cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/scientificarticles/p/1490571/frequent-and-unintentional-daytime-napping-linked-to-higher-dementia-risk-in-older-adult

Have scientists finally found a way to save the banana from disaster?

“We are not trying to preserve the Cavendish. We’re trying to replace Cavendish because we believe at the core of any sustainable farming system is biodiversity and genetic diversity.”

Other researchers have taken different approaches. A team at Queensland University of Technology led by Prof James Dale has created a genetically modified Cavendish by using a bacterium to introduce a single gene from a wild banana that produces resistance to TR4. A type of Cavendish called QCAV-4, has been approved for human consumption in Australia and New Zealand, with researchers confirming that it tastes like the traditional banana. However it is just a backup option if quarantine measures against the devastating Panama Disease TR4 fail.

De Vega, by contrast, is collaborating with other researchers to explore gene-editing techniques. These involve using “molecular scissors” to cut parts of the Cavendish’s DNA and replace them with genes from other banana cultivars. Creating both male and female plants will allow the Cavendish to be cross bred. This hopefully will lead to new offspring that are both resistant and as tasty and long lasting as our usual bananas.

As far as taste goes there are lots of good alternatives including these Banana Types. Lets hope not only disease resistance improves.

Police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers on Monday, seizing doses of hepatitis B vaccine intended for a vaccine trial for newborns. International health experts have called the trial “unethical,” but anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has attempted to fund it with US taxpayer dollars.

Under Kennedy, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in December that it had awarded the Danish researchers—led by married couple Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn of Bandim Health Project—an unsolicited $1.6 million grant to run the trial. Aaby and Stabell Benn are controversial vaccine researchers who claim vaccines cause overlooked harms. They have been repeatedly praised by Kennedy but are currently under investigation by Danish authorities for alleged scientific misconduct.

Plans for the trial were halted in January as widespread condemnation erupted over the trial’s design, which would potentially expose thousands of newborns in the country to hepatitis B, risking a lifelong infection that can lead to liver cirrhosis, cancer, and premature death. Outrage flared again after a Rolling Stone story earlier this month claimed the CDC set aside another $1.6 million in funding in late September and planned to move forward with the trial.

For now, the trial is not moving forward; Guinea-Bissau officials have not signed off on the trial. In a press conference last week, the country’s health minister, Quinhin Nantote, confirmed that the government had not yet authorized it.

“Any scientific research initiative involving human beings, particularly children, ‌must ⁠strictly comply with applicable national legislation, international ethical principles, competent evaluation and approval mechanisms,” Nantote said, according to Reuters.

In response to media reports that the trial will move forward, Nantote told the Guardian, “This is not even remotely true.”

Invidious

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/54366801

The scientific literature can be viewed as an "information commons:" an intangible resource that "no one owns and is shared by everyone." There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. This article provides a primer on the history and these frameworks, and considers a key difference between the information commons and the fields of yore: while information commons are robust and immensely valuable

some can be said to rank among humanity's greatest achievements

the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist. The latter are gone not because of the well-known "tragedy of the commons," but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement (~1600--1800) that transformed the common lands into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft at a societal scale. This article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons. Although AI-enabled enclosure does not operate identically to physical enclosure, it shares the key features of turning the commons into private wealth and undermining the social systems that support them (via "slop spam"). The concepts presented in this article can provide a scholarly basis for interrogating the foreboding feeling that AI may represent not just a smash-and-grab, but an attack upon a whole way of life.