For employees who opt to work from the office, the reopening date has been delayed. The new returning to office date is March 28, the tech giant said on Monday.

Meta currently requires all its U.S. employees coming to office to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. The company says it will watch if all workers returning to office have proof of their booster jabs.

March 14 is the deadline for employees to decide whether to return to the office, request to work remotely full time or request to work from home temporarily.

Workers who are not vaccinated for medical or religious reasons can request such remote work, a spokesperson said. He added:

“Employees who take no action can face disciplinary measures, including termination. Obviously, this would be a last resort.”

In December, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had offered an option to defer returning to office. This way Meta is joining the growing list of companies revamping reopening plans as Omicron surges.

At the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting on Nov. 8, Gates also discussed pandemic preparedness. The Event is dedicated to finding solutions for major problems in global health and development. In his speech, he called for research into drugs and vaccines that can target multiple diseases; shots that are thermostable and longer-lasting than current COVID-19 vaccines; and shots that could deliver the equivalent of multiple doses at once.

At the Grand Challenges meeting, the Foundation pledged $50 million to support the work of scientists in low- and middle-income countries, with a particular emphasis on funding female investigators. It will also award grants of up to $1 million to 14 researchers in Africa.

The philanthropist reportedly stepped down from Microsoft’s board last year during an investigation into his past relationship with a female employee. Gates’ spokespeople have said his resignation was unrelated to that matter and that he wanted to focus on philanthropy. He co-chairs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with ex-wife Melinda French Gates.

“I am pleased to welcome Raj Asarpota to our leadership team. His extensive experience in leading the financial operations of spine-focused medical device business – as well as driving successful M&A transactions – will make him an immediate asset to the future of the Augmedics business. He, as well as his tenure, are the perfect addition to our already incredible team.”

Mr. Asarpota joins Augmedics after his most recent role at ApiJect as executive vice president, chief financial officer and head of technology. ApiJect Systems America, Inc., is a medical technology company that seeks to revolutionize how medicines and vaccines are filled, finished and delivered. Prior to ApiJect, Asarpota served as executive vice president and chief financial officer with NuVasive, a global public company and leader in minimally invasive, procedurally integrated spine solutions, where he was involved with supporting the company’s growth strategy through innovation and operational excellence. Mr.  Asarpota said:

“I am incredibly excited to partner with Nissan and the management team to drive Augmedics’ revolutionary technology to significantly improve outcomes for patients and surgeons along with positioning the company for continued growth and value creation.”

Prior to NuVasive, he spent two years in the private equity space at Imaging Advantage and Cole Parmer as executive vice president and chief financial officer. Imaging Advantage was acquired by Envision in 2015. In 2014, he served as the executive vice president and chief financial officer for Questcor Pharmaceuticals which was acquired by Mallinckrodt in a $5.6B transaction. Asarpota also spent a decade at Life Technologies, a global life sciences company where he was responsible for helping scale the organization, driving growth through organic and M&A channels. During his tenure, the company revenue grew from approximately $1B to more than $4B in 2014, leading to the company’s sale to Thermo Fisher for $13.6 billion that year. Prior to Life Technologies, Asarpota spent 11 years at GE in several finance leadership roles.

• Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences was awarded to Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and Jeffery W. Kelly.
• Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was awarded to Takuro Mochizuki.
• Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to Hidetoshi Katori
• Jun Ye. Six New Horizons Prizes were awarded for Early-Career Achievements in Physics and Math.
• Three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to Women Mathematicians for Early-Career Achievements.

The scientific and medical response to Covid-19 has been unprecedented, and two of this year’s prizes are for breakthroughs that played a significant role in that response. The innovative vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that have proven effective against the virus rely on decades of work by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. Convinced of the promise of mRNA therapies despite widespread skepticism, they created a technology that is not only vital in the fight against the coronavirus today, but holds vast promise for future vaccines and treatments for a wide range of diseases including HIV, cancer, autoimmune and genetic diseases.

Meanwhile, the almost immediate identification and characterization of the virus, rapid development of vaccines, and real-time monitoring of new genetic variants would have been impossible without the next generation sequencing technologies invented by Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer. Before their inventions, re-sequencing a full human genome could take many months and cost millions of dollars; today, it can be done within a day at the cost of around $600. This resulted in a revolution in biology, enabling the revelation of unsuspected genetic diversity with major implications from cell and microbiome biology to ecology, forensics and personalized medicine.

The struggle against neurodegenerative diseases is an ever-present emergency. Jeffery W. Kelly has made a difference in the lives of people suffering from amyloid diseases that affect the heart and nervous system. He showed the mechanism by which a protein, transthyretin, unravels and agglomerates into clusters that kill cells, tissues and ultimately patients. He then conceived a molecular approach to stabilizing the protein, and after he synthesized a thousand candidate molecules, one of the designed molecules had the right structure to achieve this stabilization. He then helped develop it into an effective drug, named tafamidis, that significantly slows the progression of these diseases. In the process, he provided evidence for the notion that protein aggregation causes neurodegeneration, which has relevance for other neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease.

Hidetoshi Katori and Jun Ye, working independently, have improved the precision of time measurement by 3 orders of magnitude. Their techniques – tabletop in scale – for using lasers to trap, cool and probe atoms, produce quantum clocks so accurate that they would lose less than a second if operated for 15 billion years. These optical lattice clocks have potential technological applications from quantum computing to using the effects of Einstein’s relativity for seismology; and in fundamental research they can be used to check theories like relativity, as well as to hunt for gravitational waves and new physics such as dark matter.

While experimentalists probe the physical world with ever-increasing precision, mathematicians explore the frontiers of mindbending abstract spaces. Takuro Mochizuki works at the interface of algebraic geometry – where solutions to systems of equations appear as geometric objects – and differential geometry – where smooth surfaces unfold in multiple complex dimensions. Mochizuki overcame immense technical and conceptual challenges to extend the boundaries of knowledge deep into new terrain, extending the understanding of objects called holonomic D-modules to include varieties with singularities – points where the equations under study no longer make sense. In the process, he has given a complete foundation to the field, solving all basic long-standing conjectures.

Beyond the main prizes, six New Horizons Prizes, each of $100,000, were distributed between 13 early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact on their fields. In addition, three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to early-career women mathematicians.

Including the New Horizons and New Frontiers prizes for early-career achievements, a total of $15.75 million is conferred this year, bringing the total amount awarded to pioneering scientists and mathematicians throughout the decade of the Prize’s existence to $276.5 million.

The vaccine time bot checked around 20 vaccine appointment websites in the state every minute and tweeted out where appointments were available.

Developer Dan Cahoon tweeted on Wednesday, referring to the state’s vaxfinder.mass.gov website

“With vaccines now readily available in Massachusetts I’m going to turn off vaccine time.”

The tweet garnered more than 230 replies by midafternoon Thursday, with many saying they had used the bot to get not only themselves but others vaccinated. The replies reflected the tense times the state saw when vaccines were first made available but there wasn’t enough supply to meet the demand. According to Cahoon, a software developer at Ginkgo Bioworks

“It’s really great to see how many people it was able to help. It’s super-heartwarming to see all the people replying and saying they’ve been able to get appointments through this tool. … It’s been amazing.”

He said he developed the bot in his spare time after watching colleagues struggle to find appointments on the multiple websites where they were listed.

“Basically, it involved going to various websites, refreshing the page for hours on end. … Overall it ended up being a lot of wasted time. I’ve done some amount of bots before mostly for my company and I thought, ‘Hey, I could probably code this up pretty quickly. Anybody who followed the Twitter [feed] had a little bit better of a chance of getting an appointment when it was available.”

While media outlets earlier this year included bots in their lists of tips on how to get a vaccine appointment, some critics have said they gave the tech-savvy an advantage. Cahoon said he felt his bot levelled the playing field between people who only had limited time to search for appointments and people who had the time to sit at the screen for hours clicking away. He noted:

“Hopefully, it brought a little more fairness to the system.”

He also said the reasons he chose Twitter included the ease with which people can sign up and can get notifications on their phones.

Cahoon said that if the unthinkable happens and there’s another pandemic, it would be better if there was a single website people could go to and pre-register. That would allow a fairer distribution of the vaccines and eliminate the “problem where people have to spend a lot of time looking for them,” he said.

After enduring the early frustrations, the state is now a national leader in vaccinations, with more than 4.5 million people with first shots and nearly 3.9 million fully vaccinated as of Thursday.

Safe and effective vaccines are free for people who live, work, or study in the state. People 12 to 17 can receive the Pfizer vaccine. People 18 and older can receive either the Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the state says.