The DNA Cloud: Is it Alive?

In this analysis, I will firstly be presenting the current knowledge concerning the materiality of the internet based Cloud, which I will henceforth be referring to as simply the Cloud. For organisation purposes I have created two umbrella categories under which I place the ongoing research in the field. Scholars have been addressing the issue of Cloud materiality through broadly two prisms: sociological materiality and geopolitical materiality. The literature of course deals with the intricacies of the Cloud based on its present ferromagnetic storage functionality. However, developments in synthetic biology have caused private tech companies and University spin-offs to flirt with the idea of a DNA-based cloud system. This prospect inevitably gives birth to unaddressed questions pertaining to the biological (nucleotides instead of magnetic disks) materiality of an upcoming cloud system of this nature, since the relevant queries bleed into fields of materiality of the human soul and body and even the materiality of knowledge and memory. This novel investigation I will be conducting concerns a speculative cloud model, the technological mechanics of which are presently in an embryonic stage, and a basic question which is if this fabricated creation could be considered potentially alive

Modèles épidémiques développés pour étudier la transmission du COVID-19 durant la première vague de février à mai 2020 : une revue méthodologique

We review epidemiological models for the propagation of the COVID-19 pandemic during the early months of the outbreak: from February to May 2020. The aim is to propose a methodological review that highlights the following characteristics: (i) the epidemic propagation models, (ii) the modeling of intervention strategies, (iii) the models and estimation procedures of the epidemic parameters and (iv) the characteristics of the data used. We finally selected 80 articles from open access databases based on criteria such as the theoretical background, the reproducibility, the incorporation of interventions strategies, etc. It mainly resulted to phenomenological, compartmental and individual-level models. A digital companion including an online sheet, a Kibana interface and a markdown document is proposed. Finally, this work provides an opportunity to witness how the scientific community reacted to this unique situation