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(credit: CDC/ James Gathany)

The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first human trial of an experimental Zika vaccine, according to a joint announcement by the two companies behind the new therapy.

The companies, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc., based in Pennsylvania, and GeneOne Life Science, Inc., based in South Korea, said that their DNA-based vaccine candidate, dubbed GLS-5700, will be given to 40 people in a phase I trail. The trial will start “in the next weeks,” the companies said, and could yield results later this year.

Inovio and GeneOne noted in their announcement that pre-clinical data from animal studies suggested that the vaccine could induce a strong immune response that might protect against mosquito-transmitted Zika. But, like all phase I trials, their upcoming human study will not test how effective the vaccine is at fighting off Zika virus, but rather its safety and appropriate dosage levels. If the DNA-based vaccine is found to be safe, it will then move on to larger trials on efficacy that will take years to complete.

(credit: Internet Archive)

An angry group of former customers has sued a collapsed Bitcoin mining company, GAW Miners, in a proposed class-action lawsuit. The group alleges that it was duped by the company and its founders.

This is the second civil suit filed against the company within the last six months—it was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2015 over similar accusations of fraud. The SEC alleged $19 million worth of fraudulent deals. (That SEC case was put on hold for six months, starting in April 2016, according to court records.)

In early 2014, GAW Miners was first introduced to the Bitcoin public by re-selling mining rigs. Later, the company shifted to cloud-based mining (Hashlets), and in early 2015, it introduced its own altcoin, dubbed "Paycoin." GAW also tried its hand at its own cloud-based wallet service (Paybase) and its own online discussion board (HashTalk).

It's no big secret that Google's Chrome browser is a bit of a battery hog. The native browsers on both Windows and macOS (Edge and Safari) are widely reported to outlast Google's offering. In its latest campaign, Microsoft is quantifying this difference: in a test that cycles through some common sites including Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Amazon, Microsoft's latest browser lasted 7 hours and 22 minutes on a Surface Book system. Chrome lasted just 4 hours and 19 minutes.

Between these extremes were Firefox, at 5 hours and 9 minutes, and Opera in battery-saving mode, at 6 hours and 18 minutes.

Microsoft has gone a step beyond just measuring how long each system runs by measuring the power draw of the Wi-Fi, CPU, and GPU during its test workload. A task that drew 2.1W in Edge pulled 2.8W in Chrome, 3.1W in Opera, and 3.2W in Firefox. This lower draw translates to the longer battery life.