Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

Contrary to what you may think, getting old is not inevitable. And by getting old, I mean the bad parts: weakened muscles, fading memory, aching joints … or perhaps a disease such as cancer or diabetes makes an unwelcome appearance.

James Peyer, 35, is out to prove that age is, instead, like polio or tuberculosis. Those and other infectious diseases once were the biggest killers, until we developed effective vaccines or treatments.

Why, asked Peyer, co-founder of the New York longevity start-up Cambrian Biopharma, should age be any different? “Of our 100,000-year-plus history as a species, it’s been for only about 75 years that these diseases of ageing have been the primary predators of humankind.” He added: “We are rapidly zeroing in on our biggest.

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Experimental realization of cluster crystals-periodic structures with lattice sites occupied by several, overlapping building blocks, has been elusive. Here, the authors show the existence of well-controlled soft matter cluster crystals composed of a thermosensitive water-soluble polymer and nanometer-scale all-DNA dendrons.

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Cyber attackers could target 3D printed objects in health care, aerospace, and other fields.

Cybersecurity researchers at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and the Georgia Institute of Technology have proposed new ways to protect 3D printed objects such as drones, prostheses, and medical devices from stealthy “logic bombs.”

The researchers will present their paper, titled “Physical Logic Bombs in 3D Printers via Emerging 4D Techniques,” at the 2021 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference on December 10, 2021.

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Britain on Sunday announced additional measures to stop the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant, including the extension of booster jabs to people over 30.

From Tuesday, fully vaccinated contacts of people who test positive for Covid-19 will be required to take daily lateral flow tests for seven days.

But those who have not had one or two shots of a Covid vaccine will have to self-isolate for 10 days, the Department of Health and Social Care said.

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Senescent cells refer to those that have stopped dividing but do not die. They damage nearby healthy cells by releasing chemicals that cause inflammation.

The team identified a protein found in senescent cells in humans and mice and created a peptide vaccine based on an amino acid that constitutes the protein.

The vaccine enables the body to create antibodies that attach themselves to senescent cells, which are removed by white blood cells that adhere to the antibodies.

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The earliest genetic traces of Native American ancestry among Polynesians.

The peopling of Polynesia was a stunning achievement: Beginning around 800 C.E., audacious Polynesian navigators in double-hulled sailing canoes used the stars and their knowledge of the waves to discover specks of land separated by thousands of kilometers of open ocean. Within just a few centuries, they had populated most of the Pacific Ocean’s far-flung islands. Now, researchers have used modern DNA samples to trace the exploration in detail, working out what order the islands were settled in and dating each new landfall to within a few decades.

“The whole question of the settlement of Polynesia has been going on for 200 years,” says University of Hawaii, Manoa, archaeologist Patrick Kirch, who was not involved in the research. “This is a really great paper, and I’m happy to see it.”

Archaeologists already had hints of how this great exploration took place. Studying the styles of stone tools and carvings, as well as languages, of the people on the various islands had suggested the original ancestors traced back to Samoa and that the expansion ended halfway across the ocean in Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. But they disagreed on whether it happened in a few centuries, beginning around 900 C.E., or started much earlier and lasted 1 millennium or more.

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Chinese scientists developed a targeted delivery system that can conduct precise gene-editing for inflammatory bowel disease. /CFP

Chinese scientists have developed a targeted delivery system that can bring gene-editing tools to colon cells, offering a precise cure for inflammatory bowel disease.

The study, published on Thursday in the journal Science Advances, reported a CRISPR-Cas9 prodrug nanosystem that can transport a gene-editing protein exclusively to inflammatory lesions in mice colons and then “switch on” the protein.

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