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Just need to be patient. We will get news ... eventually.
Thank you George.
Yes, I'm glad there is some progress being made for the bees. I wish we had experienced that here with our stock, but that is a risk with social investing.
Mille Grazie. I think Smith's estimates from a year ago were higher and don't we get compensated based on 2016?. I posted those below. We shall see.
NR, Have you heard anything regarding the sales of Tedizolid, which of course determines the value of our CVRs here. TIA, Steve
Guti, Thanks for your whole series of intelligent and informative posts.
o2, You're welcome. Can't PM.
Interesting article about a traffic control system for drones.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/an-air-traffic-control-system-for-drones/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61
An air traffic control system for drones?
NASA is developing a system to control drone traffic in our national airspace, and one company thinks it has the missing ingredient
Greg Nichols
By Greg Nichols for Robotics | October 10, 2015 -- 11:49 GMT (04:49 PDT) | Topic: Innovation
When you fly on a commercial airplane, you can recline into your neighbor's knees secure in the knowledge that somewhere someone is watching a screen on which you and your airship are a little dot. That person's job is to keep your dot away from all the other dots, and so far the system has worked miraculously well. Commercial airplane crashes are so rare these days that when they do happen they make international news.
The current air traffic control system handles about 5000 planes per hour during peak travel times. That's a lot of dots, but it's nothing compared to the pixelated traffic jam we're about to face. Consider that consumer drone manufacturer DJI sells about 30,000 drones per month. With drones for delivery, emergency response, pipeline and rail inspection, and agricultural monitoring taking flight in the years ahead, there is an urgent need for another kind of air traffic control system.
"The FAA is under a lot of pressure to solve these problems and get ahead of the curve with drones," says Tyler Collins, director of business development for PrecisionHawk Unmanned Systems Innovation, a commercial UAV company. "There's a need to expand the current regulatory environment of what's allowed with UAVs, and the question the FAA is working to answer now is how we ensure that we're going to do that safely as hundreds of thousands of these things start to take flight."
In May of this year the FAA announced the UAS Focus Area Pathfinders initiative, a partnership with industry to explore the next steps in unmanned aircraft operations. In parallel to the Pathfinders project, NASA is working to develop a viable solution to Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management (UTM), which it hopes to complete by 2019 and which will ultimately be transferred to the FAA for operational management. PrecisionHawk has partnered with both agencies to become a developer of technology that it hopes will make its way into the nation's first UTM system.
"We've done demonstrations for NASA out in California," says Collins. "The question we're trying to answer is how we can help integrate UAS [unmanned aerial systems] into the national airspace system safely and in a smart way."
In January, PrecisionHawk launched an early version of its Low Altitude Tracking and Avoidance System (LATAS). LATAS is a small box about three inches across. It weighs roughly 100 grams and is operational on network speeds as low as 2G. The device provides flight planning, tracking, and sense and avoidance to each drone that flies within the national airspace system, which means it has potential to serve as the foundation for a national UTM. It is capable of working on any UAV platform, from large military aircraft to small hobbyist quad-copters, regardless of make and model.
The company's ultimate goal is to outfit every UAV platform, commercial or hobbyist, with the technology to send real time flight data transmission based on world-wide cellular networks and satellite communications.
"To provide a scalable means for drones to be integrated into an overall UTM system, you need a hardware solution that will work on a platform regardless of size or weight," says Collins. "Currently, manufacturers that are working to integrate their specific systems in a UTM are leaving out a huge network of drone users, including the hobbyist unmanned vehicles, which comprise the majority of the space."
The men and women in the tower at your local airport can track about ten manned aircraft at a given time, a relatively small number. A drone air traffic control architecture will have to handle much greater bandwidth, so must function automatically. The cornerstone of such a system will be a platform agnostic device capable of capturing and transmitting basic flight data in a reliable way. Collins says that's exactly what LATAS will do.
According to its website, NASA's near-term goal for a drone air traffic control system is "the development and demonstration of the UTM to safely enable low-altitude airspace and UAS operations within five years." PrecisionHawk is a company to watch as NASA weighs whether LATAS or its underlying technology will be part of its UTM solution.
What might also bee of interest is the following:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/09/446928755/could-a-mushroom-save-the-honeybee?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app
Could A Mushroom Save The Honeybee?
October 09, 201510:46 AM ET
from
ERTHFX
Ken Christensen
A honeybee is seen on the countertop of entomologist Steve Sheppard's lab at Washington State University. Sheppard is studying whether he can boost honeybees' immunity using liquid extracted from wood-rotting mushrooms.
A honeybee is seen on the countertop of entomologist Steve Sheppard's lab at Washington State University. Sheppard is studying whether he can boost honeybees' immunity using liquid extracted from wood-rotting mushrooms.
Ken Christensen/Courtesy of EarthFix/KCTS 9
Honeybees need a healthy diet of pollen, nectar and water. But at a bee laboratory in eastern Washington state, Steve Sheppard fills their feeding tubes with murky brown liquid from the forest.
His bees are getting a healthy dose of mushroom juice.
"If this does what we hope, it will be truly revolutionary," says Sheppard, who heads the Department of Entomology at Washington State University. "Beekeepers are running out of options."
Commercial honeybees, which pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the United States annually, have teetered on the brink of collapse for nearly a decade. A third of all bee colonies have died each year since 2006, on average, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Scientists say the mysterious phenomenon, known as colony collapse disorder, may be the result of at least 60 environmental factors that combine to cripple honeybees — including pesticides, disease, malnutrition, loss of habitat and climate change.
Beekeepers, however, say the honeybee's single greatest threat is a virus-carrying parasite called the varroa mite.
Sheppard has spent decades breeding western honeybees to better tolerate the mite and its viruses. But he hasn't had much success, he says.
Varroa mites have devastated U.S. beehives since the late 1980s, when they arrived here from Asia. In 1996, half of the colonies east of the Mississippi River died due to mite infestations.
YouTube
The reddish-brown pests, which are no bigger than the head of a pin, invade colonies and multiply rapidly. They hide among bee larvae developing in the honeycomb, feed on infant bee blood and lay several eggs each.
"It would be like having something the size of a pancake feeding on you," Sheppard says.
Honeybees that emerge from the infected hives typically carry illnesses, like a virus that results in deformed wings that prevent bees from flying.
If beekeepers don't intervene, the varroa mite can destroy a colony in less than two years. Meanwhile, the pest reproduces so rapidly, it builds resistance to chemical pesticides more quickly than solutions can be invented, Sheppard says.
That's why he decided to try an unconventional approach last year, after local mushroom expert Paul Stamets called him with an idea to help arm the honeybee in its fight against the mite.
"We've gone to the moon, we've gone to Mars, but we don't know the way of the bee?" says Stamets, who owns the medicinal mushroom company Fungi Perfecti near Olympia, Wash.
The self-taught mycologist says he noticed a relationship between honeybees and mushrooms when he observed bees sipping on sugar-rich fungal roots growing in his backyard.
"I looked down, and they were sucking on my mycelium," he says.
Now he thinks he knows why.
In recent years, his research has shown that rare fungi found in the old-growth forests of western Washington can help fight other viruses and diseases, including tuberculosis, smallpox and bird flu. He wondered if the honeybee would see similar health benefits from wood-rotting mushrooms.
"Bees have immune systems, just like we do," he says. "These mushrooms are like miniature pharmaceutical factories."
Stamets and Sheppard are feeding liquid extracts of those forest mushrooms to mite-infected honeybees. Initial findings suggest that five species of the wood-rotting fungi can reduce the honeybees' viruses and increase their lifespans.
In addition, the scientists are trying to fight honeybee viruses by taking aim at the varroa mite itself. Insect-killing fungi have been used as an alternative to synthetic chemical pesticides for years, and previous studies show that one type of entomopathogenic fungus can weaken varroa mites in beehives.
Paul Stamets cultures mycelium at his laboratory near Olympia, Wash.
Paul Stamets cultures mycelium at his laboratory near Olympia, Wash.
Ken Christensen/Courtesy of EarthFix/KCTS 9
Paul Stamets thinks his version of the fungus will be more effective. So far, the results of the experiments in Sheppard's lab look promising.
"The product seems to be killing mites without harming bees," Sheppard says.
This fall, the scientists plan to expand both experiments by partnering with commercial beekeepers like Eric Olson, who runs the largest commercial beekeeping operation in Washington.
Olson says two-thirds of his beehives died five years ago because of a varroa mite infestation. After several years successfully controlling the pest, he arrived this year in California for almond pollination season and nearly half of his bees had died during the winter.
He spent $770,000 to buy replacement hives, he says.
"I was lucky that I had the cash and the connections to recover from that," he says.
Olson recently donated about $50,000 to Sheppard's department to help find a solution to the mite. Looking at the bees in one of his hives, he says, "I'm really concerned about whether these little girls will survive."
Ken Christensen is an associate video producer at KCTS9 in Seattle, Wash., as part of EarthFix, a public media collaboration reporting on the environment. This story first appeared on the EarthFix site.
Meister, It's always a pleasure reading what you have to say.
Okaly, Meister does make music. I just need the whole symphony broken into several movements.
Meister, I like to read all comments, even if I'm not good about posting. You often offer some trenchant observations, so I try to read yours in detail, as you drop little gems here and there.
Perhaps it's just these old eyes, but I have trouble reading your very long paragraphs. Would you mind using a few more carriage returns (telling my age there) and breaking your comments into shorter paragraphs? Pretty please? TIA
Steve
Cit, That's quite the bedtime tale.
Kelt, Amen.
LR, Great dissection of a totally specious argument.
Mille Grazie!
C'mon Seel, you have NO wrinkles. I sure do though, with all my bio stocks.
It's as if someone has some inside info and is scaling in with comparatively few shares available. Not that the price is all that high or that we are at the price level we were at....
SEEL, Do you have a rational explanation for the 47 percent SP increase (as of now)? Steve
Kelt, Excellent point.
Cit, It's not clutter. I appreciate the commentary.
SLC, Take them to the gallows.
That was so noble of you! We'll come visit you at the "home."
Porscha, Thank you. It's a good buy for someone with the spare cash. I'm holding but have just about exhausted my cash on the "bargains."
Why the big drop this morning? Delayed reaction from Monday?
Not entirely. Just snoozing, waiting for something to happen.
And I bet it won't be the last time you ever quote a pope either.
LR, By "how the story ends," I mean the fairytale ending of the CTIX story. Like Cinderella marrying prince charming. Not like 20 years later when Cinderella is fat and has 6 kids running around making a mess and Prince Charming has a big beer belly and is watching yet another game on TV.
LR, You could write a mystery novel about CTIX. I'm wondering how the story ends....
Added more today.
Reply to the likes of a common shareholder? Bah.
WE do not exist in management's mind.
Stark, Management pays itself very well and may have grand plans for all these different fields where it can create entirely new markets or capture significant market share, like 3D/4D. However, as a shareholder I would like to see them make great inroads into the photonics business itself. Let the company make good money which can be passed along to shareholders --- for once.
I have the same question.
Seel, That's a good rational explanation for irrational/impatient behavior. It's an illustration of why people without patience should not be investing in early-stage biotech. Thank you.
Hi Seel,
Thank you and I did see this on my news feed. Please tell me why, when one of my stocks issues great news like this, the price goes down? Hopefully we at least test this soon in people and the Phase I results for safety also show terrific efficacy!
Let's see if CYNA can keep this sp increase up.
Acumen, Have you actually spoken with the two drone companies yet? What did they specifically say?
Good, I'm glad you have enough patience for the MNOV volcano to build up steam. It will blow when it's ready.
This is true - that it has not yet added to SP - but I believe the value has increased incrementally. Study by study, funding by funding. We have a volcano building here.
And there was another of those interesting surges in price following the news release by MNOV this morning ... followed by a drop back to nearly it's earlier level.