Dive Brief:
With the cost of clean energy technologies plummeting, social factors may prove to be final barriers to a deep decarbonization of the U.S. economy, according to a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Thanks to a decade of rapidly declining costs, decarbonization is not only technically and financially feasible it s actually the most economical path forward, according to the NASEM report. The report also projects that decarbonization could add 1-2 million jobs to the U.S. economy.
However, without policies to ensure an equitable transition that does not leave economically and racially diverse communities behind, the U.S. risks yellow vest social uprisings that could derail decarbonization, according to Stephen Pacala, a professor focused on climate change and systems ecology at Princeton University.
Under a cross-disciplinary program spearheaded by EPFL, scientists will develop an AI-based system that can predict whether Covid-19 patients will develop severe cardiovascular complications and, in the longer term, detect the likely onset of inflammatory disease.
Covid-19 comes with a range of symptoms – from a sore throat and the loss of taste to more serious ones like lung failure. But how can doctors predict how serious the disease will be when it first manifests? “The interaction between the viral infection, the host’s response, and the development of cardiovascular inflammation and injury is still poorly understood. It’s hard to know whether a patient’s symptoms will remain mild or rapidly deteriorate and trigger multiple organ failure,” says Adrian Ionescu, a professor at EPFL’s Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory, within the School of Engineering. If doctors could use a scientific method to better understand and predict the likelihood of a patient’s condition w
Covid 19 update: 11 December 2020
11 Dec 2020
A round-up of this week s coronavirus-related news and countermeasures from the photonics industry.
For Dr Mary-Anne Hartley, a medical doctor and researcher in EPFLâs Intelligent Global Health group (iGH), this past year has been relentless: âItâs not a relaxing time to study infectious diseases,â she said.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr Hartleyâs research team has been working with nearby Swiss university hospitals on two major projects. Using artificial intelligence, they have developed algorithms that, with data from ultrasound images and auscultation (chest/lung) sounds, can accurately diagnose the novel coronavirus in patients and predict how ill they are likely to become.