pgmrdlm shares a report from ABC News: Some hospitals are ditching the ritual of covering reproductive organs and fetuses during imaging exams after prominent medical and scientific groups have said it's a feel-good measure that can impair the quality of diagnostic tests and sometimes inadvertently increase a patient's radiation exposure. The about-face is intended to improve care, but it will require a major effort to reassure regulators, health care workers and the public that it's better not to shield.

Lead shields are difficult to position accurately, so they often miss the target area they are supposed to protect. Even when in the right place, they can inadvertently obscure areas of the body a doctor needs to see -- the location of a swallowed object, say -- resulting in a need to repeat the imaging process, according to the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, which represents physicists who work in hospitals. Shields can also cause automatic exposure controls on an X-ray machine to increase radiation to all parts of the body being examined in an effort to "see through" the lead. Moreover, shielding doesn't protect against the greatest radiation effect: "scatter," which occurs when radiation ricochets inside the body, including under the shield, and eventually deposits its energy in tissues. "In April, the physicists' association recommended that shielding of patients be 'discontinued as routine practice,'" the report adds. "Its statement was endorsed by several groups, including the American College of Radiology and the Image Gently Alliance, which promotes safe pediatric imaging. However, experts continue to recommend that health care workers in the imaging area protect themselves with leaded barriers as a matter of occupational safety."

In December, scientists sent 40 very muscular mice to live temporarily at the International Space Station. The resulting research, they hope, could lead to new treatments for kids with muscular dystrophy, or cancer patients with muscle wasting. From a report: In early December at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, two anxious scientists were about to send 20 years of research into orbit. "I feel like our heart and soul is going up in that thing," Dr. Emily Germain-Lee told her husband, Dr. Se-Jin Lee, as they waited arm-in-arm for a SpaceX rocket to launch. A few seconds later the spacecraft took off, transporting some very unusual mice to the International Space Station, where they would spend more than a month in near zero gravity. Ordinarily, that would cause the animals' bones to weaken and their muscles to atrophy. But Lee and Germain-Lee, a power couple in the research world, were hoping that wouldn't happen with these mice.

"It was worth waiting 20 years for," Lee said as the Falcon 9 rocket headed toward space. "And someday it may really help people," Germain-Lee added. The couple hope that what they learn from these mice will lead to new treatments for millions of people with conditions that weaken muscles and bones. Among those who might eventually benefit: children with muscular dystrophy or brittle bone disease, cancer patients with muscle wasting, bedridden patients recovering from hip fractures, older people whose bones and muscles have become dangerously weak, and astronauts on long space voyages.

Researchers from the University Hospital Zurich, ETH Zurich, Wyss Zurich and the University of Zurich have developed a machine that repairs injured human livers and keeps them alive outside the body for one week. ScienceDaily reports: Until now, livers could be stored safely outside the body for only a few hours. With the novel perfusion technology, livers -- and even injured livers -- can now be kept alive outside of the body for an entire week. This is a major breakthrough in transplantation medicine, which may increase the number of available organs for transplantation and save many lives of patients suffering from severe liver disease or a variety of cancers. Injured cadaveric livers, initially not suitable for use in transplantation, may regain full function while perfused in the new machine for several days. The basis for this technology is a complex perfusion system, mimicking most core body functions close to physiology. The corresponding study was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The inaugural study shows that six of ten perfused poor-quality human livers, declined for transplantation by all centers in Europe, recovered to full function within one week of perfusion on the machine. The next step will be to use these organs for transplantation. The proposed technology opens a large avenue for many applications offering a new life for many patients with end stage liver disease or cancer.

Sabine Hossenfelder, research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, writes: What we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There's math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn't mean this math describes reality. Physicists need new methods. Better methods. Methods that are appropriate to the present century. And please spare me the complaints that I supposedly do not have anything better to suggest, because that is a false accusation. I have said many times that looking at the history of physics teaches us that resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs, so that's what we should focus on. I may be on the wrong track with this, of course.

Why don't physicists have a hard look at their history and learn from their failure? Because the existing scientific system does not encourage learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe. This continues to go on because there is nothing and no one that can stop it. You may want to put this down as a minor worry because -- $40 billion dollar collider aside -- who really cares about the foundations of physics? Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it's not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive. But even if you don't care what's up with strings and multiverses, you should worry about what is happening here. The foundations of physics are the canary in the coal mine. It's an old discipline and the first to run into this problem. But the same problem will sooner or later surface in other disciplines if experiments become increasingly expensive and recruit large fractions of the scientific community. Indeed, we see this beginning to happen in medicine and in ecology, too.

The U.S. Supreme Court stayed out of the debate over what types of medical diagnostic tests can be patented, leaving in legal limbo companies that discover ways to diagnose and treat diseases based on patients' unique characteristics. From a report: The justices rejected an appeal by Quest Diagnostics's Athena unit that sought to restore its patent for a test to detect the presence of an autoimmune disease. A lower court had ruled in favor of the nonprofit Mayo Clinic that the test wasn't eligible for a patent because it merely covered a natural law -- the correlation between the presence of an antibody and the disease. Justices on Monday also rejected appeals to clarify the rules regarding software patents. The Supreme Court's action leaves it to Congress to resolve an issue that's created a legal gray area for such discoveries.

There's a new book called A World Without Work by economics scholar/former government policy adviser Daniel Susskind. The Guardian succinctly summarizes its prognostications for the future:
It used to be argued that workers who lost their low-skilled jobs should retrain for more challenging roles, but what happens when the robots, or drones, or driverless cars, come for those as well? Predictions vary but up to half of jobs are at least partially vulnerable to AI, from truck-driving, retail and warehouse work to medicine, law and accountancy. That's why the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers confessed in 2013 that he used to think "the Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I'm not so completely certain now." That same year, the economist and Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature: "Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs." Yet Skidelsky, like Keynes, saw this as an opportunity. If the doomsayers are to be finally proven right, then why not the utopians, too...?

The work ethic, [Susskind] says, is a modern religion that purports to be the only source of meaning and purpose. "What do you do for a living?" is for many people the first question they ask when meeting a stranger, and there is no entity more beloved of politicians than the "hard-working family". Yet faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and stagnant wages, many are losing faith in the gospel of work. In a 2015 YouGov survey, 37% of UK workers said their jobs made no meaningful contribution. Susskind wonders in the final pages "whether the academics and commentators who write fearfully about a world with less work are just mistakenly projecting the personal enjoyment they take from their jobs on to the experience of everyone else".

That deserves to be more than an afterthought. The challenge of a world without work isn't just economic but political and psychological... [I]s relying on work to provide self-worth and social status an inevitable human truth or the relatively recent product of a puritan work ethic? Keynes regretted that the possibility of an "age of leisure and abundance" was freighted with dread: "For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy." The state, Susskind concedes with ambivalence, will need to smooth the transition. Moving beyond the "Age of Labour" will require something like a universal basic income (he prefers a more selective conditional basic income), funded by taxes on capital to share the proceeds of technological prosperity. The available work will also need to be more evenly distributed. After decades of a 40-hour week, the recent Labour manifesto, influenced by Skidelsky, promised 32 hours by 2030. And that's the relatively easy part.

Moving society's centre of gravity away from waged labour will require visionary "leisure policies" on every level, from urban planning to education, and a revolution in thinking. "We will be forced to consider what it really means to live a meaningful life," Susskind writes, implying that this is above his pay grade.
The review concludes that "if AI really does to employment what previous technologies did not, radical change can't be postponed indefinitely.

"It may well be utopia or bust."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: There's currently no field test equipment that detects marijuana impairment. A company in California thinks it has a solution. From San Francisco Chronicle: "By mid-2020, Hound Laboratories plans to begin selling what it says is the world's first dual alcohol-marijuana breath analyzer, which founder Dr. Mike Lynn says can test whether a user has ingested THC of any kind in the past two to three hours. 'We're allowed to have this in our bodies,' Lynn said of marijuana, which became legal to use recreationally in California in 2018. 'But the tools to differentiate somebody who's impaired from somebody who's not don't exist.'"

We won't know if these claims are true until the testing equipment is deployed. And even then, we still won't know if the machines are accurate or the drivers they catch are actually impaired. Marijuana doesn't work like alcohol, so impairment levels vary from person to person. In addition, there's no baseline for impairment like there is for alcohol. That will have to be sorted out by state legislatures before officers can begin to claim someone is "impaired" just because the equipment has detected THC. At this point, the tech pitched by Hound Labs only provides a yes/no answer. There's a very good chance this new tech will go live before the important details -- the ones safeguarding people's rights and freedoms -- are worked out. The founder of Hound Labs is also a reserve deputy for the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. And it's this agency that's been test driving the weedalyzer. "[T]his new tech should be greeted with the proper amount of skepticism," the report says. "Breathalyzers that detect alcohol have been around for decades and are still far from perfect. A new device that promises to detect recent marijuana use just because researchers say consumption can be detected for up to three hours shouldn't be treated as a solution."

"The device is stepping into a legal and legislative void with no established baseline for marijuana 'intoxication.'"

clm1970 shares a report from Georgia State University: A novel nanoparticle vaccine that combines two major influenza proteins is effective in providing broad, long-lasting protection against influenza virus in mice, showing promise as a universal flu vaccine, according to a study by the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University. The double-layered nanoparticle vaccine contains the influenza virus proteins matrix protein 2 ectodomain (M2e) and neuraminidase (NA). Mice were immunized with the nanoparticle vaccine before being exposed to influenza virus, and they were protected against six different strains of the virus. The findings, which suggest this unique vaccine combination has potential as a universal influenza vaccine or component of such vaccines, are published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

The influenza virus protein M2e is found in all influenza virus strains, with each strain having a very similar version, and the protein has mutated very slowly over time. The protein NA is found on the surface of influenza virus and has also mutated much slower than other influenza proteins. This double-layered nanoparticle vaccine uses M2e as its core, and NA is coated on the surface. In the study, mice were exposed to one of six influenza virus strains after receiving the nanoparticle vaccine by intramuscular injection. The vaccine proved to have long-lasting immune protection, which was unchanged against viral challenges up to four months after immunizations.

The prospect of using the popular genome-editing tool CRISPR to treat a host of diseases in people is moving closer to reality. From a report: Medical applications of CRISPR-Cas9 had a banner year in 2019. The first results trickled in from trials testing the tool in people, and more trials launched. In the coming years, researchers are looking ahead to more sophisticated applications of CRISPR genome editing that could lay the foundation for treating an array of diseases, from blood disorders to hereditary blindness. But although the results of clinical trials of CRISPR genome editing so far have been promising, researchers say that it is still too soon to know whether the technique will be safe or effective in the clinic. "There's been a lot of appropriate caution in applying this to treating people," says Edward Stadtmauer, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "But I think we're starting to see some of the results of that work."

It has only been seven years since researchers discovered that a molecular defence system called CRISPR-Cas9, which microbes use to fend off viruses and other invaders, could be harnessed to rewrite human genes. Since then gene-editing has attracted attention for its potential to modify embryos -- an application that is ethically and legally fraught if those embryos are destined to become human beings. But in parallel, scientists have been testing CRISPR's much less controversial ability to disable or correct problematic genes in other cells in order to treat a host of diseases.

Breakthrough treatments for lung cancer and melanoma have driven down cancer mortality overall -- and from 2016 to 2017 spurred the largest-ever decline. schwit1 shares a report: The cancer death rate in the United States fell 2.2 percent from 2016 to 2017 -- the largest single-year decline in cancer mortality ever reported, the American Cancer Society reported on Wednesday. Since 1991 the rate has dropped 29 percent, which translates to approximately 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths than would have occurred if the mortality rate had remained constant. "Every year that we see a decline in cancer mortality rate, it's very good news," said Rebecca Siegel, director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the organization's report, which was published online in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Experts attributed the decline to the reduced smoking rates and to advances in lung cancer treatment. New therapies for melanoma of the skin have also helped extend life for many people with metastatic disease, or cancer that has spread to other parts of the body. Progress has slowed for colorectal, breast and prostate cancers, however. The rising rate of obesity among Americans, as well as significant racial and geographic disparities, likely explain why the decline in breast and colorectal cancer death rates has begun to taper off, and why the decrease in rates of prostate cancer has halted entirely.

The UK's National Health System is getting £40m (about $52.3 million) to try reducing login times on its IT systems, "a move the government says could free up thousands of staffing hours a day as the saved seconds add up," according to the Guardian.

They note estimates that switching to a "single sign-on" system reduced login times from 105 seconds to just 10 at one hospital, ultimately saving them 130 staffing hours a day.

TheNinjaCoder shared their report: In a typical hospital, staff need to log in to as many as 15 systems when tending to a patient. As well as taking up time, the proliferation of logins requires staff either to remember multiple complex passwords or, more likely, compromise security by reusing the same one on every system. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: "It is frankly ridiculous how much time our doctors and nurses waste logging on to multiple systems. As I visit hospitals and GP practices around the country, I've lost count of the amount of times staff complain about this. It's no good in the 21st century having 20th-century technology at work.

"This investment is committed to driving forward the most basic frontline technology upgrades, so treatment can be delivered more effectively and we can keep pace with the growing demand on the NHS."

"Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it," reports Ars Technica.

Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shared their report: This is one of those ideas that seems nuts but had so many earlier results pointing toward it working that it was really just a matter of time before someone tried it. To understand it, you have to overcome the idea that the immune system is always diffuse, composed of cells that wander the blood stream. Instead, immune cells organize at the sites of infections (or tumors), where they communicate with each other to both organize an attack and limit that attack so that healthy tissue isn't also targeted.

From this perspective, the immune system's inability to eliminate tumor cells isn't only the product of their similarities to healthy cells. It's also the product of the signaling networks that help restrain the immune system to prevent it from attacking normal cells... A number of recently developed drugs help release this self-imposed limit, winning their developers Nobel Prizes in the process. These drugs convert a "cold" immune response, dominated by signaling that shuts things down, into a "hot" one that is able to attack a tumor...

[More recently] researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn't get the flu. For more detailed tests, the researchers moved to mice, using melanoma cells that can form tumors when transplanted into the lungs of the mice... Having an active influenza virus infection reduced the ability of the melanoma cells to establish themselves in the lung. The effect isn't limited to the location of the infection, though, as tumors in the lung that wasn't infected were also inhibited. The effects were similar when breast cancer cells were placed into the lung, as well. All of this is consistent with the immune stimulation provided by a pathogen. The stimulation causes a general activation of the immune system that releases it from limits on its activity that prevent it from attacking tumor cells....

[T]he researchers obtained this year's flu vaccine and injected it into the sites of tumors. Not only was tumor growth slowed, but the mice ended up immune to the flu virus.... [T]he story does fit in well with the general consensus that the immune system can be a powerful tool against cancer, provided it can be mobilized properly. And, in at least some cases, a flu vaccine just might do the trick.

Doctor Stephan Moll, a blood-clot expert from the University of North Carolina, helped develop a treatment plan for a NASA astronaut who discovered a blood clot in the jugular vein partway through a long-term mission on the International Space Station. CNET reports: NASA hasn't revealed the crew member's name or when the incident happened, though the astronaut discovered the clot two months into a six-month mission while getting a neck ultrasound for a research study. Moll and a NASA medical team chose to treat the clot with blood thinners. The limited on-board supply of medicine required carefully meting out the dose until a fresh cargo shipment arrived from Earth.

The astronaut went through about 40 days of injections before switching to an oral pill. The NASA crew member discontinued the pills shortly before returning to Earth and required no follow-up treatment for the clot. Moll co-authored a case study on the clot published in the The New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday.

Google's health research unit said it has developed an artificial-intelligence system that can match or outperform radiologists at detecting breast cancer, according to new research. But doctors still beat the machines in some cases. From a report: The model, developed by an international team of researchers, caught cancers that were originally missed and reduced false-positive cancer flags for patients who didn't actually have cancer, according to a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Data from thousands of mammograms from women in the U.K. and the U.S. was used to train the AI system. But the algorithm isn't yet ready for clinical use, the researchers said.

The model is the latest step in Google's push into health care. The Alphabet company has developed similar systems to detect lung cancer, eye disease and kidney injury. Google and Alphabet have come under scrutiny for privacy concerns related to the use of patient data. A deal with Ascension, the second-largest health system in the U.S., allows Google to use AI to mine personal, identifiable health information from millions of patients to improve processes and care. The health data used in the breast-cancer project doesn't include identifiable information, Google Health officials said, and the data was stripped of personal indicators before being given to Google. Radiologists and AI specialists said the model is promising, and officials at Google Health said the system could eventually support radiologists in improving breast-cancer detection and outcomes, as well as efficiency in mammogram reading.

The "endgame" in the decadeslong campaign to eradicate polio suffered major setbacks in 2019. From a report: While the effort lost ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which recorded 116 cases of wild polio -- four times the number in 2018 -- an especially alarming situation developed in Africa. In 12 countries, 196 children were paralyzed not by the wild virus, but by a strain derived from a live vaccine that has regained its virulence and ability to spread. Fighting these flare-ups will mean difficult decisions in the coming year. The culprit in Africa is vaccine-derived polio virus type 2, and the fear is that it will jump continents and reseed outbreaks across the globe. A brand new vaccine is now being rushed through development to quash type 2 outbreaks. Mass production has already begun, even though the vaccine is still in clinical trials; it could be rolled out for emergency use as early as mid-2020. At the same time, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is debating whether to combat the resurgent virus by re-enlisting a triple-whammy vaccine pulled from global use in 2016. That would be a controversial move, setting back the initiative several years, as well as a potential public relations disaster -- an admission that the carefully crafted endgame strategy has failed. "All options are on the table," says viro-logist Mark Pallansch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the five partner organizations in GPEI. "We are clearly in the most serious situation we have been in with the program," adds Roland Sutter, who recently stepped down as the director of polio research at the World Health Organization (WHO). The heart of the problem is the live oral polio vaccine (OPV), the workhorse of the eradication program -- the only polio vaccine powerful enough to stop viral circulation. Given as two drops into a child's mouth, OPV for decades contained a mix of three weakened polio viruses, one for each of the three wild serotypes that have long plagued humanity. All three serotypes in the vaccine have the potential to revert to more dangerous versions; that's why the endgame strategy calls for deploying OPV in massive campaigns to eradicate the wild virus, then ending its use entirely.

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: The nation's oldest anti-vaccine advocacy group often emphasizes that it is supported primarily by small donations and concerned parents, describing its founder as the leader of a "national, grass roots movement." But over the past decade a single donor has contributed more than $2.9 million to the National Vaccine Information Center, accounting for about 40 percent of the organization's funding, according to the most recent available tax records.

That donor, osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola, has amassed a fortune selling natural health products, court records show, including vitamin supplements, some of which he claims are alternatives to vaccines.

In recent years, the center has been at the forefront of a movement that has led some parents to forgo or delay immunizing their children against vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles. Health officials say falling vaccination rates contributed to the infectious virus sickening more than 1,200 people in the United States this year, the largest number in more than 25 years. Measles outbreaks are surging worldwide, including in Samoa -- where nearly 80 people have died since mid-October, the great majority of them young children and infants... The group claimed credit this year for helping to defeat legislation in a dozen states that would have made it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children...

Mercola, whose claims about other products have drawn warnings from regulators, has also given at least $4 million to several groups that echo the anti-vaccine message. His net worth, derived largely from his network of private companies, has grown to "in excess of $100 million," he said in a 2017 affidavit.
In 2010 Mercola's site and the anti-vaccination group "launched a website that tracks vaccine-related legislation in every state. The site provides activists with detailed information, including how to sign up for public comment to support or oppose legislation in their state, where to park to attend a public hearing and what color T-shirt to wear to rallies..."

"In 2016, in response to a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, Mercola refunded nearly $2.6 million to more than 1,300 people who bought tanning beds that he claimed could reduce the risk of skin cancer."

There are real concerns about the way 5G is being deployed in the US, including security issues, the potential to interfere with weather forecasting systems, and the FCC steamrolling local regulators in the name of accelerating the 5G rollout. But concerns over the potential health impacts of 5G are overblown. From a report: If you weren't worried about prior generations of cellular service causing cancer, 5G doesn't produce much new to worry about. And you probably didn't need to be worried before. Few 5G services will use higher frequencies in the near term, and there's little reason to think these frequencies are any more harmful than other types of electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Most concerns about health impacts from 5G stem from millimeter-wave technology, high-frequency radio waves that are supposed to deliver much faster speeds. The catch is that millimeter-wave transmissions are far less reliable at long distances than transmissions using the lower frequencies that mobile carriers have traditionally used. To provide reliable, ubiquitous 5G service over millimeter-wave frequencies, carriers will need a larger number of smaller access points.

That's led to two fears: That the effects of millimeter-wave signals might be more dangerous than traditional frequencies; and that the larger number of access points, some potentially much closer to people's homes, might expose people to more radiation than 4G services. But millimeter waves aren't the only, or even the main, way that carriers will deliver 5G service. T-Mobile offers the most widespread 5G service available today. But it uses a band of low frequencies originally used for broadcast television. Sprint, meanwhile, repurposed some of the "mid-band" spectrum it uses for 4G to provide 5G. Verizon and AT&T both offer millimeter-wave-based services, but they're only available in a handful of locations. The wireless industry is focused more on using mid- and low-band frequencies for 5G, because deploying a massive number of millimeter-wave access points will be time-consuming and expensive. In other words, 5G will continue using the same radio frequencies that have been used for decades for broadcast radio and television, satellite communications, mobile services, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

schwit1 shares a report from People: Doctors in New Zealand are currently awaiting nearly 1,300 square feet of skin from the United States in order to treat the dozens of victims who suffered severe burns when a volcano erupted on White Island Monday afternoon. Dr. Peter Watson, chief medical officer of Counties Manukau Health, said at a press conference Wednesday that there are 29 patients being treated in intensive care and burn units at four different hospitals throughout New Zealand. Twenty-four of the burn patients remain in critical condition.

"We currently have supplies but are urgently sourcing additional supplies to meet the demand for dressing and temporary skin grafts," Watson said. "We anticipate we will require an additional 1.2 million square centimeters [1,292 square feet] of skin for the ongoing needs of the patients. These supplies are coming from the United States and the order has been placed." Watson said the nature of the victims' injuries had been made "complicated" by the gases and chemicals in the eruption, thus making "more rapid" surgical treatment necessary, as opposed to if they'd suffered thermal-only burns. CNN reports that the skin grafts are coming from people who are registered to donate skin after their deaths, and typically are taken from the donors' backs or the backs of their legs.

There were a total of 47 travelers on the island when the volcano erupted Monday just after 2 p.m. Six people were killed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google co-founder Larry Page is funneling money from his charitable foundation to a private flu-fighting initiative run as a for-profit company, TechCrunch reported. The program offers free flu shots to children in Oakland, California-area schools. Page also has a second company funding efforts to create a universal flu vaccine, according to the report. The free flu shots are offered through a group called Shoo The Flu, which started funding flu shots for both elementary and kindergarten through eighth grade schools in 2014. Shoo the Flu reimburses the Alameda County Public Health Department and school districts for the cost of the program.

The second company, Flu Lab, provides funding for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge for Universal Influenza Vaccine Development. Page and his family were initially contributing funding to the challenge directly, but they were replaced by Flu Lab. Flu Lab also supports the nonprofit Sabin Vaccine Institute, which works to expand vaccine access. The funding established the Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Science & Policy Group, which met in 2018 to discuss efforts to develop a universal flu vaccine. Shoo the Flu's director is also the CEO of Flu Lab, and TechCrunch reported that Shoo the Flu will soon move under the umbrella of Flu Lab. The report notes that both Shoo the Flu and Flu Lab are private, for-profit companies and therefore not required to file public tax returns.

"However, the funding for Shoo the Flu comes from Page's charitable foundation, the Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, which does have to file public returns," reports The Verge. "That makes the money flowing into the company public; Page's foundation gave Shoo the Flu over $4.1 million between 2015 and 2017, TechCrunch reported. What the organization did with that money is not as readily available."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SlashGear: A new treatment shows promise for revolutionizing prostate cancer treatment, offering a minimally-invasive and relatively low-risk alternative to traditional surgeries and radiotherapies. Called TULSA, this method uses sound waves to eliminate the diseased tissue in the prostate, leaving the rest of the healthy tissues behind. According to the researchers, patients treated with this method experience "minimal side effects." The transurethral ultrasound ablation (TULSA) method uses an MRI to guide the procedure, which involves inserting a rod through the urethra into the prostate, where it uses heat via sound waves to destroy the cancerous tissues. Unlike the surgery typically used to treat this condition, TULSA is minimally invasive and can be performed as an outpatient procedure.

Using guided and controlled sound waves, doctors are able to preserve the nerves near the prostate while eliminating the diseased tissues using a total of 10 elements located on the insertable rod. A software algorithm is part of the system -- it controls the strength, direction, and shape of the ultrasound beam, though doctors watch carefully using the MRI in real-time. A new study involving 115 men found that the average treatment time for this procedure is a bit less than an hour. The researchers found that 80-percent of patients experienced elimination of "clinically significant" cancer and that 72 of the men had no signs of cancer after the first year. As well, incontinence was a very rare side effect of the procedure, which also had low instances of impotence.