Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

One of the best-known regions of the brain, the cerebellum accounts for just 10 percent of the organ’s total volume, but contains more than 50 percent of its neurons.

Despite all that processing power, it’s been assumed that the cerebellum functions largely outside the realm of conscious awareness, instead coordinating physical activities like standing and breathing. But now neuroscientists have discovered that it plays an important role in the reward response — one of the main drives that motivate and shape human behaviour.

Not only does this open up new research possibilities for the little region that has for centuries been primarily linked motor skills and sensory input, but it suggests that the neurons that make up much of the cerebellum — called granule cells — are functioning in ways we never anticipated.

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Another biomarker of senescent cells could be p16, a protein whose levels increase when cells stop dividing if old and also a protein whose gene is turned off in many human cancers.

Coming back to our topic – designing senolytics that avoid the apoptosis of young, healthy cells – the ideal senolytic should accomplish two things: –turn on p53 at increased levels to determine stubborn, senescent cells to commit suicide –do that on senescent cells only.

And in order to accomplish the second part, such a drug should be ‘programmed’ to only act on those cells where it recognizes senescence-associated biomarkers. There is no single biomarker today that stains positive or negative on all types of senescence cells, but increased levels of beta-galactosidase and p16 proteins could be a welcome start to identify old cells in vivo when designing such a drug.

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Genomic instability (mutations) has been suggested as being one of the primary hallmarks of aging and this research might support that idea. Researchers at John Hopkins report that around 66% of mutations in cancer cells are due to random errors with environment/lifestyle contributing 29% and 5% inherited.

“That finding challenges the common wisdom that cancer is the product of heredity and the environment. “There’s a third cause and this cause of mutations is a major cause,” says cancer geneticist Bert Vogelstein.”

“Such random mutations build up over time and help explain why cancer strikes older people more often. Knowing that the enemy will strike from within even when people protect themselves against external threats indicates that early cancer detection and treatment deserve greater attention than they have previously gotten, Vogelstein says.”

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The team tested their device on a prosthetic hand. When the skin patches on the skin were enabled, the prosthetic could touch and grab soft objects like a normal hand. But when the skin was not turned on, the hand crushed the objects.

The skin requires just 20 nanowatts of power per square centimeter, according to the paper. Right now, the energy captured by the photovoltaic cells has to be used immediately, but the team has another prototype in development that includes flexible supercapacitors to store excess energy.

They are also working on scaling up the material to cover larger areas of a prosthetic or robot, using a method the team pioneered in 2015 for inexpensively producing large sheets of graphene. Dahiya expects the skin will eventually be produced for just $1 for 5 to 10 centimeters of the material.

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Fasting might help T1 diabetics according to new research.

Periodic fasting has long been demonstrated to have beneficial effects on autoimmune disorders, cancer prevention and treatments, cardiovascular disease and a myriad of other ailments. This most recent paper by Cheng et al. may add the treatment of Type 1 diabetes to that list[1]. If successful in humans it has the potential to reverse some or most of the loss of insulin producing cells within the pancreas. Just as remarkable, the treatment itself is relatively straightforward, consisting of a regimented protocol of periodic fasting-like conditions.

Generally speaking, Type 1 diabetes results from an autoimmune mediated depletion of insulin secreting pancreatic beta islet cells. In contrast, Type 2 results from lower cellular sensitivity to insulin. Type 2 is primarily caused by environmental factors such as poor diet.

The current medical approach to treating Type 1 diabetes is the periodic administration of insulin, usually through self-administered injections. Most new therapies focused on curing Type 1 diabetes are looking to repopulating beta islet cells through the use of reprogrammed induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.

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Creating oral formulations of intravenous (IV) medication is a daunting challenge. Scientists at SRI Biosciences are using advanced formulation tools and experience to overcome the challenges, with the goal of developing drugs that could easily be distributed to people if needed.

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March 28 (UPI) — Researchers at Northwestern University created a synthetic version of the female reproductive system that can be used to test drug therapies.

The system is shaped like a cube and consists of a series of small tubes, each containing cells from a different part of the female reproductive system, including the uterus, cervix, vagina, fallopian tubes and liver.

The system is called Evatar, like avatar but with an E for Eve, because it reproduces the female reproductive tract and mimics the hormones of the full-size reproductive system.

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Mushroom buildings, jurassic park and terraforming.

Did you ever hear about synthetic biology? No? Imagine that we could alter and produce DNA from scratch just like an engineer. Doesn’t it sound like one of the greatest interdisciplinary achievements in recent history?

Think about it, a bio-technologist is doing more or less the work of a programmer but instead of using a computer language he’s doing it by arranging molecules embedded in every living cell. The outcome, if ever mastered, could reshape the world around us dramatically.

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