Science & Technology News

An emergency research call has been launched to help fight the world’s worst Ebola outbreak in West Africa, with the British government and the Wellcome Trust medical charity pledging a combined 6.5 million pounds ($10.8 million). “The gravity of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa demands an urgent response, and we believe rapid research into humanitarian interventions and therapeutics can have an impact on treatment and containment during the present outbreak,” Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome’s director, said in a statement. There are no proven treatments or vaccines for Ebola but the World Health Organisation has backed the use of untested products and is hoping for improved supplies of experimental drugs by the end of the year.

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) – Up to 30,000 people could have used experimental treatments or vaccines so far in the world’s worst outbreak of Ebola currently plaguing West Africa, British scientists said on Wednesday. The calculation highlights the dilemma facing officials considering how to distribute the tiny quantities of unproven drugs that are likely to be available in the near term to fight the deadly disease. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is hoping for improved supplies of experimental treatments and progress with a vaccine by the end of the year, after last week backing the use of untested drugs and vaccines.

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Maayan Lubell GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli air strikes killed 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including the wife and infant son of Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, in what the group said on Wednesday was an attempt to assassinate him after a ceasefire collapsed. Accusing Israel of opening a “gateway to hell”, Hamas fired rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The attacks caused no casualties but demonstrated the Islamist movement could still bring the Gaza war to Israel’s heartland despite heavy Israeli bombardments in the five-week-old conflict. Israel’s military said it had carried out 60 air strikes on the Gaza Strip since hostilities resumed on Tuesday, and that Palestinians launched more than 80 rocket salvoes, some intercepted by the Israeli anti-missile Iron Dome system.

By Sarah McBride SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – When she started her child-support tracking business SupportPay, Sheri Atwood expected all kinds of suggestions – but not the tip she got from a female investor who suggested she dye her blonde hair darker to be taken more seriously by venture capitalists. To Atwood, who eventually won her funding from other backers, the recommendation underscored an attitude in Silicon Valley that women make second-class entrepreneurs. If more women held the purse strings at venture capital firms, the attitude would change, she said. Despite the lip service Silicon Valley has given over the past couple of years to the need to recruit more women venture capitalists, at senior levels the industry’s gender balance hasn’t budged, even as other industries with poor gender diversity show improvements.

By Yara Bayoumy DUBAI (Reuters) – The Mosul Dam was always meant to be a symbol of Iraq’s grandiose ambition to escape poverty and underdevelopment. Despite its structural faults, the country’s biggest dam at 3.6 km long, built by a German-Italian consortium in the 1980s, is a vital water and power source for Mosul, Iraq’s largest northern city of 1.7 million residents. With that in mind, Islamic State insurgents who captured swathes of Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate, wrested control of the dam from Kurdish forces in recent weeks.

By Jon Herskovitz AUSTIN Texas (Reuters) – Texas Governor Rick Perry, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2016, said on Saturday an indictment against him for abuse of power was a political move that he intends to fight. Perry was indicted on Friday by a grand jury in Travis County, a Democratic stronghold in the heavily Republican state, on two counts of abuse of power and coercion over a funding veto he made last year that was seen as being intended to force a local prosecutor to resign. “This indictment amounts to nothing more than an abuse of power and I cannot and I will not allow that to happen,” Perry told reporters in Austin, Texas.

Pope Francis has called on world football superstars to play in a Match for Peace to help resolve the Gaza situation peacefully

By Fredrik Dahl VIENNA (Reuters) – U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Yukiya Amano will visit Iran on Sunday in an apparent attempt to push for progress in a long-running investigation into suspected atomic bomb research by Tehran. Amano’s trip comes ahead of an Aug. 25 deadline for Iran to provide some information relevant to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inquiry into what it calls the possible military dimensions of the country’s disputed nuclear programme. Iran dismisses Western accusations that it has been working to develop a capability to assemble atomic weapons. The visit – announced by the IAEA on Friday – will be Amano’s first to Iran this year and the third since 2012.

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Maayan Lubell GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli assassination attempts may have left him badly hurt and driven him deep underground, but Mohammed Deif, the shadowy leader of Hamas’ armed wing in the Gaza Strip, has emerged as a mastermind of the war with Israel. As chief strategist behind a network of tunnels under Israel’s border, Deif caught his powerful enemy off guard with surprise attacks that caused heavy casualties. Despite punishing Israeli strikes in the month-old conflict, Hamas kept up its rocket fire, even against business capital Tel Aviv. Deif’s command position also gives him a voice among the Islamist movement’s leaders in steering it toward war or truce – a five-day ceasefire went into effect on Thursday.

By Minami Funakoshi TOKYO (Reuters) – Hello Kitty, Japan’s ambassador of cute, is on a government-funded mission to space. The project to launch Sanrio Co Ltd’s white cat with a pink bow into orbit is part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push to promote Japan’s high-tech industry and engineer economic growth. A 4-cm (1.6-inch) tall Hello Kitty figure is aboard the Hodoyoshi-3 satellite, looking through a window at Earth, Sanrio announced this week. The goal of the project is to get more private companies interested in working with satellites, said Toshiki Tanaka, researcher in charge of the project at the University of Tokyo’s Nano-Satellite Center.