Greenland election shows divide over rare-earth metals mine

HELSINKI (AP) — Greenland is holding an early parliamentary election Tuesday focused in part on whether the semi-autonomous Danish territory should allow international companies to mine the sparsely populated Arctic island's substantial deposits of rare-earth metals..

Lawmakers agreed on a snap election after the center-right Democrats pulled out of Greenland's three-party governing coalition in February, leaving the government led by the center-left Forward party with a minority in the national assembly, the 31-seat Inatsisartut.

One of the main reasons the Democrats withdrew was a deep political divide over a proposed mining project involving uranium and rare-earth metals in southern Greenland. Supporters see the in the Kvanefjeld mine project as a potential source of jobs and economic prosperity.

Former Prime Minister Kim Kielsen pushed to give the green light to mine owner Greenland Minerals, an Australia-based company with Chinese ownership, to start operation. Erik Jensen - Kielsen’s recent successor as Forward party leader - is opposed to granting the company a mining license.

Recent election polls showed the left-leaning Community of the People party (Inuit Ataqatigiit), a staunch opponent of the mine project, in position to become the largest party in the Greenlandic Parliament.

The opposition party has stated that a majority of Greenland’s 56,000 inhabitants, most of them indigenous Inuit people, are against the project, largely for environmental reasons.

The mining proposal is relevant beyond Greenland. The largely ice-covered island has the world’s largest undeveloped deposits of rare-earth metals, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Estimates show the Kvanefjeld mine could hold the largest deposit of rare-earth metals outside China, which currently accounts for more than 90% of global production.

Rare-earth metals are used in a wide array of sectors and products, including smartphones, wind turbines, microchips, batteries for electric cars and weapons systems.

Greenland, the world’s largest island that is not a continent, has its own government and Parliament, and relies on Denmark for defense, foreign and monetary policies.

Voting in Tuesday's election is set to end at 2200 GMT. Initial results are expected on Wednesday.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/greenland-election-shows-divide-over-090820120.html

>>13370878

Why was Moderna working on an mRNA "vaccine" in 2017?

Mysterious $5 Billion Biotech Moderna Hit With Legal Setback Related To Key Technology

A British Columbia judge has issued a ruling that puts in doubt whether Moderna Theraputics will be able to commercialize some of its first products in clinical trials using key technology that it doesn’t own.

British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Dev Dley this week granted a request from Arbutus Biopharma for a pre-trial injunction that prevents a tiny company called Acuitas from sublicensing Arbutus’ lipid nanoparticle delivery technology until the end of October. Acuitas has sublicensed the technology four times to Moderna, which appears to be using it in the first two products it has put into clinical trials.

The ruling also makes clear that Judge Dley believes that Acuitas was never authorized to sublicense Arbutus’ delivery system for use in vaccines. The first two products Moderna put in human trials were vaccines and four of the five products Moderna has in the clinic are vaccines.

Moderna is a super hot private biotech company that has raised $1.9 billion. That includes deals it has made with big companies likeMerck, Alexion and AstraZeneca,and investor cash most recently raised at a valuation of $5 billion.Led by Stéphane Bancel, Moderna is developing a new class of mRNA drugsaiming to turn human bodies into drug factories by directing cells to produce therapeutic proteins.

But getting themRNA safely into the body’s cells is tricky. Acuitas, which is based in its CEO’s Vanouver home, sublicensed one delivery system to Moderna that wraps the mRNA in balls of fat.That delivery system belongs to Arbutus and last year it terminated Aquitas’ license to the technology. Acuitas turned around and sued Arbutus in Vancouver to preserve its rights to the techonology. Acuitas originally got the license as a result of a separate legal dispute and richly-funded Moderna tapped Acuitas for the delivery system instead of its actual owner, Arbutus.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/02/09/mysterious-5-billion-biotech-moderna-hit-with-legal-setback-related-to-key-technology/?sh=3af331ee75f7

>>13371064

Moderna and Gates. Hand in hand. mRNA 2017.

Bill and Melinda Gates are placing bets on this biotech in the race to develop a Zika vaccine

Stéphane Bancel’s plans are nothing short of disrupting the entire biomedical industry — and with it the way your body and everyone else’s are protected against a variety of diseases. As CEO of Moderna Therapeutics, Bancel helms a biotech company that claims it can direct cells to develop whatever proteins it chooses, in effect turning a body’s own cells into miniature factories capable of developing the therapeutic proteins necessary to fight infections and heal diseases.

It’s an audacious ambition, and one that has attracted the attention and money of large pharmaceutical companies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the federal government.

“We modeled Moderna to mimic biology by giving your body the instructions for your cells to make the proteins you need to protect you,” said Bancel.

If successful, Moderna’s methods could lead to therapeutic drugs and myriad vaccinations being produced more quickly at a lower cost. It’s a pitch that has made the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna Therapeutics, currently valued at close to $5 billion, the most valuable private biotech company in the United States. Its stockpile of $1.9 billion in cash has been raised from financing and partners that include pharmaceutical giants Merck and AstraZeneca and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“We modeled Moderna to mimic biology by giving your body the instructions for your cells to make the proteins you need to protect you,” said Bancel.

If successful, Moderna’s methods could lead to therapeutic drugs and myriad vaccinations being produced more quickly at a lower cost. It’s a pitch that has made the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna Therapeutics, currently valued at close to $5 billion, the most valuable private biotech company in the United States. Its stockpile of $1.9 billion in cash has been raised from financing and partners that include pharmaceutical giants Merck and AstraZeneca and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/bill-and-melinda-gates-bet-on-this-biotech-to-develop-zika-vaccine.html

AND ANOTHER ONE. 2016

Moderna Wins Initial $20M Grant from Gates Foundation

https://www.genengnews.com/topics/omics/moderna-wins-initial-20m-grant-from-gates-foundation/

>>13371158

Did you miss this?

Scientists Locate Remains of Alien Planet Buried Deep Inside Earth

A Mars-sized planet that struck Earth 4.5 billion years ago and gave birth to the moon may have left two giant pieces of itself deep in Earth’s mantle, a new study suggests.

Scientists have long agreed on the existence of the planet, called Theia, and its role in creating the moon. The theory goes that Theia crashed into Earth early in its life and knocked loose a chunk of rock that would later become the moon. A new study led by Qian Yuan, a geodynamics researcher at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, suggests that the remnants of Theia is still inside Earth, probably located in two continent-size layers of rock beneath West Africa and the Pacific Ocean.

Seismologists have been studying these two rock layers for decades. They have found that seismic waves from earthquakes abruptly slow down when they pass through the layers, which suggests they are denser and chemically different from the surrounding mantle rock. Seismologists call them large low-shear velocity provinces, or LLSVPs. Together, they contain about six times the mass of the moon.

“They are the largest thing in the Earth’s mantle,” Yuan said when presenting his work last week at the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2021.

Based on isotopic evidence and modeling, Yuan believes the LLSVPs are actually remains of Theia itself. “You could say that these are the biggest and largest meteorites if they are mostly Theia’s mantle. It’s very cool,” he told Vice.

more

https://observer.com/2021/03/planet-theia-remnants-in-earth-mantle-science-study/

>>13371238

How convenient that Gates issued the Grant to Moderna 2016-17 for the mRNA, and Moderna was working with Fauci on just that, right before Covid hits?

Lab Rats needed.

In September 2019, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel made his annual visit to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and met with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Moderna had been working with the NIH on a few viruses that were global threats, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)-CoV.

Bancel proposed a test to demonstrate how quickly and efficiently Moderna could develop a vaccine for a virus in the event of a future pandemic. He suggested that the NIH could send Moderna a sequence of an unidentified virus and start the clock. “I told Dr. Fauci that I thought we could develop a vaccine in less than 60 days,” says Bancel. “As of November 2019, it was our plan to move forward with the test in the new year.”

In early January 2020, the plan changed. Bancel read about a new virus emerging in China and quickly emailed the NIH. Within a few days, the genetic sequence of the virus was available online. Instead of running a test, Moderna now faced an urgent real-world challenge to develop a vaccine that might potentially save millions of lives.

As soon as the genetic sequence was posted, the Moderna team went to work. “Using software, our team designed a vaccine in just two days,” says Bancel. “And we never had a physical sample of the virus. We saw the genetic sequence online and designed the vaccine entirely with a computer.”

As the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic, Moderna worked to produce the first doses of the experimental vaccine. Within 42 days, the vaccine was ready, and the company could begin the rigorous clinical trials that all experimental vaccines are required to undergo.

“In the past, it might have taken 20 months to design and produce a vaccine,” says Bancel. “But we went from 20 months to 2 for the first dose because we moved from a hardware world to a software world in biology.”

https://www.vmware.com/content/microsites/possible/stories/moderna.html

==31 JAN 2014

BODY, HEAL THYSELF

Stéphane Bancel has taken Moderna Therapeutics from a one-man shop to a company that's poised to revolutionize the biotech world.==

Throughout 2009 and 2010, Stéphane Bancel (MBA 2000) had received upward of 20 calls from biotech companies asking him to come aboard and lead the company. It made sense. He was a highly recruited CEO successfully running bioMérieux, a diagnostics company with 6,000 employees and sales reaching into the billions. Then one evening he got a call from Noubar Afeyan, managing partner and CEO of Flagship Ventures, a venture capital firm that started Moderna, asking Bancel to swing by the company's Boston office and take a look at the latest data coming in on their patented technology, messenger RNA (mRNA) Therapeutics.

The data that Bancel saw that evening were shocking. The numbers suggested Moderna had found an entirely new way to treat diseases—one that promised to change the medical world, resulting in cures for rare diseases and treatments for cancer. Even better, to a businessman like Bancel, the technology would be inexpensive to produce. Still, Bancel was incredulous. The numbers seemed too good to be true, and he was reluctant to leave a prestigious job to join a company with one employee and one patent. But then Afeyan said, "Stéphane, what if the data are correct?"

Bancel took a few weeks to weigh his options, and in mid-2011 he became president and founding CEO of Moderna. He feels certain that the company is producing something that could turn the biotech world—and the treatment of patients— on its head; and it all hinges on messenger RNA, or mRNA, the molecules responsible for transporting DNA code from a cell's nucleus to the ribosomes that create proteins. mRNA Therapeutics, as the company calls this new drug application, gives patients' cells the code they need to begin creating their own proteins and antibodies to fight disease.

This is how Bancel explains the process to his two young children: Think of your body as needing a recipe book, with each page detailing the directions to produce specific proteins. When a protein goes haywire—as might be the case with diabetes, when insulin needs to be produced to keep blood sugar levels in check—ideally a patient can be injected with Moderna's mRNA, which offers directions, or a specific recipe, to individual cells, which then use it to produce the protein or antibody needed to tackle the problem. In other words, mRNA Therapeutics offers a little help to the body so it can essentially heal itself.

In March of 2013, AstraZeneca offered the company $240 million for the development and exclusive use of the mRNA technology to treat cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic diseases as well as cancer. "It is one of the largest-ever initial payments in a pharmaceutical industry licensing deal that does not involve a drug already being tested in clinical trials," according to the New York Times. Then, in October, the government's=Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded Moderna $25 million= to develop mRNA to combat infectious diseases and biological threats.

Fulll article here

https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages/story-bulletin.aspx?num=3170

>>13371568

Covert ID AI

DARPA Nano tech