Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

“The door is open now. The view is pretty incredible.”

Watch four “amateur astronauts” and a floating stuffed dog go to space.

The four crew members — Shift4 Payments founder Jared Isaacman, scientist Sian Proctor, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee Hayley Arceneaux, and aeronautical engineer Chris Sembroski — are the first all-civilian crew to fly aboard a private vehicle to low-Earth orbit.

“The door is open now. The view is pretty incredible,” said Isaacman, a billionaire who founded the retail payment processing company Shift4 Payments in 1999.

The mission comes two months after competitor Blue Origin’s historic — and not-all-too-popular — suborbital flight that saw four civilians go to space. One of them being Bezos’ brother.

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Space has seen a number of high-profile, incredibly rich tourists in the past few months. The so-called “billionaire space race” kicked off in July, when Richard Branson rode his Virgin Galactic space plane to the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere. Shortly after, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rode his rocket a little further. Whether they made it to “space,” though, has been hotly debated. Most space watchers agree these short suborbital trips aren’t quite the same as getting into low Earth orbit.

There will be no debate about the Inspiration4 mission. This flight takes the crew of four higher than Bezos or Branson and is different from those flights in key ways, even if it was bankrolled by another billionaire in Isaacman.

When SpaceX announced the mission in February, Isaacman bought up the entire flight and donated three of the Crew Dragon seats to “individuals from the general public.” He offered up two seats to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, handpicking Arceneaux, a childhood cancer survivor who now works as a physician’s assistant at the hospital and acts as the medical officer on Inspiration4.

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We need robots as workers it would speed up things maybe a thousand fold. Humans are not made for the grueling labor that robots can do easily. Unless we give workers like ironman suits humans do better work as coders or the ones repairing the machines.

Logistics managers are battling the pandemic, a labor shortage, and huge demand to get goods to your front door.

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Researchers at Université de Montréal and McGill University have discovered a new multi-enzyme complex that reprograms metabolism and overcomes “cellular senescence,” when aging cells stop dividing.

In their study published today in Molecular Cell, the researchers show that an named HTC (hydride transfer complex) can inhibit cells from aging.

“HTC protects cells from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen that normally leads to their death,” said senior author Gerardo Ferbeyre, an UdeM biochemistry professor and principal scientist at the CRCHUM, the university’s affiliated teaching hospital research center.

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The pandemic marks another grim milestone: 1 in 500.

Americans have died of covid-19.

The idea, he said, was to prevent “the humanitarian disaster” that occurred in New York City, where ambulance sirens were a constant as hospitals were overwhelmed and mortuaries needed mobile units to handle the additional dead.

The goal of testing, mask-wearing, keeping six feet apart and limiting gatherings was to slow the spread of the highly infectious virus until a vaccine could stamp it out. The vaccines came but not enough people have been immunized, and the triumph of science waned as mass death and disease remain. The result: As the nation’s covid death toll exceeded 663,000 this week, it meant roughly 1 in every 500 Americans had succumbed to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

While covid’s death toll overwhelms the imagination, even more stunning is the deadly efficiency with which it has targeted Black, Latino, and American Indian and Alaska Native people in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

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Common side effects of covid-19 vaccination listed by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) include a sore arm, fever, fatigue, and myalgia.1 Changes to periods and unexpected vaginal bleeding are not listed, but primary care clinicians and those working in reproductive health are increasingly approached by people who have experienced these events shortly after vaccination. More than 30 000 reports of these events had been made to MHRA’s yellow card surveillance scheme for adverse drug reactions by 2 September 2,021 across all covid-19 vaccines currently offered.

Most people who report a change to their period after vaccination find that it returns to normal the following cycle and, importantly, there is no evidence that covid-19 vaccination adversely affects fertility. In clinical trials, unintended pregnancies occurred at similar rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.2 In assisted reproduction clinics, fertility measures and pregnancy rates are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients.

Read related article.

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Dementia has many faces, and because of the wide range of ways in which it can develop and affect patients, it can be very challenging to treat. Now, however, using supercomputer analysis of big data, researchers from Japan were able to predict that a single protein is a key factor in the damage caused by two very common forms of dementia.

In a study published this month in Communications Biology, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have revealed that the HMGB1 is a key player in both frontotemporal lobar and Alzheimer , two of the most common causes of dementia.

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration can be caused by mutation of a variety of genes, which means that no one treatment will be right for all patients. However, there are some similarities between frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer disease, which led the researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) to explore whether these two conditions cause damage to the brain in the same way.

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The Kidney Project’s implantable bioartificial kidney, one that promises to free kidney disease patients from dialysis machines and transplant waiting lists, took another big step toward becoming reality, earning a $650,000 prize from KidneyX for its first-ever demonstration of a functional prototype of its implantable artificial kidney.

KidneyX is a public–private partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) founded to “accelerate innovation in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of kidney diseases.”

The Kidney Project, a nationwide collaboration led by Shuvo Roy, PhD of UC San Francisco and William Fissell, MD of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), combined the two essential parts of its artificial kidney, the hemofilter and the bioreactor, and successfully implanted the smartphone-sized device for preclinical evaluation.

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In the early days of the pandemic, with commercial COVID tests in short supply, Rockefeller University’s Robert B. Darnell developed an in-house assay to identify positive cases within the Rockefeller community. It turned out to be easier and safer to administer than the tests available at the time, and it has been used tens of thousands of times over the past nine months to identify and isolate infected individuals working on the university’s campus.

Now, a new study in PLOS ONE confirms that Darnell’s test performs as well, if not better, than FDA-authorized nasal and oral swab tests. In a direct head-to-head comparison of 162 individuals who received both Rockefeller’s “DRUL” test and a conventional swab test, DRUL caught all of the cases that the swabs identified as positive—plus four positive cases that the swabs missed entirely.

“This research confirms that the test we developed is sensitive and safe,” says Darnell, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology. “It is inexpensive, has provided excellent surveillance within the Rockefeller community, and has the potential to improve safety in communities as the pandemic drags on.”

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Jan. 29 2021 — An international team of researchers studying COVID-19 has made a startling and pivotal discovery: The virus appears to cause the body to make weapons to attack its own tissues.

The finding could unlock a number of COVID’s clinical mysteries. They include the puzzling collection of symptoms that can come with the infection; the persistence of symptoms in some people for months after they clear the virus, a phenomenon dubbed long COVID; and why some children and adults have a serious inflammatory syndrome, called MIS-C or MIS-A, after their infections.

“It suggests that the virus might be directly causing autoimmunity, which would be fascinating,” says lead study author Paul Utz, MD, who studies immunology and autoimmunity at Stanford University in Stanford, CA.

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