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Congressional Democrats are introducing legislation to transfer $1bn in funding from a controversial new intercontinental ballistic missile to the development of a universal Covid vaccine.

The Investing in Cures Before Missiles (ICBM) Act, introduced in the House and Senate on Friday, would stop funding on the proposed new missile, known as the ground-based strategic deterrent (GBSD) which is projected to cost a total of $264bn over its projected lifespan, and discontinue spending on a linked warhead modification program.

Instead, the life of the existing US intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, would be extended until 2050, and an independent study commissioned on how best to do that.

The United States should invest in a vaccine of mass prevention before another new land-based weapon of mass destruction, Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, co-author of the bill, said.

The ICBM Act makes clear that we can begin to phase out the cold-war nuclear posture that risks accidental nuclear war while still deterring adversaries and assuring allies, and redirect those savings to the clear and present dangers presented by coronaviruses and other emerging and infectious diseases.

Arms control experts say static intercontinental ballistic missiles, of which the US has 400 in silos across the northern midwest, are inherently destabilizing and dangerous, because a president would have just a few minutes to launch them on the basis of early warning signals of an impending enemy attack, or risk losing them to a pre-emptive strike. They point to a history of near-launches based on defective data, and the risk of cyber-attacks distorting early warning systems.

With all of the global challenges we face, the last thing we should be doing is giving billions to defense contractors to build missiles we dont need to keep as a strong nuclear deterrence, Ro Khanna, Democratic congressman from California and the bills co-author in the House, said.

In September 2020, Northrop Grumman was awarded an uncontested bid for the $13.3bn engineering, manufacturing and development phase of GBSD, after its only rival for the vast contract, Boeing, pulled out of the race complaining of a rigged competition.

The Biden administrations intentions on the GBSDs future are unclear, but an early signal may come in its first defence budget expected in the next few weeks.

The new ICBM bill would transfer of $1bn in funding for the GBSD to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid) for development work on a universal coronavirus vaccine. It would also divert money from the program to modify the W87-1 nuclear warhead to fit the GBSD, and dedicate it to research and preparations to combat future bio-threats. And it would launch an independent study to explore viable technical solutions to extend the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile to 2050.

When Khanna tried to introduce a similar bill last July it was killed in the House armed services committee by a decisive bipartisan vote of 44-12. A proposed Minuteman extension study was also voted down.

Rarely is a congressional study controversial. This just shows how afraid Northrop Grumman is about the results of the independent study, Khanna told the Guardian. They lobbied to kill a simple study, to see if the Minuteman III could be extended.

The congressman said he was optimistic the new administration would support the bill.

This will remain an uphill battle. Northrop Grumman is lobbying hard against this bill, Khanna said. Given we have Democratic majorities in both chambers and a Democrat in the White House, we think our chances are better, particularly by putting pressure on the administration to pause GBSD and consider extending Minuteman III.

Jessica Sleight, the program director at Global Zero, a disarmament advocacy group, said: The US nuclear arsenal far exceeds any plausible mission requirements put forth by the Pentagon. Even in the best of times, $264bn for new nuclear missiles is money we cant spare for weapons we dont need. In the middle of a devastating pandemic, its irresponsible.

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Democrats call for $1bn shift from weapons of mass destruction to 'vaccine of mass prevention' - The Guardian

Crime tape surrounds a King Soopers grocery store on March 24 in Boulder, Colo where ten people were killed in a shooting on Monday. State Democrats now say they will consider a statewide assault weapons ban. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images hide caption

Crime tape surrounds a King Soopers grocery store on March 24 in Boulder, Colo where ten people were killed in a shooting on Monday. State Democrats now say they will consider a statewide assault weapons ban.

Colorado could be the next state to consider a ban on "assault-style" weapons, Colorado Public Radio has learned, although discussions are still in the preliminary stages at the state capitol and no legislation has been introduced yet.

Ten people were killed in Monday's mass shooting at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder and state lawmakers are grappling with what else could be done to prevent these types of shootings from happening. In Colorado, Democrats control the legislative and executive branches of the state government.

"I'm devastated," says Democratic Senate Majority Leader Steve Fenberg. He was born and raised in Boulder and represents the state Senate district where the shooting occurred.

"This is my grocery store. This is blocks from where my wife teaches middle school and her students go on their lunch break," says Fenberg. "It is my job to solve solutions through policy. And that's why it's not too soon. It's frankly too late, especially for these 10 innocent lives."

Fenberg and other Democratic state leaders say they are eager for a federal assault weapons ban. Even though President Biden called for that on Tuesday, Fenberg isn't optimistic Congress will act. The U.S. Senate is currently considering two less sweeping measures.

"There's no question that the real solution has to come from the federal government. A patchwork of laws is better than nothing, but clearly, if someone is intent on causing harm and we have strict regulations in Colorado, somebody can drive an hour and a half to Wyoming," says Fenberg. "The point is to not end gun violence tomorrow, but to prevent some of these tragedies from happening and making it so we can go longer than a week before the next tragedy."

Gun laws Colorado has passed so far

Colorado has already passed several gun laws within the last decade: a high-capacity magazine ban, universal background checks and a so-called "red flag" gun law. Opponents of stricter laws say those measures infringe on Second Amendment rights, placing burdens on law-abiding gun owners, while failing to prevent mass shootings.

Historically, opponents of bans on specific types of weapons have criticized them as unenforceable and often out of touch with the nuances of firearm styles.

"We haven't seen any bill text from Democrats on assault weapons, but I will say that we find bans to be ineffective and that they end up punishing good, law-abiding Coloradans," says Republican Sen. John Cooke, a former sheriff.

According to Cooke, Senate Republicans plan to respond to the Boulder shooting by pushing for a "massive investment" in mental health services.

"Something is troubled in the collective American psyche," says state Sen. Paul Lundeen, a Republican. "People are hurting and we need to do all we can to address that."

Republican state Rep. Matt Soper says that after the Boulder shooting, he started to hear chatter about a possible bill to ban certain types of guns statewide. He said there would be strong opposition from the GOP.

"We shouldn't have a knee-jerk reaction to these tragedies," he says, warning such a ban would likely be unconstitutional. "The political divide has grown even wider on the issue of guns and there's a lot of emotion involved on both sides."

Colorado's own constitution protects individual gun ownership: "The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question."

However, the state Supreme Court has upheld past gun laws as legal under that provision.

Two gun bills are making their way through this year's legislative session. One proposal would require safe storage of firearms in many instances and the other would require people to report lost and stolen guns. Both have passed their first chamber, so far on almost entirely on party-line votes.

The Boulder shooting is the largest mass shooting in Colorado since 2012. The state has some of the highest numbers of mass shootings in the country, beginning in 1999 with the attack on Columbine High School.

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Assault Weapons Ban Could Be In Colorado's Future - NPR

Ahead of the Monday start to the Derek Chauvin trial, George Floyd's family and supporters are planning a prayer vigil and rally.

MINNEAPOLIS Editor's note: The above video is from March 12, 2021.

The family of George Floyd and two national civil rights leaders will be gathering in Minneapolis the night before the trial of the former Minneapolis police officer charged in Floyd's death.

Opening statements in the Derek Chauvin trial begin Monday. Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd's death. The images of Chauvin's knee on Floyd's neck were captured on video and shared worldwide, sparking global protests around race and police brutality.

Sunday night before the official start of the trial, Rev. Al Sharpton and civil rights attorney Ben Crump will join the Floyd family for a prayer vigil and rally beginning at Greater Friendship Missionary Church in Minneapolis.

Crump represented the Floyd family in a civil suit that was just settled for a record $27 million with the city of Minneapolis.

The rally will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. Sunday. Opening statements for the trial begin Monday at 9 a.m., after nearly three weeks of jury selection. Fifteen jurors have been selected to hear the case, but one will be released Monday once the other 14 are sworn in. Two are alternates, who will hear the case but will not deliberate unless they are needed.

Rev. Sharpton and the National Action Network said in a Friday announcement about the rally, "NAN is committed to fighting for justice for the Floyd family and, as always, to rallying against the repeated, currently sanctioned violence against Black people by police officers."

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George Floyd family, Rev. Al Sharpton plan Sunday night vigil in Minneapolis - KARE11.com

According to a new study, Drug Ranking Using Machine Learning (DRUML) can accurately rank cancer therapies by efficacy across a range of cancer types.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London, UK, have developed a machine learning algorithm that ranks drugs based on their efficacy in reducing cancer cell growth. According to the developers of Drug Ranking Using Machine Learning (DRUML), in the future the approach could advance personalised therapies by enabling oncologists select the best drugs to treat individual cancer patients.

One of the problems in cancer treatment, is that different people respond differently to the same treatments. This is because, despite tumours being classified as the same type, they exhibit a huge amount of variation in their genetic makeup and characteristics between patients. The field of personalised medicine is attempting to address this issue by combining genetic insights with other clinical and diagnostic information to identify patterns that can allow clinicians to predict patient responses to therapies and select the most effective interventions.

The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to biomedicine, as was done in the study by the Queen Mary University, is one method being used to promote the development and adoption of personalised medicine and transform how cancers are diagnosed and treated in the future.

DRUML was trained using datasets derived from proteomics and phosphoproteomics analyses of 48 leukaemia, oesophagus and liver cancer cell lines responding to over 400 drugs. Based on these results it produces ordered lists predicting which drug will be most effective at reducing cancer cell growth. The team verified the predictive accuracy of DRUML using data obtained from 12 other laboratories and a clinical dataset of 36 primary acute myeloid leukaemia samples.

According to the developers, one of the most important features of the method is that, as new drug are developed, it could be retrained to include them in its predictions as well.

Speaking of the new method, Professor Pedro Cutillas from Queen Mary University of London, who led the study, remarked: DRUML predicted drug efficacy in several cancer models and from data obtained from different laboratories and in a clinical dataset. These are exciting results because previous machine learning methods have failed to accurately predict drug responses in verification datasets and they demonstrate the robustness and wide applicability of our method.

The research was funded by The Alan Turing Institute, Medical Research Council, Barts Charity and Cancer Research UK.

The method was published in Nature Communications.

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Machine learning used to predict most effective cancer drugs - European Pharmaceutical Review

This article was originally published here

Biomed Eng Online. 2021 Mar 25;20(1):31. doi: 10.1186/s12938-021-00865-9.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: The use of machine learning (ML) methods would improve the diagnosis of respiratory changes in systemic sclerosis (SSc). This paper evaluates the performance of several ML algorithms associated with the respiratory oscillometry analysis to aid in the diagnostic of respiratory changes in SSc. We also find out the best configuration for this task.

METHODS: Oscillometric and spirometric exams were performed in 82 individuals, including controls (n = 30) and patients with systemic sclerosis with normal (n = 22) and abnormal (n = 30) spirometry. Multiple instance classifiers and different supervised machine learning techniques were investigated, including k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forests (RF), AdaBoost with decision trees (ADAB), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The first experiment of this study showed that the best oscillometric parameter (BOP) was dynamic compliance, which provided moderate accuracy (AUC = 0.77) in the scenario control group versus patients with sclerosis and normal spirometry (CGvsPSNS). In the scenario control group versus patients with sclerosis and altered spirometry (CGvsPSAS), the BOP obtained high accuracy (AUC = 0.94). In the second experiment, the ML techniques were used. In CGvsPSNS, KNN achieved the best result (AUC = 0.90), significantly improving the accuracy in comparison with the BOP (p < 0.01), while in CGvsPSAS, RF obtained the best results (AUC = 0.97), also significantly improving the diagnostic accuracy (p < 0.05). In the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth experiments, different feature selection techniques allowed us to spot the best oscillometric parameters. They resulted in a small increase in diagnostic accuracy in CGvsPSNS (respectively, 0.87, 0.86, 0.82, and 0.84), while in the CGvsPSAS, the best classifiers performance remained the same (AUC = 0.97).

CONCLUSIONS: Oscillometric principles combined with machine learning algorithms provide a new method for diagnosing respiratory changes in patients with systemic sclerosis. The present studys findings provide evidence that this combination may help in the early diagnosis of respiratory changes in these patients.

PMID:33766046 | DOI:10.1186/s12938-021-00865-9

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Machine learning associated with respiratory oscillometry: a computer-aided diagnosis system for the detection of respiratory abnormalities in...