Word: bio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thursday Congress held the first of a series of planned hearings on the recent - and some might say reckless - proliferation of high-security bio-laboratories in the U.S. The questions at hand: How many such labs, which handle virulent toxins and germs like anthrax, avian flu and SARS, are currently operating in the U.S.? And has the research they've conducted made us any safer today than we were six years ago, just after 9/11...
...answers range from "No" to "We don't know." "[Given] that there is so much that is unknown at the moment, I would have to say we are at greater risk," Keith Rhodes, chief technologist with the General Accountability Office (GAO), told Congress, "because, as the number [of bio-labs] increases, the risk increases. And it's not just the increase in material, it's the increase in laboratories that have less experience than others...
...world's deadliest pathogens - the vast majority of them for the first time. Though FBI background checks are required for people who handle so-called select agents - a government-drawn list of 73 highly lethal pathogens, such as Ebola, ricin and monkeypox - the vetting focuses on security, not bio-safety competence. Yet most lab accidents are due to simple human error, says Dr. Gigi Gronvall, Senior Associate at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh. Newbies to the lab are typically indoctrinated to safe lab habits through a mentor-apprentice process, but the recent, rapid expansion of bio...
...government has spent billions on bioterror and infectious-disease research, and on building the high-risk labs that house those experiments. But nobody knows exactly how many such labs exist today. A 2005 survey by the National Institute of Health, which funds much of the country's bio-defense studies, tallied 277 Level 3 labs in the U.S.; meanwhile, a Homeland Security and Health and Human Services report the same year found more than 600. The GAO's Rhodes told Congress, however, the number is "surely in the thousands." Level 4 labs, which handle the most dangerous pathogens - those...
...Inner Mongolia Agricultural University is working in parts of the province near the Gobi Desert, planting sweet sorghum, a kind of grass that can be harvested by locals and sold for biofuel production. The plan dovetails with Beijing's ambitious goal of generating 2 million tons of bio-ethanol a year by 2010, and 15% of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. (Seventy percent of mainland China's energy comes from coal today.) In another desert village, drought-resistant shrubs called sand willows are being planted to keep encroaching sands at bay, but there are also plans to start...