Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical

This will be the 13th New Shepard mission and the 7th consecutive flight for this particular vehicle (a record), demonstrating its operational reusability. N…

Blue Origin successfully completed the 13th New Shepard mission on October 13, 2020. New Shepard flew 12 commercial payloads to space on this mission, including the Deorbit, Descent, and Landing Sensor Demonstration with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate under a Tipping Point partnership. This was the first payload to fly mounted on the exterior of a New Shepard booster rather than inside the capsule, opening the door to a wide range of future high-altitude sensing, sampling, and exposure payloads.

Also on board were tens of thousands of postcards from students around the world from Blue Origin’s nonprofit, Club for the Future, some of which will include a special NASA Artemis stamp.

With this successful mission, New Shepard has flown more than 100 payloads to space across 10 sequential flights. All mission crew supporting this launch exercised strict social distancing and safety measures to mitigate COVID-19 risks to personnel, customers, and surrounding communities. Learn more about this mission and the payloads flown on New Shepard on BlueOrigin.com: https://bit.ly/367AcM3.

Read more | >

Eli Lilly said Wednesday a monoclonal antibody treatment is effective in reducing levels of the virus that causes Covid-19 in patients, and also appears to prevent patients from visiting the emergency room or hospital.

Lilly had previously released results for a similar treatment using one antibody, which experts viewed as promising. But the new results, of a combination of two antibodies, appear, based on limited data provided in a press release, to be more robust. The results also appear roughly similar to those Regeneron presented last week of its own cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies. Last Friday, President Trump was treated with the Regeneron monoclonal antibodies.

Monoclonal antibodies are synthetic versions of the antibodies that are one of the main weapons of the immune system. Researchers believed that injecting them into patients could help treat them.

Read more | >

There’s no need to fear arsenic poisoning if you grew up in the Argentinian Andes — hundreds of years of drinking arsenic-laced groundwater will have left you with a genetic tolerance for it.

Geneticists from Lund and Uppsala universities had noticed that certain plants and bacteria could live in environments with lots of arsenic, with natural selection favouring a gene known to improve their ability to metabolise the poison. Curious to see if humans could also gain some kind of arsenic immunity, they looked at a group of people who they knew would have been exposed to the poison over many generations — the indigenous peoples of the Argentinian part of the Andes. Sure enough, a higher-than average proportion of people they studied possessed the AS3MT gene, which lets them flush out toxins faster than “normal” people.

The genetic samples tested for the AS3MT gene came from 346 residents of the small, isolated town of San Antonio de los Cobres, located more than 3,700m above sea level in the Andes. Not only does the bedrock in the surrounding area contain a lot of arsenic which gets into the groundwater, but mining operations from the era of Spanish colonisation onwards have released even more arsenic — so both modern people and mummies dating back 7,000 years have had high levels of arsenic found in their hair and internal organs.

Read more | >

Physicists have created a broadband detector of terahertz radiation based on graphene. The device has potential for applications in communication and next-generation information transmission systems, security, and medical equipment. The study came out in ACS Nano Letters.

The new detector relies on the interference of plasma waves. Interference as such underlies many technological applications and everyday phenomena. It determines the sound of musical instruments and causes the rainbow colors in soap bubbles, along with many other effects. The interference of electromagnetic waves is harnessed by various spectral devices used to determine the chemical composition, physical and other properties of objects — including very remote ones, such as stars and galaxies.

Plasma waves in metals and semiconductors have recently attracted much attention from researchers and engineers. Like the more familiar acoustic waves, the ones that occur in plasmas are essentially density waves, too, but they involve charge carriers: electrons and holes. Their local density variation gives rise to an electric field, which nudges other charge carriers as it propagates through the material. This is similar to how the pressure gradient of a sound wave impels the gas or liquid particles in an ever expanding region. However, plasma waves die down rapidly in conventional conductors.

Read more | >

A team of researchers led by Osaka University discovers “microtube implosion,” a novel mechanism that demonstrates the generation of megatesla-order magnetic fields.

Magnetic fields are used in various areas of modern physics and engineering, with practical applications ranging from doorbells to maglev trains. Since Nikola Tesla’s discoveries in the 19th century, researchers have strived to realize strong magnetic fields in laboratories for fundamental studies and diverse applications, but the magnetic strength of familiar examples are relatively weak. Geomagnetism is 0.3−0.5 gauss (G) and magnetic tomography (MRI) used in hospitals is about 1 tesla (T = 104 G). By contrast, future magnetic fusion and maglev trains will require magnetic fields on the kilotesla (kT = 107 G) order. To date, the highest magnetic fields experimentally observed are on the kT order.

Recently, scientists at Osaka University discovered a novel mechanism called a “microtube implosion,” and demonstrated the generation of megatesla (MT = 1010 G) order magnetic fields via particle simulations using a supercomputer. Astonishingly, this is three orders of magnitude higher than what has ever been achieved in a laboratory. Such high magnetic fields are expected only in celestial bodies like neutron stars and black holes.

Read more | >

Most previous ancient DNA work involves people of European ancestry. A focus of the Emory lab, however, is exploring how environmental changes — including those caused by European contact — affected the biology of Indigenous and other populations of the Americas.

“Our work can connect people to ancestries they potentially don’t know about,” Lindo explains. “It can also give them insights into how historic, and even prehistoric, events may be affecting them today, especially in terms of health risks and disparities.”

Lindo establishes relationships with local and Indigenous people who decide whether unearthed remains from their communities will be analyzed and how the data will be used. Visiting scientists and scholars from these communities will come to the Emory lab, working alongside Emory scientists and students, exchanging knowledge, insights and perspectives.

Read more | >

Virtual reality software which allows researchers to ‘walk’ inside and analyse individual cells could be used to understand fundamental problems in biology and develop new treatments for disease.

The software, called vLUME, was created by scientists at the University of Cambridge and 3D image analysis software company Lume VR Ltd. It allows super-resolution microscopy data to be visualised and analysed in virtual reality, and can be used to study everything from individual proteins to entire cells. Details are published in the journal Nature Methods.

Super-resolution microscopy, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014, makes it possible to obtain images at the nanoscale by using clever tricks of physics to get around the limits imposed by light diffraction. This has allowed researchers to observe molecular processes as they happen. However, a problem has been the lack of ways to visualise and analyse this data in three dimensions.

Read more | >

In first-of-their-kind observations in the human brain, an international team of researchers has revealed two well-known neurochemicals–dopamine and serotonin–are at work at sub-second speeds to shape how people perceive the world and take action based on their perception.

Furthermore, the neurochemicals appear to integrate people’s perceptions of the world with their actions, indicating dopamine and serotonin have far more expansive roles in the human nervous system than previously known.

Known as neuromodulators, dopamine and serotonin have traditionally been linked to reward processing–how good or how bad people perceive an outcome to be after taking an action.

The study online today in the journal *Neuron* opens the door to a deeper understanding of an expanded role for these systems and their roles in human health.

“An enormous number of people throughout the world are taking pharmaceutical compounds to perturb the dopamine and serotonin transmitter systems to change their behavior and mental health,” said P. Read Montague, senior author of the study and a professor and director of the Center for Human Neuroscience Research and the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion. “For the first time, moment-to-moment activity in these systems has been measured and determined to be involved in perception and cognitive capacities. These neurotransmitters are simultaneously acting and integrating activity across vastly different time and space scales than anyone expected.”

…

“These neuromodulators play a much broader role in supporting human behavior and thought, and in particular they are involved in how we process the outside world,” Bang said. “For example, if you move through a room and the lights are off, you move differently because you’re uncertain about where objects are. Our work suggests these neuromodulators–serotonin in particular– are playing a role in signaling how uncertain we are about the outside environment.”

Read more | >

The CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing tool is one of the most promising approaches to advancing treatments of genetic diseases—including cancer—an area of research where progress is constantly being made. Now, the Molecular Cytogenetics Unit led by Sandra Rodríguez-Perales at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has taken a step forward by effectively applying this technology to eliminate so-called fusion genes, which in the future could open the door to the development of cancer therapies that specifically destroy tumors without affecting healthy cells. The paper is published in Nature Communications.

Fusion genes are the abnormal result of an incorrect joining of DNA fragments that come from two different genes, an event that occurs by accident during the process of cell division. If the cell cannot benefit from this error, it will die and the will be eliminated. But when the error results in a reproductive or survival advantage, the carrier cell will multiply and the genes and the proteins they encode thus become an event triggering tumor formation. “Many and the fusion genes they produce are at the origin of childhood sarcomas and leukaemias,” explains Sandra Rodríguez-Perales, lead co-author of the study now published by the CNIO. Fusion genes are also found in among others prostate, breast, lung and brain tumors: in total, in up to 20% of all cancers.

Because they are only present in tumor cells, fusion genes attract a great deal of interest among the scientific community because they are highly specific therapeutic targets, and attacking them only affects the tumor and has no effect on .

Read more | >