Technology

Antibodies are supposed to attack invading germs, but severely ill COVID-19 patients have so-called autoantibodies that mistakenly attack not just their own tissues and organs but even virus-fighting proteins produced by the immune system, new research shows. Scientists studied 194 COVID-19 patients, including 55 with severe disease, plus a control group of 30 people without the virus. In the sickest …

Trained dogs can identify people with COVID-19, even those with no symptoms, according to researchers. In the preliminary study published on Thursday in PLoS One. Dogs who sniffed swab samples of armpit sweat could tell which samples came from COVID-19 patients and which were from people who tested negative for the new coronavirus. That study was conducted in March. More …

CALIFORNIA: Google services, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive, were restored for most users on Monday, following a global outage that affected thousands. Google’s website that logs outages said the services that were affected for nearly an hour should be restored for most users. The company has some of the most widely used services in the world. YouTube records over …

Social network firm Reddit said here on Sunday it would buy short-video platform Dubsmash, becoming the latest company to expand in a space dominated by Chinese-owned TikTok. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a spokeswoman for Reddit said the acquisition was based on a combination of cash and stock. The success of ByteDance’s TikTok has prompted …

WASHINGTON: Hackers believed to be working for Russia have been monitoring internal email traffic at the US Treasury and Commerce departments, according to people familiar with the matter, adding they feared the hacks uncovered so far may be the tip of the iceberg. The hack is so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House …

SINGAPORE: Singapore has approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s novel coronavirus vaccine and expects to receive shots by year-end, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Monday, adding that he planned to be among the early vaccine recipients. The city-state of 5.7 million people expects to have enough vaccines for everyone by the third quarter of 2021 and will make it free for citizens …

LONDON: A single-patient study conducted by British scientists has found that Gilead’s antiviral drug remdesivir could be highly effective against COVID-19, raising questions about previous studies that found it had no impact on death rates from the disease. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study describes how doctors who gave the drug to a patient with both COVID-19 and …

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani doctor based in Toronto has introduced an instant Covid-19 diagnostic test using a smartphone. Pakistan High Commissioner to Canada Raza Bashir Tarar has congratulated Dr Naqeeb Khalid for his extraordinary achievement. In a video conversation with Dr Naqeeb Khalid who led the development of smartphone-based diagnostic test for Covid-19 as Director of Medical Device Programme at the …

TORONTO: In a landmark achievement, Toronto-based Pakistani Doctor Naqeeb Khalid has introduced an instant COVID-19 diagnostic test using a smartphone. High Commissioner for Pakistan to Canada Raza Bashir Tarar has congratulated Dr. Naqeeb Khalid, who led the development of a smartphone-based diagnostic test for COVID-19. The high commissioner in a video conversation with Dr. Naqeeb Khalid said the idea of …

ISLAMABAD: Federal minister of science Fawad Hussain Chaudhry praised Saturday the stance taken by Prime Minister Imran Khan on avoiding fossil fuels for environmental protection. Federal minister Chaudhry on his Twitter account posted a message saying it was astounding for him how media is unable to fathom the profoundness of this breakthrough decision by the PM.   He said calling …