Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

This is a farm in China.
This is a Mcdonalds in New York.
This is an apartment complex in Mumbai.
And this is a skyscraper in London.

What do all these have in common? Well as it turns out. All of these places’ successes or failures…
Economic booms or collapses…
And even population growth or famines…
Might soon be decided by the nation of Morocco.

And probably not for the reasons that you might think. In fact, this future economic trajectory was likely decided by a tiny little creature a couple centuries ago.

This a bat. In the modern world, we view bats as things that both control insect population, as well as creatures that spread rare diseases.

But a few hundred years ago, bats were discovered to do something else. Something miraculous that would shape our world forever without most people realizing it.

In 1,802, the european explorer, alexander von Humboldt, was travelling through the Peruvian lands, when he discovered something strange.

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Everyone talks about learning methods, but few people can find realistic and genuine methods that provide a net profit in the types of information and application.

Elon Musk has broken through that barrier by employing learning techniques that have been proven time and time again to be successful. Musk may be said to have taken use of his education by becoming a disruptor. He and his businesses have transformed entire industries, such as transportation, energy, and space.

He recently stated at a press conference that his plans for his biotech company, Neuralink, are proceeding well, implying that he will likely move his focus in the near future to yet another sector. Musk is, without even a doubt, a once-in-a-generation genius. Possibly on par with Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Newton. He tackles things in a different way than the typical entrepreneur.

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The Food and Drug Administration approved the first treatment for the most common cause of dwarfism Friday, a drug that has proved to increase children’s height but has been polarizing among adults with short stature.

The treatment, developed by BioMarin Pharmaceutical, is a once-daily injection for children with achondroplasia, a rare genetic disorder that results in dwarfism and can lead to serious medical complications. In a pivotal clinical trial, patients who got the drug, called Voxzogo, grew 1.6 centimeters more over the course of a year than those who received placebo. That means patients who take Voxzogo throughout childhood are likely to reach heights similar to their peers who don’t have achondroplasia, according to BioMarin.

“It’s the difference between being able to drive a car or not, reaching stuff in closets, being able to take care of your hygiene,” said Jean-Jacques Bienaimé, BioMarin’s CEO. “It would make a huge difference for those patients. There’s no question about it.”

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Skyrocketing demand for boxes and packing materials during the pandemic has slashed paper production across North America, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for retail companies.

“We’re starting to hear, ‘We’re out of paper,’” said Polly Wong, president of San Francisco-based direct-marketing firm Belardi Wong, noting that some of her clients already missed their fall advertising campaigns due to issues at the printers. Wong estimates that 100 million catalogs will not be printed or reach U.S. homes in time for the year’s biggest spending season as a result. “It kind of put our industry up in a panic.”

With some mills converting to cardboard to meet the spike in e-commerce deliveries and others shutting down altogether, more than 2.5 million metric tons of North American printing and writing paper capacity — or nearly one-fifth of 2019 levels — has come offline since the start of last year. That’s according to Kevin Mason, managing director for ERA Forest Products Research, a financial research company that specializes in paper and forest products.

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Magnetic soft robots are systems that can change shape or perform different actions when a magnetic field is applied to them. These robots have numerous advantageous characteristics, including a wireless drive, high flexibility and infinite endurance.

In the future, micro-scale magnetic soft robots could be implemented in a variety of settings; for instance, helping humans to monitor the environment or to remotely perform biomedical procedures. Most of the systems developed so far, however, can only complete simple tasks and take on a limited number of shapes.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have recently devised a new technique for creating shape-programmable magnetic soft robots. This technique, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv and presented at the CCIR2021 conference, allowed them to create a new based on magnetic pixels that can change shapes and complete a variety of actions or tasks.

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Discovery suggests glial cells may be important in other organs as well.

Glial cells in the heart help regulate heart rate and rhythm, and drive its development in the embryo, according to a new study publishing today (November 18th, 2021) in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Nina Kikel-Coury, Cody Smith and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame. The discovery provides the most detailed portrait yet of a critical population of cells that had been previously poorly understood.

Glia are a diverse set of cell types, originally named after the Greek word for glue, and include cells that surround and nourish neurons, and others that mount immune responses within the central nervous system. In the peripheral nervous system, glia are present and presumably active in multiple organs, including the gut, pancreas, spleen, and lungs, although their function is not clear in most cases.

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Over the past few years, scientists have been trying to understand how listening to music affects your brain. One of the features of music that seems to be important is whether you have an emotional connection to it. In other words, listening to a favorite tune will have a different effect on your brain than an unknown or disliked piece of music.

Now, a new study has shown that people with Alzheimer’s Disease can improve their cognition by listening to music that has personal meaning to them, such as songs they’ve been listening to for years.

Researchers Corinne Fischer, Nathan Churchill and colleagues from the University of Toronto ran a small study to find out what exactly happens when people with Alzheimer’s listened to their favorite songs. They asked fourteen people with early stage Alzheimer’s Disease to spend one hour per day listening to music they enjoyed and were very familiar with. Before and after the test period all participants also took a cognitive test, and had their brain activity measured by functional MRI (fMRI).

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Glaucoma is a surprisingly common condition that can have serious consequences if it goes untreated. Understanding the importance of early detection, a team of engineers and ophthalmologists in Australia has developed a novel approach using AI to diagnose glaucoma that can yield results in just 10 s.

Have you ever experimented with food dye? It can make cooking a lot more fun, and provides a great example of how two fluids can mix together well—or not much at all.

Add a small droplet in water and you might see it slowly dissolve in the larger liquid. Add a few more drops and perhaps you’ll see a wave of color spread, the colored droplets spreading and breaking apart to diffuse more thoroughly. Add a spoon and begin stirring quickly, and you’ll probably find that the water fully changes color, as desired.

Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, led by Ivan Bermejo-Moreno, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, studied a similar phenomenon with gases at high speeds, with an eye toward more efficient mixing to support supersonic scramjet engines. In the study, published in Physics of Fluids, USC Viterbi Ph.D. Jonas Buchmeier, along with Xiangyu Gao (USC Viterbi Ph.D. ‘20) and former visiting M.Sc. student Alexander Bußmann (Technical University Munich), developed a novel tracking method that zoomed in on the fundamentals of how mixing happens. The study helps understand, for example, how injected fuel interacts with the surrounding oxidizers (air) in the engine to make it operate optimally, or how interstellar gases mix after a supernova explosion to form new stars. The method focuses on the geometric and physical properties of the turbulent swirling motions of gases and how they change shape over time as they mix.

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Professor Norikazu Ichihashi and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo have successfully induced gene expression from a DNA, characteristic of all life, and evolution through continuous replication extracellularly using cell-free materials alone, such as nucleic acids and proteins for the first time.

The ability to proliferate and evolve is one of the defining characteristics of living organisms. However, no artificial materials with these characteristics have been created. In order to develop an artificial molecular system that can multiply and evolve, the information (genes) coded in DNA must be translated into RNA, proteins must be expressed, and the cycle of DNA replication with those proteins must continue over a long period in the system. To date, it has been impossible to create a reaction system in which the genes necessary for DNA replication are expressed while those genes simultaneously carry out their function.

The group succeeded in translating the genes into proteins and replicating the original circular DNA with the translated proteins by using a circular DNA carrying two genes necessary for DNA replication (artificial genomic DNA) and a cell-free transcription-translation system. Furthermore, they also successfully improved the DNA to evolve to a DNA with a 10-fold increase in replication efficiency by continuing this DNA replication cycle for about 60 days.

By adding the genes necessary for transcription and translation to the artificial genomic DNA developed by the group, it could be possible to develop artificial cells that can grow autonomously simply by feeding them low-molecular-weight compounds such as amino acids and nucleotides, in the future. If such artificial cells can be created, we can expect that useful substances currently produced using living organisms (such as substances for drug development and food production) will become more stable and easier to control.

This research has been led by Professor Norikazu Ichihashi, a research director of the project “Development of a self-regenerative artificial genome replication-transcription-translation system” in the research area “Large-scale genome synthesis and cell programming” under the JST’s Strategic Basic Research Programs CREST (Team type). In this research area, JST aims to elucidate basic principles in relation to the structure and function of genomes for the creation of a platform technology for the use of cells.

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