Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

This summer, the fifth instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise will be on the big screen, reinforcing a love of dinosaurs that has been with many of us since childhood. There is something awe inspiring about the biggest, fiercest, and “deadest” creatures that have ever walked the planet. But the films have had an additional benefit – they have sparked an interest in dinosaur DNA.

The “Mr DNA” sequence in the original movie is a great piece of science communication and the concept of extracting DNA from the bodies of “dino” blood-engorged mosquitoes is an outstanding piece of fiction. It is, however, just fiction.

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“These findings are disturbing. Suicide is one of the top 10 causes of death in the US right now, and it’s one of three causes that is actually increasing recently, so we do consider it a public health problem — and something that is all around us,” Schuchat said. The other two top 10 causes of death that are on the rise are Alzheimer’s disease and drug overdoses, she noted.

Suicide rates increased by 25% across the United States over nearly two decades ending in 2016, according to research published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Twenty-five states experienced a rise in suicides by more than 30%, the government report finds.

More than half of those who died by suicide had not been diagnosed with a mental health condition, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC.

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A new approach to fight the aging process: rejuvenating the nuclear membrane.

A new discovery about the effects of aging in our cells could allow doctors to cure or prevent diabetes, fatty liver disease and other metabolic diseases — and possibly even turn back the clock on aging itself.

The new finding from the University of Virginia School of Medicine suggests that fatty liver disease and other unwanted effects of aging may be the result of our cells’ nuclei — the compartment containing our DNA — getting wrinkly. Those wrinkles appear to prevent our genes from functioning properly, the UVA researchers found.

There’s no wrinkle cream for nuclear membranes, but there is a tantalizing possibility: We might use viruses to smooth the membranes’ surfaces — and restore the cells to functioning as they did in the glow of youth.

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New video from Undoing Aging 2018: Matthew Scholz, founder and CTO of Immusoft, on their work developing a breakthrough platform for treating a variety of genetic diseases.

Accelerating rejuvenation therapies to repair the damage of aging. Berlin, March, 15 — 17.

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Hidden in the bones of ancient humans lies evidence of diseases that continue to distress people today. Recently, the examination of two 3,800-year old skeletons revealed the presence of a Yersinia pestis strain, famously the bacterium that causes plague. This strain is now the oldest of its kind sequenced to date, and suggests that the devastation that is the bubonic plague has a Bronze Age origin.

The discovery, published Friday in Nature Communications, pushes back the proposed age of the bubonic plague by 1,000 years. It also adds to the understanding of a disease that is still reported between one and seven times per year in the United States, despite its more ancient reputation: In the U.S. 80 percent of plague cases have been in the bubonic form. Although it’s been present throughout much of recorded history — it was the drive behind some of humanity’s deadliest pandemics including the Justinian Plague and the Black Death — the origin and age of the disease have remained largely a mystery.

“Contrary to previous studies suggesting that Y. pestis was unable to cause disease during that time, we provide evidence that bubonic plague has been affecting humans for at least the last 4,000 years,” study co-author Maria Spyrou tells Inverse.

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A breakthrough stem cell treatment that promises the first effective cure for heart disease will be offered to British patients this year, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Hundreds of thousands stand to benefit after regulators approved a major trial of the regenerative drug capable of shrinking fatal scar tissue which follows a heart attack.

The “off-the-shelf” therapy, which can be harvested for thousands of recipients from one healthy donor, will begin being administered to patients at London’s Royal Brompton Hospital in November.

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A new technique developed by MIT physicists could someday provide a way to custom-design multilayered nanoparticles with desired properties, potentially for use in displays, cloaking systems, or biomedical devices. It may also help physicists tackle a variety of thorny research problems, in ways that could in some cases be orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.

The innovation uses computational neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence, to “learn” how a nanoparticle’s structure affects its behavior, in this case the way it scatters different colors of light, based on thousands of training examples. Then, having learned the relationship, the program can essentially be run backward to design a particle with a desired set of light-scattering properties—a process called inverse design.

The findings are being reported in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT senior John Peurifoy, research affiliate Yichen Shen, graduate student Li Jing, professor of physics Marin Soljacic, and five others.

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