HN user

matznerd

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I am a futurist & biohacker, but since 2019 have been working to help counteract climate change by developing large-scale carbon removal projects and companies.

I currently run Metalplant, where we use hyperaccumulator plants to mine soil for nickel, while removing carbon dioxide through enhanced rock weathering.

Enhanced weathering works by crushing magnesium-silicate minerals and spreading them into fields to generate alkalinity that forces CO2 to become stored as bicarbonate for 10,000+ years. Olivine is one of the most efficient minerals at this process, but contains trace nickel ~0.3%.

Nickel hyperaccumulator plants grow natively in nickel-bearing soils and draw nickel up from the soil and store it in their biomass as a natural defense against predators. The plants are harvested and processed to pure nickel products. With optimized plants, hundreds of kilograms of nickel can be recovered per hectare per year.

Normally phytomining is as phytoremediation and the soil nickel level depletes, but by utilizing olivine weathering on these soils already containing nickel, we can resupply the nickel as the olivine weathers, stoichemetrically removing gross 300 tonnes of carbon for every tonne of nickel we replenish into the field.

The company was originally developed as a way to demonstrate how to create an economically viable carbon removal technology that creates valuable and important co-products that can drive the upscaling of the process.

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In 2017, I started Climigitation a non-profit think tank dedicated to promoting technologies and techniques to mitigate climate change and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. Started as a non-profit, it was known as Project Vesta and the idea was to use tropical beaches to speed up Earth's natural long-term carbon-silicate cycle. In early 2021, I left Project Vesta after that, it was split into a non-profit and a for-profit PBC. Vesta has successfully deployed olivine onto beaches in Southhampton New York, and Duck, North Carolina and now focuses on beach nourishment.

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In the biohacking space, I was a "nootropics historian" and started and ran the nootropics company, Nootroo. I helped drive the adoption and acceptance of nootropics and in some ways biohacking in general. You can read a profile of me that is a snapshot from that time of my life in The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/the-brain-bro/497546/ And this is one of the last interviews I did on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwYfsknlWHI You can also find interviews from that time in GQ, Men's Health, ABC Nightline News, NPR, The Guardian, among others. You can see the most accurate definition of nootropics at https://Nootroo.com

MeditationBattleLeague.com - "head-to-head" competitive meditation with EEG headsets.

*This is a personal account and posts here are opinions and do not represent the views of my company/orgs unless otherwise stated.*

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huggingface.co 11mo ago

Version of OpenAIs's new open source 20B model, optimized to run on Mac (MLX)

matznerd
1pts1
www.vasulka.org 1y ago

Plan, Plant, Planet (1989) [pdf]

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3pts1
futuri.st 5y ago

Notes from Elon Musk and Diamandis Carbon Removal xPrize Launch Interview

matznerd
1pts2
www.nytimes.com 5y ago

Businesses Aim to Pull Greenhouse Gases from the Air. It’s a Gamble

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1pts0
www.fastcompany.com 6y ago

Ever been to a green sand beach? The newest geohack to fight climate change

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1pts1
reuters.com 6y ago

Stripe picks $1M in carbon-removal projects to spur industry

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medium.com 6y ago

The Future Is Grim

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www.upi.com 6y ago

Amyloid plaques may not cause Alzheimer's disease, study says

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www.latimes.com 8y ago

The goal was espionage. The tactics were social media 101

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medium.com 10y ago

X Without Y

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futuri.st 10y ago

How Life Extension Can Save the World

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www.sciencedaily.com 11y ago

Eating green leafy vegetables keeps mental abilities sharp (Vitamin K)

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1pts0
futuri.st 11y ago

Is It Time to Get Rid of Human Pilots?

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gizmodo.com 11y ago

Nootropics and the Human Lab Rats of Reddit

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17pts0
money.cnn.com 11y ago

Are smart drugs driving Silicon Valley?

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news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: What is the highest number of browser tabs you have ever had open?

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1pts4
matznerd.com 13y ago

Hiding In Plain Sight

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matznerd.com 13y ago

How To Sell Umbrellas On Twitter

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venturebeat.com 14y ago

Kayak IPO Soars

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2pts0
matznerd.com 14y ago

Outsourcing Birthdays and Flirting

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31pts27

Is there any way to make it so that when you plug new things in, the power doesn't renegotiate causing other things plugged in to reconnect/flicker/interrupt.

Looking for high power USB C hubs that don't do that, but seems most do as part of PD and need isolated slots that don't draw from shared potential... programmatically locking specific power to laptop hub, while others negotiate would be ideal...

Great that it was available, but compared to Peter's version this one is inferior. It didn't have draft email as a default and asking it to write a draft would just send the email, oops lol. And doesn't have mutli-account support or a number of other features. I think one thing it could do better was inline commenting (maybe), but neither CLI can initiate their own comments...

Gog cli - https://github.com/openclaw/gogcli

have enough sessions going that you just cycled through them and by the time you get back that chat is ready to go again. Easier sometimes staying in same project, sometimes easier if you don't use worktrees to work on different projects.

I thought this post was going to be a metaphor about how most people can barely handle 1 project, while some people need to multiple projects for it to feel natural...

Notion 3.0 10 months ago

I do writing with RAG and it can be implemented to suprisingly good if you already have your own writing that the text is being generated from. FAQs etc can be pretty easy when your content is context for the AI.

After a few rounds of AI generating AI content from AI content, I'm sure it could eventually become slop...like the model collapse lol idk.

"AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y

Notion 3.0 10 months ago

Dear Notion employees, please, if you're advertise mail and calendar as features, add them into your app and do not make them open in new tabs. I want an all in one thing, why is that so hard, you already have tabs built in? Thanks!

okay but what about "c" being nearly the same as "z", neither of which look like the character and are nearly(?) identical. Is our brain supposed to just be able to figure it out?

"A large new study published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health provides evidence that exposure to certain workplace chemicals among parents may influence the severity of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptoms and contribute to behavioral, cognitive, and adaptive challenges in their children. The findings suggest that occupational exposures—especially to plastics, ethylene oxide, phenols, and pharmaceutical agents—may have broader developmental effects beyond autism diagnosis alone."

"The effects of parental occupational exposures on autism spectrum disorder severity and skills in cognitive and adaptive domains in children with autism spectrum disorder" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143846392...

The person leading this study, Erin C. McCanlies, was forced out of the CDC, her division eliminated and she went into early retirement from the CDC. https://www.psypost.org/scientist-who-linked-autism-to-chemi...

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"The findings suggest that workplace exposures to several specific chemical classes were associated with worse outcomes in children with ASD. One of the strongest and most consistent patterns involved plastics and polymer chemicals. Fathers’ exposure to plastics was associated with lower scores across all cognitive and adaptive skill domains, including language, motor coordination, daily living skills, and overall functioning. When both parents were exposed, the deficits appeared to compound.

“I was surprised how strongly and consistently plastics and polymers stood out as being linked with multiple developmental and behavioral outcomes including irritability, hyperactivity, and daily living,” McCanlies told PsyPost.

Exposure to ethylene oxide—commonly used in hospital sterilization—was also linked to more severe autism symptoms, lower expressive language abilities, and poorer adaptive functioning. Similarly, parental exposure to phenol (used in construction, automotive, and some consumer products) and pharmaceuticals was associated with increased ASD severity and more pronounced behavioral challenges, especially hyperactivity and stereotyped behavior.

While the results do not imply that all children exposed to these chemicals will develop more severe symptoms, the patterns suggest that early life exposure to workplace toxicants may amplify certain developmental difficulties in children who already meet criteria for ASD. The study provides one of the most detailed looks to date at how parental occupation may relate not just to diagnosis, but to variation in how autism is expressed.

“Our findings suggest that certain parental workplace exposures may be related not just to autism, but to worse symptoms and autism behaviors,” McCanlies explained."

These are 8bit versions On mac, use LM Studio to download it, just search "oss mlx", and note there is an mlx toggle box on search.

Link for the 120B version: https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gpt-oss-120b-MLX-8...

Its taking 21 gb of memory on my 64 gb mbp, still tuning it and settling on context size, temp, and other settings.

My comment from yesterday:

"thanks openai for being open ;) Surprised there are no official MLX versions and only one mention of MLX in this thread. MLX basically converst the models to take advntage of mac unified memory for 2-5x increase in power, enabling macs to run what would otherwise take expensive gpus (within limits). So FYI to any one on mac, the easiest way to run these models right now is using LM Studio (https://lmstudio.ai/), its free. You just search for the model, usually 3rd party groups mlx-community or lmstudio-community have mlx versions within a day or 2 of releases. I go for the 8-bit quantizations (4-bit faster, but quality drops). You can also convert to mlx yourself...

Once you have it running on LM studio, you can chat there in their chat interface, or you can run it through api that defaults to http://127.0.0.1:1234

You can run multiple models that hot swap and load instantly and switch between them etc.

Its surpassingly easy, and fun.There are actually a lot of cool niche models comings out, like this tiny high-quality search model released today as well (and who released official mlx version) https://huggingface.co/Intelligent-Internet/II-Search-4B

Other fun ones are gemma 3n which is model multi-modal, larger one that is actually solid model but takes more memory is the new Qwen3 30b A3B (coder and instruct), Pixtral (mixtral vision with full resolution images), etc. Look forward to playing with this model and see how it compares."

Open models by OpenAI 12 months ago

thanks openai for being open ;) Surprised there are no official MLX versions and only one mention of MLX in this thread. MLX basically converst the models to take advntage of mac unified memory for 2-5x increase in power, enabling macs to run what would otherwise take expensive gpus (within limits).

So FYI to any one on mac, the easiest way to run these models right now is using LM Studio (https://lmstudio.ai/), its free. You just search for the model, usually 3rd party groups mlx-community or lmstudio-community have mlx versions within a day or 2 of releases. I go for the 8-bit quantizations (4-bit faster, but quality drops). You can also convert to mlx yourself...

Once you have it running on LM studio, you can chat there in their chat interface, or you can run it through api that defaults to http://127.0.0.1:1234

You can run multiple models that hot swap and load instantly and switch between them etc.

Its surpassingly easy, and fun.There are actually a lot of cool niche models comings out, like this tiny high-quality search model released today as well (and who released official mlx version) https://huggingface.co/Intelligent-Internet/II-Search-4B

Other fun ones are gemma 3n which is model multi-modal, larger one that is actually solid model but takes more memory is the new Qwen3 30b A3B (coder and instruct), Pixtral (mixtral vision with full resolution images), etc. Look forward to playing with this model and see how it compares.

If you're on Mac you can download LM Studio and get the MLX version (edit - links below). I am running it on 64 gb M1 and it takes about ~30 gb ram. I've been on the hunt for a local orchestrator model that interprets input with speech to text (STT) from WhisperX, then can decide what to do. I have only been running it for a day, but it may be overkill for my setup.

For simple tasks it can quickly respond and then understand to use MCP servers for tasks and other things, but offloading all the heavy lifting to claude code via sdk and cli, then bringing the results back in a summary or with clarifying questions as text to speech (TTS). I'm playing with Kyutai TTs b/c have great models that sound real and can do conversational streaming with VAD (though my mbp is too slow with it for now but see https://unmute.sh/ for demo).

I am looking for an orchestrator model that runs on 10-15 gb of ram and can do really good tool calling and model routing. I'm will likely move to something even smaller designed specifically for this, like Jan Nano and then spin up an intermediate model like Qwen if needed, or try a smaller Qwen. https://github.com/menloresearch/jan?tab=readme-ov-file

Ultimately, I want something that can see my screen and know what is going on and have full context and be live, so I was excited about Gemma 3N multi-modal, but its not really available yet fully with vision at least for MLX. https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-3n/

Next 6 months in this area is going to be pretty wild though.

edit: Fixed links below, thanks

https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3... https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Ins...

I think what you're missing is that this is likely in preparation for some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world etc...

There is a reason that longevists, longevity researchers, and biohackers focus on mitochondrial enhancement through various means, supplementing NAD/NR, Ubiquinol, PQQ, ALCAR, photobiomodulation, etc

"Your eyes transform light into electrical impulses that coalesce into an image in your visual field, and your ears transform air-pressure waves into electrical pulses that you eventually perceive as sounds. Likewise, mitochondria transform dozens of hormonal, metabolic, chemical, and other information streams into their electrical membrane potential. This “bioenergetic” state then leads to the production of secondary messenger molecules that are intelligible to the nucleus. So in the same way you read messages on your phone, which receives signals, transforms them and projects decipherable information onto its screen, the nucleus of your cells can “read” the environment through the MIPS that surrounds it. Rather than having supplementary roles like those of battery chargers, mitochondria are more like the motherboard of the cell. Genes sit inert in the nucleus until energy and the right message come along to turn some of them on and some others off. Mitochondria provide these messages, speaking the language of the epigenome—the malleable layer of regulation that sits on top of the genome to regulate its expression.

My colleague Timothy Shutt of the University of Calgary likes to call mitochondria the “CEO of the cell”: the chief executive organelle. This metaphor captures how mitochondria not only are involved in integrating information but also give orders. They dictate whether the cell divides, differentiates or dies. Indeed, mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death. If the MIPS deems it necessary, it triggers programmed cell death, or apoptosis—a form of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the organism.

So vital are mitochondria that in difficult times cells may donate entire mitochondria to other cells. “In cellular emergencies, newly arrived mitochondria might kick-start tissue repair, fire up the immune system or rescue distressed cells from death,” journalist Gemma Conroy noted in a Nature news story last April. Inside tumors, cancer cells and immune cells appear to compete for mitochondria, using them as a kind of bioweapon. An international effort I participated in, led by Jonathan R. Brestoff of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently created an entirely new lexicon to guide the emerging field of mitochondria transfer and transplantation. All well and good, you may think. What does all this mean for my health or how long I’m going to live?

The short answer is that it may have everything to do with human health. Diabetes, neurodegenerative conditions, cancer and even mental health illnesses are all emerging as metabolic disorders involving malfunctioning mitochondria. And these findings are indicating new routes for intervention.

Mitochondria drive health—or disease—in several ways. One route derives from their role as energy processors. In an electrical circuit, if we crank up the input voltage too much, we can blow it out. Similarly, if our cells are exposed to too much glucose or fat—or, worse, both together, causing what doctors refer to as glucolipotoxicity—the mitochondria undergo fission and fragment into little bits, accumulate mtDNA defects, and produce signals that end up prematurely aging or killing the cell. Experiments in cells and in mice have shown that pharmacologically or genetically preventing mitochondrial fission induced by excessive glucose and fats may protect against insulin resistance. Cancer, too, may be a disorder of cellular metabolism. Cancer cells can burn glucose without oxygen, which suggests either that something is wrong with their mitochondria or that they prefer to reserve mitochondria for use in cell division—and proliferation.

A second pathway is through mitochondria’s influence on gene expression. Mitochondrial signals alter the expression of more than 66 percent of genes in the nuclear chromosomes. By changing which genes are expressed and to what extent, mutations in mtDNA may completely alter the nature, behavior and stress resilience of cells and ultimately of the whole organism."

You're missing that Claude desktop has MCP servers, which can extend it to do a lot more, including much better real life "out of the box" uses. You can do things like use Obsidian as a filesystem or connect to local databases to really extend the abilities. You can also read and write to github directly and bring in all sorts of other tools.

This is one of the ways we get all of the secondary metabolites from plants, most of the compounds in supplements and drugs that are active in humans. They come from mutations of the existing DNA, then are able to change from there without impacting the plant's core functions due to being duplicates:

"Gene duplications drive the recruitment of genes for secondary metabolism. Gene copies are gradually modified to create genes with specificities and expression patterns adapted to the needs of the new pathway in which they are involved. Duplicated genes are often in tandem repeats, forming clusters within the plant genome. However, in some cases, clusters of nonhomologous genes have also been identified as forming a functional unit. The selective forces that have caused the establishment of new pathways are far from understood and might have changed repeatedly during evolution owing to the continuously changing environment. Recent data show that the way several classes of secondary compounds are scattered among species is attributable to independent recruitment and the inactivation of biosynthetic enzymes."

https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/abstract/S1360-138...

If you want to understand secondary metabolites, which is not the "how" do they work part of plant-derived molecules, but the "why" do they work?

You can follow this line of research:

"Over recent years, the consensus as to the mechanisms responsible for these effects in humans has shifted away from polyphenols having direct antioxidant effects and toward their modulation of cellular signal transduction pathways. To date, little consideration has been given to the question of why, rather than how, these plant-derived chemicals might exert these effects. Therefore, this review summarizes the evidence suggesting that polyphenols beneficially affect human brain function and describes the current mechanistic hypotheses explaining these effects. It then goes on to describe the ecologic roles and potential endogenous signaling functions that these ubiquitous phytochemicals play within their home plant and discusses whether these functions drive their beneficial effects in humans via a process of “cross-kingdom” signaling predicated on the many conserved similarities in plant, microbial, and human cellular signal transduction pathways."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S216183132...

The functional aspect of the duplicated DNA goes back to the point that humans, insects, and plants are all eukaryotes...

Hi Boris et al, can you comment on increased conversation lengths or limits through the UI? I didn't see that mentioned in the blog post, but it is a continued major concern of $20/month Claude.ai users. Is this an issue that should be fixed now or still waiting on a larger deployment via Amazon or something? If not now, when can users expect the conversation length limitations will be increased?

Bunkers in Albania 2 years ago

Lol I don't think there are that many, which area? But gas stations can be like normal businesses there and often have restaurants and sometimes even hotels. I accidentally stayed at a gas station hotel once by the airport, when my go to hotel was full and I didn't know and booked online, and only when I arrived did I realize it was a gas station.

Bunkers in Albania 2 years ago

Not sure why Albanian bunkers are on the front of HN, but I've been living in Albania/Kosovo for the last couple of years working to use nickel hyperaccumulator plants to mine nickel (phytomining), while removing carbon with olivine minerals (enhanced rock weathering), with my company Metalplant...

I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro).

Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc...

The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania.

Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state.

So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc.

But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans...

Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.

Plan, Plant, Planet is an article written by Terence McKenna, the ethnobotanist and psychonaut, for the Whole Earth Catalog in 1989 on the need for humans to look towards plants and their concepts for solutions to solve the crises of the 21st century.

Humans are just getting solar power to scale, yet plants pioneered generating energy from the sun billions of years ago. What other technologies and processes can we learn from plants to help set the planet back on the right track?

Not sure what people are interested in CO2 sensors for, but I use them as a proxy for ventilation in indoor spaces, which is then a proxy for covid risk.

It won't tell you if the air is being filtered (need MERV13 or better), but a lot of places for efficiency and/or due to old HVAC equipment don't bring in fresh air, which increases the risk in a more confined and/or crowded space.

Also, some places like airplanes, which have HEPA filters and have 10-20 air changes per hour (ACH), don't run those systems at full power or bring in outside air at fast enough rate until airborne, so PPM can't build up to 2000 ppm vs the ~420 ambient outdoor CO2 level and approx 800 "good" indoor air rate.

I use an Aranet4 device, which uses 2 AA batteries that last like a year.

Pretty impressive, if true that it can stop infection, and potentially then transmission. Nasal vaccines have the ability to do this because of the potental for neutralizing activity along the nasal muscosa.

They make the claim so we'll have to see. I currently use a nitric oxide nasal spray as the nose is the major area to protect (and also use probiotic lozenges of the k12 strain for the throat).

--- “The vaccine offers potent protection against transmission, prevents reinfection and the spread of the virus, while also reducing the generation of new variants,” Dr Liu said.

“Unlike the mRNA vaccine which targets only the spike protein, CDO-7N-1 induces immunity to all major SARS-CoV-2 proteins and is highly effective against all major variants to date.

“Importantly, the vaccine remains stable at 4°C for seven months, making it ideal for low- and middle-income countries.” ---