Lifeboat Foundation

The past few years have been marked by the proliferation of lab-grown organs, including limbs, livers, skin, heart tissue, and yep, even penises. But piecing together an organ, cell-by-cell, in a way that resembles the real thing is only half the challenge — you’ve actually got to make it work as part of several incredibly complex systems in a living, breathing organism. And that’s where most attempts fall flat.

But researchers in Japan have managed to grow fully functioning kidneys in the lab, and when transplanted into pigs and rats, they filtered out urine just like a natural kidney. Built using stem cells that had been extracted and then incubated in the animal recipients, the kidneys point to the possibility of lab-grown kidneys for humans in the future.

Led by Takashi Yokoo from the Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo, the team figured out how to overcome a challenge they’d faced previously with these lab-grown kidneys: they were good at processing urine, but instead of passing it into the natural ureter, they ballooned dangerously under the pressure.

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Next January Stephen Hawking will be 74 years old. He has lived much longer than most individuals with his debilitating condition. In addition to being an unquestionably gifted cosmologist, he has invited controversy by supporting the pro-Palestinian, Israel-BDS boycott and warning about the dangers of alien invaders who tap into our interstellar greetings

Antisemitism, notwithstanding, this man is a mental giant. He is Leonardo. He is Einstein. Like them, his discoveries and theories will echo for generations beyond his life on earth. He is that genius.

Forty years ago, when Stephen Hawking still had mobility, he delivered a paper on a mystery regarding information-loss for entities that cross the event boundary of a black hole.

In the mid 1970s, Astronomers were just discovering black holes and tossing about various theories about the event horizon and its effect on the surrounding space-time. Many individuals still considered black holes to be theoretical. Hawking’s analysis of the information paradox seemed extremely esoteric. Yet, last month (Aug 2015) , at Sweeden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Hawking presented a possible solution to the paradox that he sparked.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking speaks with virtually no muscular movement” »

By Julie Steenhuysen.

(Reuters) — Scientists behind the discovery of a technology called CRISPR-Cas9 that allows researchers to edit virtually any gene they target are among the top contenders for Nobel prizes next month, according to an annual analysis by Thomson Reuters.

The predictions announced on Thursday come from the Intellectual Property & Science unit of Thomson Reuters (which also owns the Reuters news service). Since 2002, it has accurately identified 37 scientists who went on to become Nobel laureates, although not necessarily in the year in which they were named.

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By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) — A brain-to-computer technology that can translate thoughts into leg movements has enabled a man paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury to become the first such patient to walk without the use of robotics, doctors in Southern California reported on Wednesday. The slow, halting first steps of the 28-year-old paraplegic were documented in a preliminary study published in the British-based Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, along with a YouTube video. The feat was accomplished using a system allowing the brain to bypass the injured spinal cord and instead send messages through a computer algorithm to electrodes placed around the patient’s knees to trigger controlled leg muscle movements.

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Aristotle is frequently regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity. So why didn’t he think much of his brain?

In this brief history of the brain, the GPA explores what the great minds of the past thought about thought. And we discover that questions that seem to have obvious answers today were anything but self-evident for the individuals that first tackled them. And that conversely, sometimes the facts which we simply accept to be true can be blinding, preventing us from making deeper discoveries about our our world and ourselves.

Reconstituting epithelial (skin) microtissues with programmed size, shape, composition, spatial heterogeneity, and embedding extracellular matrix. Scheme and images of fully embedded aggregates of human luminal and myoepithelial cells. (credit: Michael E Todhunter et al./Nature Methods)

A new technique developed by UCSF scientists for building organoids (tiny models of human tissues) more precisely turns human cells into the biological equivalent of LEGO bricks. Called DNA Programmed Assembly of Cells (DPAC), it allows researchers in hours to create arrays of thousands of custom-designed organoids, such as models of human mammary glands containing several hundred cells each.

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(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Japan has succeeded in growing kidneys from stem cells that worked as they were supposed to after being transplanted into rats and pigs. The team outlines their work and results in a paper they have had published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have met with success in the past, using human stem cells to grow organs, in this case kidneys, unfortunately, the kidneys that have been grown have all developed without a urinary pathway—the means by which urine makes its way out of the kidney and to a tube that connects with the bladder. Such kidneys experience hydronephrosis, where they bloat with urine. In this new effort, the researchers found a way to grow both a kidney and a pathway and an initial bladder, all of which successfully replicated the work normally done by natural organs for a period of time.

The team used the organogenic niche method to grow kidneys using rat stem cells, which when tested, were able to produce urine. Next, they grew a urinary pathway, which was in effect, a type of drainage tube. Then, they grew a blabber that would be compatible with the drainage tube. With all the parts, grown, the kidney was placed inside a rat, then the pathway was added, followed by the bladder they’d grown—the new bladder was then connected to the rat’s native bladder. After sewing up the rat, they found the whole system worked. The team then repeated what they had done with a much larger animal, one much closer in size to humans—a pig—and found the same results.

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This week’s episode welcomes Bill Andrew’s, Ph. D., President and Founder of the biotechnology firm Sierra Sciences. Bill is widely considered the foremost researcher on aging and telomeres and most of his entire professional career has been devoted to finding a cure for aging. Most notably, he led a team in 1997 at Geron Corporation to successfully identify the human enzyme telomerase. An enzyme that causes Telomeres to lengthen, thus enabling cells to replicate itself without hitting their Hayflick limit (i.e. the number of times a cell is able to reproduce itself). It is believed that only human embryonic stem cells and cancer cells are immortal and do not possess a Hayflick limit.

Our conversation explores the science, possibilities, and social impacts of finding a cure for aging. He explains his company’s quest to create a safe and affordable drug that will lengthen telomeres in every cell in your body. He believes his research team is one year away from starting human trials if he receives the additional funding necessary to finish his research.

Join us in this fascinating discussion that is sure to change the way you view aging and our future.

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A team from the Francis Crick Institute wants a permit to use so-called CRISPR/Cas 9 technology in basic research.

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