Recent News

By Region: North America

The Military Is Building Integrated Hybrid Living-Nonliving Robotic Organisms

(Business Insider) In a request released Sept. 14 of this year, the Office Of Naval Research sought to find proposals for “Synthetic Biology Tools for Sensing and Bioprocessing” — essentially hybrid, organic inorganic “sensing” robots. But the language can be deceiving. Googling the first three words — synthetic biology tools — yields research in the Read More »

October 1, 2012
| Filed under North America, Biotechnology, Countermeasures, Policy & Initiatives, and Research
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Cattle anthrax outbreak probably over

(Denver Post) Colorado agriculture officials say four ranch quarantines that were prompted by an outbreak of anthrax in cattle in northeast Colorado have been lifted. State Department of Agriculture officials initially estimated that the outbreak killed 60 cattle in Logan County this past summer, but they have since revised that to about 55 cattle on Read More »

October 1, 2012
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, and Agriculture
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UN: ‘More should be done’ to prevent bio-terrorism

(BBC News) A UN official delivered the warning at the BioDesign Forum on synthetic biology being held in the UK. Piers Millet from the UN’s Biological Weapons Convention said there was no global organisation to ensure biotech was not used for “nefarious” purposes. But international bodies did exist to watch out for nuclear and chemical Read More »

September 28, 2012
| Filed under Europe, North America, Agents & Toxins, Bioterrorism, International, and Public Health
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A novel coronavirus

(The Economist) MOST of the time, for most people, respiratory diseases such as influenza and the common cold are little more than a snotty inconvenience. Occasionally, though, the viruses that cause them mutate into something truly nasty. The Spanish flu of 1918 may have killed more people than the first world war. More recently, there Read More »

September 28, 2012
| Filed under Asia/Pacific, North America, Agents & Toxins, Public Health, and Research
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Hoya Citings: Student contributes to foot-and-mouth disease research in Shanghai laboratory

(Vox Populi) Until this summer, Georgetown student David Schaffer (COL ’14) never thought he’d need to know how to say “flask” in Chinese. And no, this is was not his way to get to know Shanghai’s nightlife. Schaffer spent the summer in China at Shanghai’s State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering in Fudan University, scrambling Read More »