Biotech/medical – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Sep 29
2018

The end of HIV transmission in the U.S.: A once-unthinkable dream becomes an openly discussed goal

And yet, today, the struggle against HIV may be undergoing a sea change.

U.S. health officials and HIV experts are beginning to talk about a future in which transmission in the United States could be halted. And that future, they say, could come not within a generation, but in the span of just a few years.

“We have the science to solve the AIDS epidemic,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, himself a longtime HIV researcher and clinician, told STAT in a recent interview. “We’ve invested in it. Let’s put it into action.‘’

Sep 29
2018

There Is a Rogue Group of Stars Behaving Very Suspiciously in the Milky Way’s Disk

The Milky Way has a violent past. When it isn’t swallowing renegade sausage galaxies, it seems to be waging endless games of interstellar tug-of-war with its nearest galactic neighbors — and not always winning. According to a new study published Sept. 19 in the journal Nature, one such encounter ended with a cosmic wound to the Milky Way’s disk that still hasn’t fully healed, 300 million years later.

That wound, researchers say, is visible in a cluster of several million stars that are not behaving as they should be. While still rotating around the Milky Way’s galactic center, these rogue stars also orbit around one another in a wobbly, spiral pattern that has only become more tangled over the past eon. [Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]

“We have observed shapes. [of star clusters] with different morphologies, such as a spiral similar to a snail’s shell,” lead study author Teresa Antoja, a researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) at the University of Barcelona, said in a statement. “These substructures allow us to conclude that the disk of our galaxy suffered an important gravitational disturbance.”

Sep 29
2018

‘Mosquito-pocalypse is in full effect’: North Carolina hit by blood-sucking pest outbreak

Mosquitoes that are three times larger than normal are swarming areas affected by Hurricane Florence.

Sep 29
2018

In the Face of High Costs, DIYers Hope to Brew Their Own Insulin

Home kits could one day allow diabetes patients to make their own insulin — potentially saving them thousands of dollars a year.

Sep 29
2018

Meet the B.C. man who implants technology to increase his physical capabilities News

But where advocates like Foxx mostly see the benefits of transhumanism, some critics say it raises ethical concerns in terms of risk, and others point out its potential to exacerbate social inequality.

Foxx says humans have long used technology to make up for physical limitations — think of prosthetics, hearing aids, or even telephones. More controversial technology aimed to enhance or even extend life, like cryogenic freezing, is also charted terrain.

The transhumanist movement isn’t large, but Foxx says there is a growing awareness and interest in technology used to enhance or supplement physical capability.

This is perhaps unsurprising given that we live in an era where scientists are working to create artificial intelligence that can read your mind and millions of people spend most of their day clutching a supercomputer in their hands in the form of a smartphone.

Sep 28
2018

People Who Give Up on Life Can Die From “Psychogenic Death,” Say Scientists

In a paper published in Medical Hypotheses a scientist at the University of Portsmouth in England has identified a syndrome called give-up-itis. Also called psychogenic death, he believes that this syndrome plagued prisoners of war in Korea for years.

Sep 28
2018

The Arch Mission Foundation Announces Digital Data Stored in DNA Added to Lunar Library™, Creating Groundbreaking Archive of Knowledge on the Moon

LOS ANGELES (PRWEB) September 27, 2018

The Arch Mission Foundation today announced the creation of an archive of knowledge encoded into synthetic DNA by Microsoft, Twist Bioscience Corporation, and the University of Washington to be included in the Lunar Library™. The DNA Archive will feature 10,000 crowdsourced images and the full text of 20 important books, among other items. The data is encoded into billions of synthetic DNA molecules and encapsulated for long-term preservation. Collectively this data will represent the first Special Collection of the Lunar Library, which the Arch Mission Foundation announced last spring.

The Arch Mission Foundation sought partners that could help curate these materials and assist in achieving a remarkable collection that reflects both the best of human knowledge, as well as the most ambitious technical abilities in the emerging new field of molecular data storage. Molecular data storage is a new technology for storing and retrieving data from molecules of synthetic, non-living DNA.

Sep 27
2018

MIT study: 24-hour fasting regenerates stem cells, doubles metabolism

This gives credence to the 5–2 diet, which has recently gained in popularity thanks to a large celebrity following.

Sep 27
2018

Growing Brains in Lab

Scientists create 3-dimensional brain spheroids—small, spherical, laboratory-grown human brain tissue.

By Sam Rose on September 25, 2018

Sep 27
2018

Switching Off ALPL Gene Contributes to Bone Aging

A recent open-access mouse study published by Xi’an Institute of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine scientists in the journal Bone Research describes how the ALPL gene affects bone aging and suggests that metformin might constitute a viable therapeutic option to prevent it [1].

Study abstract

Mutations in the liver/bone/kidney alkaline phosphatase (Alpl) gene cause hypophosphatasia (HPP) and early-onset bone dysplasia, suggesting that this gene is a key factor in human bone development. However, how and where Alpl acts in bone ageing is largely unknown. Here, we determined that ablation of Alpl induces prototypical premature bone ageing characteristics, including bone mass loss and marrow fat gain coupled with elevated expression of p16INK4A (p16) and p53 due to senescence and impaired differentiation in mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Mechanistically, Alpl deficiency in MSCs enhances ATP release and reduces ATP hydrolysis. Then, the excessive extracellular ATP is, in turn, internalized by MSCs and causes an elevation in the intracellular ATP level, which consequently inactivates the AMPKα pathway and contributes to the cell fate switch of MSCs.