Lifeboat Foundation

The Expedition 72 crew studied micro-algae and DNA-like nanomaterials on Tuesday to improve health in space and on Earth. The orbital residents also worked on cargo transfers and lab maintenance aboard the International Space Station.

NASA Flight Engineer Nick Hague began his day processing radiation-resistant samples of Arthrospira C micro-algae and stowing them in an incubator for analysis. The samples will be exposed to different light intensities to observe how they affect the micro-algae’s cell growth and oxygen production. Results may advance the development of spacecraft life support systems and fresh food production in space.

Afterward, Hague joined Commander Suni Williams of NASA for a different research session mixing water with samples of messenger RNA, or mRNA, and protein to create DNA-like nanomaterial products inside the Kibo laboratory module’s Life Science Glovebox. Flight Engineer Butch Wilmore then transferred the samples, exposed them to ultrasonic waves, and imaged them with a spectrophotometer to measure the intensity of light at different wavelengths and evaluate the quality of the nanomaterials. The samples will also be returned to Earth for further evaluation. Results may lead to improved therapies for Earth and space health conditions as well as advance the space economy.

When water freezes slowly, the location where water turns into ice—known as the freezing front—forms a straight line. Researchers from the University of Twente showed how droplets that interact with such a freezing front cause surprising deformations of this front. These new insights were published in Physical Review Letters and show potential for applications in cryopreservation and food engineering techniques.

When water freezes, it is often thought of as a predictable, solid block forming layer by layer. But what happens if the progressing freezing front encounters tiny particles or droplets? Researchers from the University of Twente have explored this question, discovering that droplets can cause surprising deformations in the way ice forms.

Arthritis, intense exercise, and sugary or fatty foods are some of the things that can lead to inflammation. Here’s what you can take or add to your diet to help fight it.

Insecticides have been used for centuries to counteract widespread pest damage to valuable food crops. Eventually, over time, beetles, moths, flies and other insects develop genetic mutations that render the insecticide chemicals ineffective.

Escalating resistance by these mutants forces farmers and vector control specialists to ramp up use of poisonous compounds at increasing frequencies and concentrations, posing risks to human health and damage to the environment since most insecticides kill both ecologically important insects as well as pests.

To help counter these problems, researchers recently developed powerful technologies that genetically remove insecticide-resistant variant genes and replace them with genes that are susceptible to pesticides. These gene-drive technologies, based on CRISPR gene editing, have the potential to protect valuable crops and vastly reduce the amount of chemical pesticides required to eliminate pests.

Scientists looking to tackle our ongoing obesity crisis have made an important discovery: Intermittent calorie restriction leads to significant changes both in the gut and the brain, which may open up new options for maintaining a healthy weight.

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and relative fasting on some days.

Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body weight on average – there was also evidence of shifts in the activity of obesity-related regions of the brain, and in the make-up of gut bacteria.

A study found that male worms’ brains can activate conflicting memories, but behavior is driven by the more beneficial one. This research sheds light on how brains prioritize information, offering insights into conditions like PTSD.

A new study by UCL researchers reveals that two conflicting memories can simultaneously be activated in a worm’s brain, even though only one memory directly influences the animal’s behavior.

In the paper published in Current Biology, the researchers showed how an animal’s sex drive can at times outweigh the need to eat when determining behavior, as they investigated what happens when a worm smells an odor that has been linked to both good experiences (mating) and bad experiences (starvation).

Basically bio electricity once controlled could offer eternal life for humans because we could simply use the electricity to have longer if not indefinite lifespans that don’t require as much food for energy.

In the near future, birth defects, traumatic injuries, limb loss and perhaps even cancer could be cured through bioelectricity—electrical signals that communicate to our cells how to rebuild themselves. This innovative idea has been tested on flatworms and frogs by biologist Michael Levin, whose research investigates how bioelectricity provides the blueprint for how our bodies are built—and how it could be the future of regenerative medicine.

Levin is a professor of biology at Tufts University and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common and sophisticated, its effects on human lives and societies raises new questions. A new paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology posits how these new technologies might affect human evolution.

In “How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?” author Rob Brooks considers the inevitable but incremental evolutionary consequences of AI’s everyday use and human-AI interactions—without “dramatic but perhaps unlikely events, including possibilities of human annihilation, assimilation, or enslavement.”

In the paper, Brooks considers (“often with considerable speculation”) some possible forms of human-AI interaction and the evolutionary implications of such interactions via natural selection, including forms of selection that resemble the inadvertent and deliberate selection that occurred when humans domesticated crops, livestock, and companion animals.

Cognitive neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin have published new research describing a brand new approach to making habit change achievable and lasting.

This innovative framework has the potential to significantly improve approaches to personal development, as well as the clinical treatment of compulsive disorders (for example obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction, and eating disorders).

The research was led by Dr. Eike Buabang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the lab of Professor Claire Gillan in the School of Psychology, has been published as a paper titled “Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits” in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.