Understanding High-Mutating Viruses

Tool Helps to Better Understand High-Mutating Viruses, Including COVID-19

Los Alamos Reporter, March 8, 2022

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have developed FEVER, or Fast Evaluation of Viral Emerging Risks, a computational tool for detecting and investigating high-mutating viruses. Researchers use FEVER to design flexible measurement assays that concurrently identify whole classes of viruses for bio-surveillance, accurately diagnose an outbreak strain, and type mutations to find variants impacting public health. "We applied FEVER to COVID-19 and showed that we can indeed perform both highly specific SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics in 100 clinical samples while performing mutation typing for spike variants all at the same time," said LANL's Jessica Kubicek-Sutherland. ... '

Comparing Human vs Computer Viruses

 Interesting view with potentially useful comparisons.

Protecting Computers and People From Viruses   By Robin K. Hillin in ACM

Communications of the ACM, October 2020, Vol. 63 No. 10, Page 8 10.1145/3415748

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the virus analogy that gave rise to the use of the word "virus" from biology, to label a malicious program that attacks computer systems. The situation moves us to look into that, as another way to compare nature and artifact, and as an excuse to raise more abstract questions. We are moved also to stipulate that our mastery of both the biological and computational forms is shallow, and to invite other, better observations to follow. See Apvrille and Guillaume1 for greater depth and intriguing crossover speculation, Weis11 for yet more intriguing comparison, and Wenliang Du's website for detailed virus examples,3 which constitute dramatic reading for coders.

A virus is generally not regarded as a living organism, but sometimes described as (similar to) software. When the first self-replicating computer programs made the rounds, they were experiments or pranks;12 for most, the point was solely reproduction. An early computer worm was beneficent, but escaped control.2

We distinguish computer viruses from computer worms by the profligate scale of replication, viruses generating a broadcast of copies rather than a chain of copies. The obvious points of analogy across both types of virus include that viruses are tiny, invading a host much greater in size and complexity, without an overt signal, and that viruses disrupt some process in the host. Neither computer nor biological virus necessarily does damage. In biology, self-replication is an end, not a means, making the damage a side-effect. In the modern computer virus, the end is likely to be the action of a payload of malicious code. Now the term "virus," in both environments, connotes an intrusive and damaging force carrying dangerous baggage.    .... " 

Coronavirus Examination via AI

No idea if there is any credibility in this, but the initial link is connected to the Lancet, a well known professional healthcare journal, Worth a close look. the latter in Forbes.

Some intriguing items emerged reported Via O'Reilly (Connect with their newsletter)

AI identified a drug that could help contain the spread of coronavirus.

 On the other hand, AI’s coronavirus predictions may not be credible. Here’s why  .... '

Wuhan Virus Detected by AI Epidemiologist

Quite interesting revelation.  The depth of this discovery still unclear.  Recall our work in detecting epidemics and bioterror by retail data.

AI Epidemiologist Sent First Warnings of Wuhan Virus in Wired via CACM   By Eric Niiler

Canadian health monitoring platform BlueDot was the first organization to alert its customers to the outbreak of coronavirus, on Dec. 31. BlueDot’s algorithm analyzes foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and governmental information in order to warn its clients to avoid dangerous regions where disease outbreaks appear to be occurring. The algorithm also considers global airline ticketing data, to help predict where and when infected residents are traveling. BlueDot correctly predicted the coronavirus would jump from Wuhan, China, to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo in the days following its initial appearance. Said BlueDot CEO Kamran Khan, “What we have done is use natural language processing and machine learning to train this engine to recognize whether this is an outbreak of anthrax in Mongolia versus a reunion of the heavy metal band Anthrax.”

Smartphone Biological Virus Scanner

Not computer viruses, but biological viruses  Like the idea of physical sensors being attached to now very powerful devices/sensors in the form of smartphones.     Allowing the power to be readily put in many hands.

Smartphone virus scanner is not what you think

A new portable device lets smartphones count real biological viruses
The current leading method to assess the presence of viruses and other biological markers of disease is effective but large and expensive. It is prohibitively difficult for use in many situations, especially due to certain economic and geographic factors. So researchers created and tested an alternative miniaturized system that makes use of low-cost components and a smartphone. Researchers hope the system could aid those who tackle the spread of diseases.

A virus scanner for a smartphone might not sound too exciting at first, but this virus scanner doesn’t search for the latest malware; it scans biological samples for real viruses. It is a portable, low-cost, battery-powered device and is the brainchild of researcher Yoshihiro Minagawa from the University of Tokyo. It was tested with viruses but could also detect other biological markers.  ... "