Gates Foundation to fund 78 more health projects

The fourth round of grants will fund research projects in 18 countries.

 (Credit: Grand Challenges Explorations)

In its fourth round of funding, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges Explorations grants have been awarded to 78 science projects, with each collecting $100,000.

Through its grants, the five-year, $100 million initiative aims to foster "creative projects that show great promise to improve the health of people in the developing world," and as part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative is supported by the Gates Foundation.

This latest round of grants brings the total number of Exploration projects receiving funding to 340. Although the group originally anticipated funding roughly 60 projects per round, it is averaging closer to 80.

The foundation reports that the winners come from universities, research institutes, and nonprofits, with research spread across 18 countries on six continents.

The wide range of projects includes a "seek-and-destroy" laser vaccine, cell phone microscopes to diagnose malaria, ultrasound as a reversible male contraceptive, and disposable paper-based diagnostics devices. All project topics from the four rounds are listed here.

"We are convinced that some of these ideas will lead to new innovations and eventually solutions that will save lives," says Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation's Global Health Program, in a statement.

The group says round 5 is open for submissions until May 19, and round 6 will open in September. 
Throughout the initiative, "priority areas of focus" include: enteric and diarrheal diseases, HIV/AIDS, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and neglected and other infectious diseases. Other areas center on integrated health solutions for: family planning; nutrition; maternal, neonatal, and child health; tobacco control; and vaccine-preventable diseases.

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 

 

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The Bailout Era

The Bailout Age?

The printing press already has its own prominent place in history, so we’re not sure what else to call the first couple decades of the new millennium, but after Monday's news, there’s little debate: time to fire it up!

The European Union and International Monetary Fund announced a plan that comes straight out of the United States’ playbook: smother debt flare-ups with truckloads of “free money” while the central bank manipulates rates.

European leaders unveiled a $957 billion plan to save themselves and their currency. Here’s the quick and dirty:

• The EU will pony up $560 billion in new loans and $76 billion in existing deals for the GIIPS nations (as we’ve taken to calling them...no reason to give pigs such a bad rap)

• The IMF says it's ready with $321 billion

• The European Central Bank (ECB) has abandoned its old stance (and credibility) by launching a program to purchase government and corporate debt.

“This is like pouring Chanel No. 5 on a French ‘lady of the evening,’” Rob Parenteau, editor of The Richebacher Letter, wrote us early this morning, “after a night of wanton debauchery. More public debt will be issued as public debt guarantees and other fiscal assistance are put into place. German bunds are now the most screaming short."

But Parenteau warns that a quick move is not necessarily a smart one. "I would not put on shorts on the euro or euro banks or buy a credit default swap (CDS) on banks until this rally flares out, which I expect by June, if not sooner. By then, you will have an even more advantageous point to pick at the carcass of the fatally flawed by design -- as many argued over a decade ago -- euro zone.”

What of the implications for investors who have been taken on a wild ride of late. "This weekend's actions heavily reinforce the three-to-five year investing case for gold, because there's little reason for investors to view the euro as a relatively ‘hard’ currency," Parenteau argues. "This weekend's actions also weakened the ‘safe haven’ status of German bunds; expect bund yields to keep rising if German politicians approve funding for the off-balance sheet strategic investment vehicle (SIV) contraption that was set up to evade the ‘no bailout’ clause of the euro treaty.”

“The short covering rally should be fierce, but quick,” Parenteau advises, “given the tremendous oversold/overly pessimistic position markets were in going into this weekend. Savvy, cynical professional investors are welcome to go long risky assets like EPP or IBB (a Pacific ex-Japan ETF and biotech ETF, respectively) for the ride, but you must be ready to rip these positions out within a week or two.”

Addison Wiggin 

The Bailout Era originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning, which offers a uniquely refreshing perspective on the global economy, investing, gold, stocks and today's markets. Check out our new special report Investing in Offshore Oil

Addison Wiggin is the executive publisher of Agora Financial, LLC, a fiercely independent economic forecasting and financial research firm. The executive producer of the acclaimed documentary film I.O.U.S.A. and 3 time New York Times best-selling authort, Addison is also the editorial director of Agora Financial’s daily 5 Min. Forecast and The Daily Reckoning. 

The Renaissance. The Age of Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution. The Gilded Age. The Cold War. The Information Age.

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May 11, 1951: RAM Is Born

1951: Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory.

Back when computers still weighed hundreds of pounds and were primarily used by the military, computer memory relied on cathode rays to retrieve information. But the Navy needed a faster computer that could run flight simulations in real time.

In stepped a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Led by professor Jay Forrester, the researchers developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind.

The structure consisted of a plane made of wires and magnetic rings called cores. Each ring contained one bit of data. Every bit on the memory plane could be accessed with a single read-and-write cycle.

In short, magnetic core memory was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed. The time it took to request and retrieve information from memory was a microsecond — hundreds of thousands of times slower than memory today, but nonetheless a magnificent achievement in the 1950s.

“When we were working on this, in a million years we couldn’t imagine what would happen with memory,” said Bernard Widrow, who worked on Project Whirlwind with Forrester, in a 2009 interview with Edison Tech Center.

Forrester applied for a patent on his invention May 11, 1951. Project Whirlwind stayed active until 1959, though the technology was never used for a flight simulator.

Source: Today in Technology History; Edison Tech Center 
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Photo: Magnetic core memory removed from an Olympia 15-digit Nixie calculator.
Synx508/Flickr
See Also:

• March 8, 1955: The Mother of All Operating Systems
• Feb. 1, 1951: TV Shows Atomic Blast, Live
• Feb. 4, 1951: Major Assist Removes Enormous Cyst
• April 5, 1951: Happy Birthday, Mr. Pied Piper of Technology
• May 1951: Lockheed, Convair Get Contracts to Build VTOL
• May 8, 1951: DuPont Debuts Dacron
• Oct. 31, 1951: We’ll Cross That Street When We Come to It
• Dec. 5, 1951: ‘Your Car Is on the 12th Floor, Lady’
• May 11, 868: Signed, Sealed, Delivered
• May 11, 1997: Machine Bests Man in Tournament-Level Chess Match