Friday bits and pieces: ebola, old software patches, microscopy and microbiomes
Scammers are cashing in on the ebola scare. The news media is cashing in on the ebola scare. Politicians are cashing in on the ebola scare. Unfortunately, neither international healthcare nor biomedical research are cashing in on the ebola scare.
I found the first software patch. Seems pretty robust.
Diet can influence certain autoimmune diseases via gut microbes. Also, artificial sweeteners can make you fat via your gut microbes. Is there anything our gut microbiomes cannot do?
The Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded for bypassing the Abbe diffraction limit, enabling high resolution light microscopy. Cue the beautiful pics:
The actin filaments (purple), mitocondria (yellow), and DNA (blue) of a human bone cancer cell are elucidated using structured illumination microscopy, a related super high-resolution fluorescence microscopy technique. Source: NIH, Dylan Burnette and Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health
Have you checked out the Ebola portal http://genome.ucsc.edu/ebolaPortal/ ?
Bioinformaticians are doing what they can to help in the fight against Ebola,collecting all the available information that can guide vaccine and drug development.
I did not mean that researchers & physicians are not working on the problem. I meant that there is comparatively little funding for research into, and healthcare of, emerging diseases. (‘Tropical & neglected’ are typically grouped together for a reason).