor is a narrow cylinder that is two decimetre long. In the experiments, the reactor operated at temperatures up to about 1 400 degrees Celsius. A net energy release of 1 500 kWh was observed. The thermal energy output was three to four times the electrical energy input. The reactor was filled with 1 gram hydrogen-loaded nickel powder and some additives.

In recent years, Elforsk has followed the development of what has come to be called LENR – Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. Elforsk has published an overview summary of LENR. Elforsk has co-funded the work described in the report in addition to earlier measurements that showed an anomalous excess of energy.

If it is possible to safely operate and control these reactions that are now believed to be nuclear reactions, we may see a fundamental transformation of our energy system. Electricity and heat could then be produced with relatively simple components, facilitating a decentralization of energy supply that could be both inexpensive and part of a solution for global climate change.

More research is needed to understand and explain. Let us engage researchers in trying to validate and then explaining how it works.

Magnus Olofsson, CEO Elforsk – Swedish Electrical Utilities' R & D Company

h8ters cain't wait to h8te...,

stephenpomp |  The title of the report, though, heralds quite differently “Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel”. So what is going on? 

Yet another version of the E-Cat² has been tested. This time the tests have been performed in Lugano³.

As in previous reports, some measurements and technical details are reported in great detail. One may, however, wonder why so much information, irrelevant for the core question, is reported while the really interesting claim is dealt with on only about two pages.  

So if you do not manage to read through all the tables and numbers, just turn to page 27 ff, read section 8 “Fuel analysis”, and check out table 1 in Appendix 3. That should do. Why? Because none of the measurements presented on the previous 26 pages matter, if what is written in this section is true; i.e., that the reported dramatic changes in the isotopic composition of the “fuel” are really due to a nuclear reaction in the E-Cat.

Levi et al. write that the “fuel” initially consists of a mixture of nickel powder and lithium in natural isotopic compositions. However, after the run, the “ash” is radically different in the isotopic composition! Practically all Li-7 has turned into Li-6 and all the 4 other naturally occurring nickel isotopes have practically vanished and turned into Ni-62. The latter has a natural abundance of 3.6 % but in the “ash” the abundance is about 99 %! Yes, you have read correctly. This is what is claimed. Nobelprize? If true: definitely. Imagine: You run the E-Cat and all the Ni-58 (68 % natural abundance), Ni-60 (26 %), Ni-61 (1 %) and Ni-64 (1 %) nuclei have turned into Ni-62.

Yes, you may read this again and try to digest it. The authors really claim that some of the nickel isotopes get some neutrons added while others have some removed and everything just becomes one single isotope. 

And this miracle happens without any radiation being emitted when the E-Cat is run, without traces of copper or other elements, and without changes in the effectiveness of the E-Cat while it is run⁴.

nothing would please me more than for the boy to face the future close to home...,

mospace.umsystem  | The 18th meeting of the International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (ICCF) was held at the University of MIssouri--Columbia on July 21-27, 2013.

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• Piezonuclear Fission Reactions Simulated by the Lattice Model 

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last night my son shifted his focus from chemical and petroleum engineering to physical chemistry and nuclear engineering...,

centauri-dreams |  Whenever we’re audacious enough to categorize far future civilizations, we turn to the work of Nikolai Kardashev. Nick Nielsen today looks at the well known Kardashev scale in the light of a curious fact: While many use Kardashev’s rankings in their own speculations, few have gone back and dug into his original paper. In Kardashev’s terms, our planet is close to attaining Type I status, which would surprise many commentators. And doesn’t the ambiguity over what constitutes the energy of a star — red dwarf? red giant? — play havoc with cut and dried ‘type’ definitions? How subsequent writers have adapted and modified the Kardashev scale makes for a cautionary tale about mastering our sources before using them for further extrapolation. For that matter, are there better gauges of a civilization than its use of particular energy resources? Answering the question deepens the debate that Kardashev so fruitfully began.

low energy nuclear reactions coming into view?

sifferkoll |   This report shows an undeniable COP of 3,2-3.6 over a 32 day period and substantial isostope changes in nickel and lithium. Anyway here it is for those interested.

LuganoReportSubmit

So, what does this mean?

It means that everything will change. It may take some time, but it means that most things will get significantly cheaper, since energy is such an important part in how we keep warm (and cold), what we eat and how we cook it, how me move about (fuels), and all other things we consume, etc. etc.

I would go so far to say that energy is as close we get to a ”gold standard” for our storage of value (ie. the petrodollar). Everything depends on it.

So what will happen when we suddenly gets five times as much energy per petrodollar?

Of course we will consume more energy,but in everything we consume there will be a HR part, so we will also consume more human resources (ie. valuable knowledge), which of course will increase in value. The economic boom will be unparallelled. All food and water scarcities around the globe could be solved if only the local rulers allow it (unfortunately they will not) and the environmental challanges can be solved as well since so much of it comes from air pollution, etc.

The amount of petrodollars around will be the same, so in a classical sense there will be neither deflation or inflation. However the deflation of price in all commodities and products with a high energy content will be huge, but balanced by a equally huge inflation in the new scarcities with low energy content; like human resources, time in general, attractive real estate and other status symbols. Generated profits will be invested in new products like never before. And debts could be paid off.

What about the financial system then?

Since the investment climate will change due to possible high returns, the price of money will go up, which in turn will make it a better investment to pay off debts. There will be some kind of balance, but basically it means that the financial debt crises in EU, US and Japan can be solved due to lower costs, higher taxes and lower unemployment in general.

So are there any losers?

Of course, oil stocks will be valued at cash instead of possible future profits. So the owners of these assets will loose money. Mainly this means savings and pensions of taxpayers; fortunately the same ones that in general will see an even bigger upside. some people and organisations will loose power, like the ”green” politicians that make a living out of environmental doomesday scenarios, and maybe most troubling, some governments that are dependent on exporting oil and gas for spendings. I guess Russia beeing the most scary one.  Fist tap Dale.

straight loving the way this cat thinks yo!

sifferkoll |  While looking in the logs after publishing the E-Cat report I found out that within minutes it was downloaded by an IP number owned by Blackrock/Barcleys. Within minutes after that oil futures started to fall and have stayed volatile since…

topological quantum computing

technologyreview |  In 2012, physicists in the Netherlands announced a discovery in particle physics that started chatter about a Nobel Prize. Inside a tiny rod of semiconductor crystal chilled cooler than outer space, they had caught the first glimpse of a strange particle called the Majorana fermion, finally confirming a prediction made in 1937. It was an advance seemingly unrelated to the challenges of selling office productivity software or competing with Amazon in cloud computing, but Craig Mundie, then heading Microsoft’s technology and research strategy, was delighted. The abstruse discovery—partly underwritten by Microsoft—was crucial to a project at the company aimed at making it possible to build immensely powerful computers that crunch data using quantum physics. “It was a pivotal moment,” says Mundie. “This research was guiding us toward a way of realizing one of these systems.”

Microsoft is now almost a decade into that project and has just begun to talk publicly about it. If it succeeds, the world could change dramatically. Since the physicist Richard Feynman first suggested the idea of a quantum computer in 1982, theorists have proved that such a machine could solve problems that would take the fastest conventional computers hundreds of millions of years or longer. Quantum computers might, for example, give researchers better tools to design novel medicines or super-efficient solar cells. They could revolutionize artificial intelligence.

Progress toward that computational nirvana has been slow because no one has been able to make a reliable enough version of the basic building block of a quantum computer: a quantum bit, or qubit, which uses quantum effects to encode data. Academic and government researchers and corporate labs at IBM and Hewlett-Packard have all built them. Small numbers have been wired together, and the resulting devices are improving. But no one can control the physics well enough for these qubits to serve as the basis of a practical general-purpose computer.

Microsoft has yet to even build a qubit. But in the kind of paradox that can be expected in the realm of quantum physics, it may also be closer than anyone else to making quantum computers practical. The company is developing a new kind of qubit, known as a topological qubit, based largely on that 2012 discovery in the Netherlands. There’s good reason to believe this design will be immune from the flakiness plaguing existing qubits. It will be better suited to mass production, too. “What we’re doing is analogous to setting out to make the first transistor,” says Peter Lee, Microsoft’s head of research. His company is also working on how the circuits of a computer made with topological qubits might be designed and controlled. And Microsoft researchers working on algorithms for quantum computers have shown that a machine made up of only hundreds of qubits could run chemistry simulations beyond the capacity of any existing supercomputer.

In the next year or so, physics labs supported by Microsoft will begin testing crucial pieces of its qubit design, following a blueprint developed by an outdoorsy math genius. If those tests work out, a corporation widely thought to be stuck in computing’s past may unlock its future.

Stranger still: a physicist at the fabled but faded Bell Labs might get there first.

speaking of contact-tracing: how is it that the government can read your emails but not count overseer-inflicted casualties?

salon |  The shooting of teenager Michael Brown has focused the nation (again) on the dangers faced by young, unarmed black men walking the streets of America. The sight of paramilitary police with guns pointed at peaceful protesters in a suburban town in the Midwest also got our attention. And as we wait for the legal system to determine if officer Darren Wilson will be held liable for the shooting, new questions are rising to the surface about the issue of officer-involved shootings in general. How often does this happen? How are these issues normally handled by prosecutors and the courts? And surprisingly, there is almost no way of knowing how often American citizens are killed at the hands of the authorities.

Most reporting in the last couple of weeks has cited the figure of 400 people killed in incidents of “justifiable homicide” by police officers each year since 2008.  This number comes from estimates done by the Centers for Disease Control and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to this article by Reuben Fischer-Baum at Five Thirty Eight, that number is highly debatable for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that only “justifiable” homicides are counted, which obviously means any that are deemed unjustified are not. It’s clear that the current government methods for reporting these deaths are unreliable.

Others have tried to compile these statistics themselves through media reports. Kyle Wagner at Deadspin recently announced a crowdsourcing project to collect the information for a comprehensive database. D. Brian Burghart, editor of the Reno News & Review, has been trying to gather the data for years and wrote a very interesting, and disturbing, article for Gawker discussing the difficulties he’s had getting cooperation from the authorities:

The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this project is something I’ll never be able to prove, but I’m convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why.

It’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting to collect this information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public records requests. The government collects millions of bits of data annually about law enforcement in its Uniform Crime Report, but it doesn’t collect information about the most consequential act a law enforcer can do.

It does seem more than a bit odd that the government has the capacity to collect all emails and texts that pass through the United States but is unable to compile a list of citizens who died in interactions with police agencies, doesn’t it?

cdc recommends hermetically-sealed fema coffins for ebola victims - and has stockpiled them for this contingency...,

alt-market |  I have been warning for quite some time that the banking establishment in particular is well aware that an economic collapse of incredible proportions is coming. In fact, they have done everything in their power to make one possible. This collapse, according to my research, is designed to clear the way through monetary carpet bombing for a new international Bretton Woods-style agreement which will plant the foundation of a truly global economic system centralized and controlled by a highly select few elites. Needless to say, the internationalists would prefer not to take the blame for such a calamity.

Regional or widespread war, terrorism, cyber attacks, etc, are all useful vehicles to conjure mass confusion, and can also be used as scapegoats for the eventual downfall of our economy. That said, a viral pandemic truly surpasses them all in effectiveness. All other tragedies could easily be tied to the first “domino” or “linchpin” (as Rand Corporation calls it) of Ebola transmission, but the strategy goes deeper than this...

An Act Of Nature

Even though most people are well aware of the fact that governments have been engineering biological weapons for decades, few people think political leadership would ever use them at all, let alone use them on the people they are tasked to protect. Even with the complacency and inaction of our government in terms of the response to Ebola, the general assumption by most of the American population will be that any viral outbreak is a product of nature, not of men.

Acts of nature are not things that the common man can easily rebel against. People rebel against governments and corrupt despots all the time, but not the plague. If a viral pandemic strikes, nearly everything a government does after the fact, no matter how corrupt or destructive, can be rationalized as necessary for the greater good of the greater number. If anyone does rebel, they will be labeled as pure evil, for they are now disrupting the government's ability to stop the pandemic from spreading, and thus, are partly responsible for the mass deaths that follow.

During a viral outbreak, government becomes mother, father, nurse and protector. No matter how abusive they are, most people will still look to them for safety and guidance, primarily because they have no knowledge of disease. What they do not understand, they will fear, and fear always drives the ignorant into the arms of tyrants.  One should also take into consideration the fact that most globalists lean towards the ideology of eugenics and promote the concept of population reduction.  A pandemic would fulfill this desire nicely...

Rationalized Economic Collapse

Who would question the event of an economic collapse in the wake of an Ebola soaked nightmare? Who would want to buy or sell? Who would want to come in contact with strangers to generate a transaction? Who would even leave their house? Ebola treatment in first world nations has advantages of finance and a cleaner overall health environment, but what if economic downturn happens simultaneously? America could experience third world status very quickly, and with it, all the unsanitary conditions that result in an exponential Ebola death rate.

The treasury, labor department, and private Federal Reserve have gone to vast lengths to skew statistics and rig markets with trillions in fiat dollars. Despite historic numbers of Americans falling off unemployment rolls, imploding shipping and manufacturing statistics, and the U.S. teetering on the edge of global “de-dollarization”, a large portion of the citizenry has been led to believe that economic recovery is assured. What they do not understand is that fiscal implosion is unavoidable, and the whole bull market is a circus designed to distract.

Amidst even a moderate or controlled viral scenario, stocks and bonds will undoubtedly crash, a crash that was going to happen anyway. The international banks who created the mess get off blameless, while Ebola, an act of nature, becomes the ultimate scapegoat for every disaster that follows.

why ARE so many deadly viral diseases breaking out all over the world right now?

economiccollapseblog |  Ebola, Marburg, Enterovirus and Chikungunya - these diseases were not even on the radar of most people coming into 2014, but now each one of them is making headline news.  So why is this happening?  Why are so many deadly diseases breaking out all over the world right now?  Is there some kind of a connection, or is the fact that so many horrible diseases are arising all at once just a giant coincidence?  And this could be just the beginning.  For example, there are now more than a million cases of Chikungunya in Central and South America, and authorities are projecting that there will be millions more in 2015.  The number of Ebola cases continues to grow at an exponential rate, and now an even deadlier virus (Marburg) has broken out in Uganda.  We have gone decades without experiencing a major worldwide pandemic, and many people believed that it could never happen in our day and time.  But now we could potentially see several absolutely devastating diseases all racing across the planet at the same time.

On Monday, we got news that the first confirmed case of Ebola transmission in Europe has happened.  A nurse in Spain that had treated a couple of returning Ebola patients has contracted the disease herself...

A nurse's assistant in Spain is the first person known to have contracted Ebola outside of Africa in the current outbreak.

Spanish Health Minister Ana Mato announced Monday that a test confirmed the assistant has the virus.

The woman helped treat a Spanish missionary and a Spanish priest, both of whom had contracted Ebola in West Africa. Both died after returning to Spain.

Health officials said she developed symptoms on September 30. She was not hospitalized until this week. Her only symptom was a fever.

How many people did she spread the virus to before it was correctly diagnosed?

aaaawwwwwww snap! if this overseer's hot, shit's about to get unbelievably real....,

dailymail |  Texas sheriff's deputy rushed to hospital with Ebola symptoms after attending apartment of 'patient zero' who died today

• Dallas County Sheriff Deputy Michael Monnig went to an urgent care clinic in Frisco, Texas with his wife on Wednesday A witness at the clinic described him as 'hunched over and flushed' 
• The deputy was inside the apartment where Ebola patient Thomas Duncan fell ill - the officer wasn't wearing protective clothing 
•  The CDC said the person is not one of the 48 contacts being monitored 
• The CareNow clinic was placed in lock-down Liberian national Mr Duncan, 42, died from Ebola on Wednesday morning 
•  Sgt Monnig's family said today the CDC had told them that their loved one was not at risk and they were just taking precautions

A Dallas County sheriff's deputy has been hospitalized today with Ebola symptoms, a week after he went unprotected into the apartment of first patient Thomas Duncan. Sgt Michael Monnig went on Wednesday to an urgent-care facility in Frisco, Texas with his wife, after complaining of stomach problems. The deputy presented at the clinic a week after he visited the Dallas home where Duncan was staying when he developed Ebola symptoms. Sgt Monnig was at the home to deliver a quarantine order to family members. Neither Sgt Monnig, nor the other two health officials, Zachary Thompson and Christopher Perkins with him, were wearing protective clothing or masks despite being in the apartment as cleaning crews were going about their work in full protective gear.