The Ebola Outbreak of 2014-2015: From Coordinated Multilateral Action to Effective Disease Containment, Vaccine Development, and Beyond.

The Ebola outbreak of 2014-2015 exacted a terrible toll on major countries of West Africa. Latest estimates from the World Health Organization indicate that over 11,000 lives were lost to the deadly virus since the first documented case was officially recorded. However, significant progress in the fight against Ebola was made thanks to a combination of globally-supported containment efforts, dissemination of key information to the public, the use of modern information technology resources to better track the spread of the outbreak, as well as more effective use of active surveillance, targeted travel restrictions, and quarantine procedures.

Experimental insight into the radiation resistance of zirconia-based americium ceramics.

Our works shows that the americium pyrochlore (241)Am(2)Zr(2)O(7) undergoes a phase transition to a defect-fluorite structure along with an unusual volume contraction when subjected to internal radiation from alpha-emitting actinides. Disorder relaxation proceeds through the simultaneous formation of cation antisites and oxygen Frenkel pairs. X-ray absorption spectroscopy at the Am-L(II) and the Zr-K edges reveals that Am-O polyhedra show an increasing disorder with increasing exposure.

An inventory of computer resources for the medical application of virtual reality.

Within the framework of the scientific community, we could define virtual reality (VR) as an effective simulation of complex environmental aspects related to both interaction-dependent and high-risk operations, where mistakes will lead to unacceptable consequences. Surgeons performing open surgery, endoscopists working on the intestine or neurologists working on the brain-all are impressive examples where the VR approach looks potentially quite interesting. In fact the risk of unsatisfactory implementations, too poor with respect to the complexity of the real world, coming from the unsatisfactory performance of the present-day technology, is quite high.