Empty airport at sunset, 3D generated image, generic location. (Getty Images- gremlin)
A surge in COVID-19 infections overseas in places like China has prompted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to consider testing airplane wastewater for the virus.
The agency announced plans to begin inspecting airplane wastewater last month and now it is looking to clear a legal hurdle. Scientists have already found that testing wastewater for traces of the COVID-19 is a viable process and agreed that the method can act as a new defense weapon against the spread of the virus in the U.S.
An upgraded line of defense is needed as requiring international travelers to test negative for the virus before entering the country has been proven to not completely mitigate the spread of the virus. In December 2021, an airplane wastewater analysis of a flight from Ethiopia to France showed that despite passengers testing negative for COVID-19, the omicron variant was still present in waste.
Experts suggested that analyzing airplane wastewater can even help scientists determine how vaccines should be updated.
"If you do have a new variant that's coming and you have a wastewater sample, it's going to be more concentrated coming out of a smaller sewer shed or an airport," Sandra McLellan, professor of freshwater sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told NBC. "If you just look in the municipal wastewater, you could miss it."
When it comes to a potential legal dispute in assessing airplane wastewater, some countries could consider airplanes their own territory and removing anything from them could be considered theft, according to Kata Farkas, research officer at Bangor University and contributor to a new airplane wastewater study.
Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania. And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology in artificial intelligence. Chambers is trying take some of the lessons he learned while riding a wave that turned Cisco into the world's most valuable company in 2000 before a crash hammered its stock price and apply them as an investor in AI startups. He recently discussed AI's promise and perils during an interview with The Associated Press.
Tesla reported a surprise increase in sales in the third quarter as the electric car maker likely benefited from a rush by consumers to take advantage of a $7,500 credit before it expired on Sept. 30. The company reported Thursday that sales in the three months through September rose 7% compared to the same period a year ago. The gain follows two quarters of steep declines as people turned off by CEO Elon Musk’s foray into right-wing politics avoided buying his company’s cars and even protested at some dealerships. Sales rose to 497,099 vehicles, compared with 462,890 in the same period last year.
OpenAI could now be the world’s most valuable startup, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and TikTok parent company ByteDance, after a secondary stock sale designed to retain employees at the ChatGPT maker. Current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors, pushing the privately held artificial intelligence company’s valuation to $500 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. The valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology and continues OpenAI’s remarkable trajectory from its start as a nonprofit research lab in 2015.
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