Lifeboat Foundation

True and sad. I personally have seen so many of these situations across many government facilities.

Communities across the United States are living in cancer clusters, but federal aid is hard to come by when the cause of the cancer cannot be easily proven.

Scientists have captured new images of a calcium-shuttling molecule that has been linked to aggressive cancers. The three-dimensional structure could help researchers develop novel therapies and diagnostic tools for diseases that are caused by a malfunction in calcium adsorption.

Alexander Sobolevsky’s lab at Columbia University Medical Center is studying a family of proteins called “Transient receptor potential (TRP)” channels. These proteins line surfaces inside the body, such as the intestine, and form pores that help calcium cross a dense barrier of lipid and protein called the membrane to reach the interior of the cell.

Continue reading “New images of a calcium-shuttling molecule that has been linked to aggressive cancer” »

Matthew Davis’ Arcus is officially the most impressive thing we’ve ever seen come out of a 3D printer. Sure, cheap prosthetics and replacement body parts are important uses of the technology, but this spinning rubber band blaster is what finally makes us want to put a 3D printer on our desks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8PtwqRvVDU

Unlike most rubber band blasters that only fire a single shot every time you squeeze the trigger or require a drive mechanism to make them fully automatic, Davis’ Arcus uses the energy from the loaded elastics to spin the barrel and automatically fire shot after shot until it’s empty. Brilliant.

Continue reading “3D-Printed Gatling Gun Fires 48 Rubber Bands in Mere Seconds” »

There is a well-documented organ shortage throughout the world. For example, 3,000 kidney transplants were made last year in the United Kingdom, but that still left 5,000 people on the waiting list at the end of the period. A lucrative trade in organs has grown up, and transplant tourism has become relatively common. While politicians wring their hands about sensible solutions to the shortage, including the nudge of opt-out donation, scientists using genetic manipulations have been making significant progress in growing transplantable organs inside pigs.

Scientists in the United States are creating so-called ‘human-pig chimeras’ which will be capable of growing the much-needed organs. These chimeras are animals that combine human and pig characteristics. They are like mules that will provide organs that can be transplanted into humans. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare). Horses and donkeys are different species with different numbers of chromosomes, but they can breed together.

In this case, the scientists take a skin cell from a human and from this make stem cells capable of producing any cell or tissue in the body, known as ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’. They then inject these into a pig embryo to make a human-pig chimera. In order to create the desired organ, they use gene editing, or CRISPR, to knock out the embryo’s pig’s genes that produce, for example, the pancreas. The human stem cells for the pancreas then make an almost entirely human pancreas in the resulting human-pig chimera, with just the blood vessels remaining porcine. Using this controversial technology, a human skin cell, pre-treated and injected into a genetically edited pig embryo, could grow a new liver, heart, pancreas or lung as required.

Continue reading “Should a human-pig chimera be treated as a person?” »

A POSSIBLE cure for inherited eye diseases which cause blindness is within sight thanks to a breakthrough recorded by a Tasmanian-led research team.

Associate Professor Alex Hewitt, an ophthalmologist and a researcher with the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research and the School of Medicine, said his team had successfully edited adult eye tissue genes in the laboratory to replace unwanted genes that caused blindness.

Dr Hewitt said he was optimistic Tasmanian doctors could soon start wielding molecular gene shears inside the eyes of humans.

High-performance detectors that are compatible with mainstream semiconductor device fabrication deliver high speed, ultra-sensitivity, and good timing resolution.

Recent advances in biomedical imaging include the enhancement of image contrast, 3D sectioning capability, and compatibility with specialized imaging modes such as fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM).^1–3 Compared with other imaging methods, FLIM offers the highest image contrast because it measures the lifetime of the fluorescence, rather than just its intensity or wavelength characteristics. The contrasting fluorescence lifetime attributes can then enable the observer to discriminate between regions, such as identifying healthy and diseased tissue for cancer detection. In conventional FLIM, a discrete single-photon detector, typically based on photomultiplier tube (PMT) technology, enables the acquisition of a single focal spot.⁴ This focal spot is then raster-scanned across the field of view to form an image. This approach, however, requires sequential scanning—pixel by pixel—and thus results in a slow image acquisition rate.

Continue reading “Single-photon avalanche diodes and advanced digital circuits for improved biomedical imaging” »

Aluminium builds up in the brain, eventually causing contamination which could cause the degenerative bran disease, researchers from Keele University previously found.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have developed a transparent “window to the brain” — a skull implant that is biocompatible, infection-resistant, and does not need to be repetitively replaced.

Part of the ongoing “Window to the Brain” project, a multi-institution, cross-disciplinary effort, the idea is to use transparent skull implants to provide laser diagnosis and treatment of a wide variety of brain pathologies, including brain cancers, traumatic brain injury, stroke, and neurodegenerative diseases, without requiring repeated craniotomies (a surgical operation in which a bone flap is temporarily removed from the skull to access the brain). Such operations are vulnerable to bacterial infections.

Continue reading “A biocompatible, transparent therapeutic window to the brain” »

Experts at the National Eye Institute, Maryland, found showing sufferers changing patterns of black lines triggered damaged cells in the optic nerves to grow back, which could potentially restore sight.