Lifeboat Foundation

Since 2020, the condition known as long COVID-19 has become a widespread disability affecting the health and quality of life of millions of people across the globe and costing economies billions of dollars in reduced productivity of employees and an overall drop in the work force.

The intense scientific effort that long COVID sparked has resulted in more than 24,000 scientific publications, making it the most researched health condition in any four years of recorded human history.

Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that limits people’s ability to work, and conditions such as heart failure and diabetes, which are known to last a lifetime.

According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is a top public health risk that was responsible for 1.27 million deaths across the globe in 2019. When repeatedly exposed to antibiotics, bacteria rapidly learn to adapt their genes to counteract the drugs—and share the genetic tweaks with their peers—rendering the drugs ineffective.

Superpowered bacteria also torpedo medical procedures—surgery, chemotherapy, C-sections—adding risk to life-saving therapies. With antibiotic resistance on the rise, there are very few new drugs in development. While studies in petri dishes have zeroed in on potent candidates, some of these also harm the body’s cells, leading to severe side effects.

What if there’s a way to retain their bacteria-fighting ability, but with fewer side effects? This month, researchers used AI to reengineer a toxic antibiotic. They made thousands of variants and screened for the ones that maintained their bug-killing abilities without harming human cells.

Increasing serotonin can change how people learn from negative information, as well as improving how they respond to it, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications.

The study by scientists at the University of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry and the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Oxford Health Biomedical Research Center (OH BRC) found people with increased serotonin levels had reduced sensitivity to punishing outcomes (for example, losing money in a game) without significantly affecting sensitivity to rewarding ones (winning money).

The study involved 26 participants who were given the drug to increase serotonin, with a further 27 in a control group, who were asked to do a series of tasks measuring learning and behavioral control. State-of-the-art models were then used to understand participant behavior.

Strengthening Public Health Systems For Healthier And Longer Lives — Dr. Ashwin Vasan, Commissioner, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Dr. Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/ab…).

Continue reading “Dr. Ashwin Vasan — Commissioner — NYC Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene — Strengthening Public Health” »

The wearables market has been dominated, so far, by smartwatches and fitness trackers. The first Apple Watch was launched in April 2015, and wearable technology now includes jewelry that tracks your steps and notifies you of an incoming call, VR headsets for gamers, earbuds, smart glasses with Internet access, smart clothing integrated with electronic devices and a range of health monitors.

But the world’s first eyelid wearable device opens up a whole new world of opportunity.

Blink Energy’s device weighs just 0.4 grams (0.014 ounces) — less than half the weight of a paperclip – and is fitted to one eyelid. You barely notice it, says Bar-On. “After two minutes you forget it’s there.”

Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a rapidly growing global problem, and it’s expected to worsen with the production of new kinds of flexible electronics for robotics, wearable devices, health monitors, and other new applications, including single-use devices.

A new kind of flexible substrate material developed at MIT, the University of Utah, and Meta has the potential to enable not only the recycling of materials and components at the end of a device’s useful life, but also the scalable manufacture of more complex multilayered circuits than existing substrates provide.

The development of this new material is described in the journal RSC Applied Polymers (“Photopatternable, Degradable, and Performant Polyimide Network Substrates for E-Waste Mitigation”), in a paper by MIT Professor Thomas J. Wallin, University of Utah Professor Chen Wang, and seven others.

PROVO — A new study from a BYU professor is giving insights into the quality of popularly consumed carbohydrates in the U.S. with a new glycemic index and database developed with the use of artificial intelligence.

Nutrition and dietetics professor Karen Della Corte developed a national glycemic index and glycemic load database that was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. A news release from BYU said the data offers insights into the “evolving quality of carbohydrates consumed in the United States, something that hadn’t been done previously.”

She hopes this database helps increase awareness on the importance of carbohydrate quality in one’s diet and how, with other lifestyle factors, it can help prevent diseases and extend an individual’s health span.

New data on the rotation around both long and short axes of plastic strands may help researchers track and remove microplastics that pollute the ocean.

Pollution from tiny plastic particles (microplastics) increasingly threatens ocean and river ecosystems, and potentially human health, but researchers don’t have a good understanding of how and where these pollutants are transported by flowing waters. Now a research team has observed 1.2-mm-long, 10-µm-wide strands—similar to the most common type of microplastic particles—as they moved in turbulent flows mimicking those in natural environments [1]. The experiments reveal new aspects of their motion, including the rates at which fibers spin around their long axes. The researchers hope that their results will help engineers design structures that can concentrate plastics for easier removal.

Scientists currently have a limited understanding of where microplastics tend to accumulate in the environment, says fluid dynamics expert Alfredo Soldati of the Vienna University of Technology. Where plastics gather depends on natural fluid flows and on the nature of the plastic objects themselves.

ACE, a groundbreaking DNA-powered signal amplification technology, significantly enhances the sensitivity of mass cytometry, providing new insights into various biological and pathological processes.

Since the 1950s, researchers have employed “flow cytometry,” a renowned technique devised by Wallace Coulter, to characterize various types of immune cells in research studies and human blood samples. This method has significantly enhanced our understanding of immune cell development and provided innovative approaches for evaluating human health and diagnosing various blood cancers. Eventually, flow cytometry was extended to analyze other cell types as well.

In traditional flow cytometry, cell surface and intracellular proteins are detected with antibody molecules that are linked to fluorescent probes. However, while providing single-cell sensitivity, this method is limited in detecting multiple proteins by the number of fluorophores that can be clearly distinguished within the entire spectrum of fluorescent light.