Tag: lab
South Korea’s 4:33 Creative Lab launches Delabs Web3 game studio
SpaceX Rival Rocket Lab Targeting Multi-Continent Launches Later This Month
Rocket Lab is riding the wave from last year’s success, gearing up for rapid back-to-back launches from sites in New Zealand and the United States. One of the planned launches will initiate a new partnership with U.S. space tech company Capella Space.
Elon Musk’s ‘lab leak’ tweets could be an issue for Tesla’s plans in China
CNBC reports The Global Times, a state-run paper in China, has warned Elon Musk about pushing the covid “lab leak” theory. Reporter Eunice Yoon said the social media post asked if Musk is “breaking the pot of China,” with a meaning similar to asking if he was biting the hand that feeds him.
Ever since Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter, it’s seemed certain that at some point, the service’s content would put him at odds with the Chinese Communist Party, as Nilay Patel wrote after the deal closed:
Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen.
How fast we arrived at this most obvious sticking point is no…
Covid most likely DID leak from Wuhan virus lab causing pandemic, US report says
The Department of Energy Now Believes a Lab Leak is the Most Likely Origin of Covid-19
The Department of Energy now assesses that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely began as the result of a leak from a government laboratory, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Virologist Disputes WSJ Report on a Minority Opinion Suggesting Covid ‘Lab Leak’ Origin
DevNull127 writes: Four U.S. agencies have concluded that the Covid-19 virus originated at the Wuhan market, the Wall Street Journal reports. The U.S. National Intelligence Council reached the same conclusion. Then there’s two more agencies (including America’s CIA) that are “undecided.”
But there is one agency that decided — with “low confidence” — that the virus had somehow leaked from a lab. (And the FBI also decided with “moderate confidence” on that same theory.) “The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin,” writes the Wall Street Journal — adding that unfortunately U.S. officials “declined” to give any details on what led to the Energy Department’s position.
The Wall Street Journal also notes:
Despite the agencies’ differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said….
Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens. Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to “the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins,” the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn’t have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said.
Also responding to the Department of Energy’s outlying position was a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at Canada’s University of Saskatchewan, who posted a series of observations on Twitter:
The available evidence shows overwhelmingly that the pandemic started at Huanan market via zoonosis. I have no idea what this evidence that Department of Energy has is. All I know that it is “weak” and resulted in a conclusion of “low confidence”.
It reportedly comes from the DOE’s own network of national labs rather than through spying. But I do know that to be consistent with the available scientific evidence, the DOE has to explain how the virus emerged twice over 2 wks in humans at the same market the size of a tennis court, over 8 km & across a river from the only lab in Wuhan working on SARSr-CoVs….
Claims of a progenitor at WIV are pure speculation & unsupported by evidence…. Despite 3 years of a global search for this evidence, it has not materialized, while evidence supporting zoonosis associated with Huanan has continued to stack up. At some point, an absence of evidence might just be evidence of absence.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.