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Tag: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

  • Bill & Melinda Gates Donate $1M to Gun Control Initiative

    Bill and Melinda Gates have both offered up $500,000 to The Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility, “a coalition of concerned citizens and organizations working together to forge commonsense solutions to reduce gun violence.”

    The main common sense solution that alliance is fighting for is to make background checks mandatory for private sellers – for example those operating at gun shows and online.

    They’ve done this through Initiative 594, which is set to be voted on in November as citizens take to the ballot. The initiative, which did not pass the state legislature earlier this year, will likely have better luck at the polls. According to the alliance, 7 out of 10 Washington voters support it.

    Initiative 594 would “makes sure that anyone buying a gun in Washington State passes the same background check, no matter where they buy the gun and no matter whom they buy it from,” apart from noted exceptions like gifts between family members and for antique firearms.

    “We believe it will be an effective and balanced approach to improving gun safety in our state by closing existing loopholes for background checks,” said the Gates’ in a statement.

    Other high-profile names to donate big bucks to this cause? According to public disclosures, Paul Allen donated a half a million dollars earlier this month, as did Steve Ballmer.

    Bill & Melinda Gates have donated to this cause in smaller amounts before, but $1 million, although not a sizable percentage of their net worth, signals that this is an issue about which they care deeply.

    Gates was most recently seen dumping ice water on himself for ALS.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Mosquito Repellent 1000x Stronger Than DEET

    Mosquito Repellent 1000x Stronger Than DEET

    Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee have developed a mosquito repellent that is 1000 times stronger than DEET, and works on many different types of insects.

    The new substance is tentatively called VUAA1, is far more effective than N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide (DEET), and works on mosquitoes, ants, flies, moths and a slew of other bugs. According to project researcher Laurence Zwiebel, VUAA1 is the product of an initiative to combat malaria.

    “It turns out if we found the world’s greatest mosquito repellent, no one would care,” Zwiebel commented, adding, “So we needed to find something that would work against all insects.”

    Existing bug sprays attempt to camouflage the user from the offending insect, by masking any odor indicative of a food source. VUAA1 likewise works via scent, but in an opposite way. “We decided to take a more aggressive approach and, rather than turn off the mosquito’s olfactory system, we could look for something that would turn it too far on, to see if we could design a new generation of insect repellents based on overloading their smell system,” Zweibel said, adding, “They hate, just like we hate, overstimulation. They will move away from too much smell.” So far, VUAA1 has worked on every insect it’s been tested on.

    Malaria, which will likely be contracted by up to 500 million people this year, killed roughly 660,000 in 2010. “Our hope is that we’re able to help develop a product that can be sold for profit in the developed world, and use that profit to leverage distribution in the developing world,” Zwiebel said. “Our hope is that every time we spray on a mosquito repellent here in America, we’re subsidizing malaria reduction in Africa and Asia.”

    Here is an animation describing how malaria enters the bloodstream of a host:

    The malaria research project was supported by the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative funded by the Foundation for the NIH through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. No word on when a VUAA1 product will hit stores, as it is still being tested for safety.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Bill Gates Urges Philanthropy From China’s Wealthiest

    Bill Gates may be known as the richest man in the world, but that doesn’t mean he can solve every global problem himself. The co-founder of Microsoft is once again urging China’s wealthiest people to tackle the country’s poverty levels.

    “China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people … I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them,” Gates wrote in the People’s Daily. “Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.”

    It isn’t the first time Gates has implored the country’s most well endowed to help lift up their communities; in 2010, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up with Warren Buffet for a charity dinner in Beijing, inviting 50 of China’s richest in order to try and solicit donations. Many declined their invitations.

    According to Yahoo, the wealthiest of the most populated country in the world fear that donating large amounts of money will draw unwanted attention to them, and so they rarely give. However, Jack Ma and Joe Tsai–co-founders of the e-commerce company Alibaba–announced last week that they will endow a $2 billion foundation which will focus on education and health care for their home country.

    Gates made headlines this week for more than his generosity; the entrepreneur and philanthropist is also launching a fight against mosquitoes, pointing out that they are the deadliest creatures to humans, especially in impoverished countries.

    “For many of us, mosquitoes might seem more pests than predators. But in a large part of the world, particularly among the poor, mosquitoes are a blight. There are more than 2,500 species of mosquito, and they’re found in every region of the world except Antarctica. During the peak breeding seasons, they outnumber every other animal on Earth, except termites and ants. Despite their innocuous-sounding name—Spanish for “little fly”—they carry devastating diseases,” Gates wrote in a blog post.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Bill Gates Condom Challenge Offers $100,000

    Bill Gates Condom Challenge Offers $100,000

    Bill Gates‘ philanthropy continues to press hard on issues that may seem odd, but are actually essential to propping up the developing world.

    Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) selected a reinvention of the toilet that functions as a solar-powered wastewater treatment system. Now, Gates is challenging inventors to use improvements in materials science to develop a condom that feels good.

    As part of the BMGF’s Grand Challenges in Global Health initiatives, the foundation is offering a $100,000 grant to someone who is willing to design a “next generation condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use.”

    The idea is that, as reliable and easy-to-use as condoms are, men supposedly experience more pleasure having bareback sex than they do using a condom. The challenge asks:

    Is it possible to develop a product without this stigma, or better, one that is felt to enhance pleasure? If so, would such a product lead to substantial benefits for global health, both in terms of reducing the incidence of unplanned pregnancies and in prevention of infection with HIV or other STIs?

    The challenge states that condoms have been in use for around 400 years, and have not improved in the past 50 years. However, the scientific advances made in the past 50 years, the initiative reads, have not been applied to this important area:

    Material science and our understanding of neurobiology has undergone revolutionary transformation in the last decade yet that knowledge has not been applied to improve the product attributes of one of the most ubiquitous and potentially underutilized products on earth. New concept designs with new materials can be prototyped and tested quickly. Large-scale human clinical trials are not required. Manufacturing capacity, marketing, and distribution channels are already in place.

    A better feeling condom could go a long way to convincing some men that they might as well roll one on before sex, if only for their own safety. However, the question of how a condom feels during sex isn’t the only factor that has prevented the condom from better curbing STIs and the AIDS epidemic seen in some regions of the world. Religious beliefs in particular continue to hinder the distribution and adoption of condoms in the developing world – and those can’t simply be engineered away.

  • HIV Test For Babies Tested For Developing Nations

    A clinical trial of a new HIV drug test could improve the lives of both mothers and children in developing nations. The test delivers results in under one hour – far faster than conventional tests – and researchers hope it will increase the rate at which HIV positive infants are diagnosed and treated.

    The pending trial was announced this week by Northwestern University, where the research on the test took place. The trial will take place “soon” in Maputo, Mozambique, with nine other countries slated to begin trials after the results of the Mozambique trial are analyzed.

    “Our test provides while-you-wait results, and if a child is infected, he or she will begin treatment immediately, which is critical to survival,” said David Kelso, professor of biomedical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern. “One and a half million infants in Africa and Asia are born to HIV-positive mothers each year, but only a fraction of the HIV-positive infants are identified in time to start treatment. While adults can manage the disease for decades, an infant who isn’t treated likely will die within a year or two.”

    The new test is a miniaturized version of the p24 HIV test. It was specifically designed for use in developing nations, is “easy-to-use,” and has a 95% accuracy rate, according to Northwestern. The test detects low levels of core protein 24, which is made by the virus.

    To perform the test, medical personnel take a drop of an infant’s blood and place it on a blood-separation membrane, which is then inserted into a small processor. Results come in just 30 minutes, with two black lines indicating the presence of HIV. The cost of the test is currently $15, though that price is expected to drop by as much as half as production volume increases.

    The technology behind the test was developed with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is the first product to come out of the Northwestern Global Health Foundation, which Kelso helped found in 2010.

    “The Northwestern Global Health Foundation is a new sort of business: a nonprofit biotech company that helps manufacture and deliver health care products that wouldn’t turn enough profit to be attractive to traditional companies,” Kelso said. “If the foundation works, I think it’s an entirely new way to do business.”

    (Photo courtesy Northwestern University)

  • Gates Foundation Gives $1.1 Million for Mood Bracelets

    When I was in college we were given these scantron sheets to fill out to judge how well a teacher was doing. Imagine if you were in high school again and you had to wear a bracelet that was able to record biometrics to determine how interested you were during a lecture on the theory of relativity? That is exactly what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is trying to do.

    The funds were dispersed in two separate grants to the National Center on Time and Learning and Clemson University totaling over $1.1 million dollars. The grants are trying to find out if “Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers.”

    Thats right, the bracelet is going to determine if the students are engaged in the current discussion. kind of Orwellian don’t you think? Some other people tend to think it is a waste of money saying, “That’s more than $1.1 million that could have been spent on things that schools actually need, such as books, teachers, librarians, etc.” I don’t know if I agree with that but that is her opinion.

    The study of galvanic bracelets is part of the “emerging field of neuromarketing,” which “relies on biometric technologies to determine a participant’s emotional and cognitive response to certain stimuli.”

    photo courtesy of MIT technologyreview.com