Lifeboat Foundation

In arguing against nuclear war, Dr. Tsipis said he came « to believe that reason must prevail. »

A curious boy who gazed at the stars from his mountainside Greek village and wondered how the universe came to be, Kosta Tsipis was only 11 when news arrived that the first atomic weapon had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

“After the bomb went off, I sent away for a book because I wanted to understand it,” he told the Globe in 1987.

Continue reading “Kosta Tsipis, MIT physicist and prominent voice for nuclear disarmament, dies at 86” »

Rank in social hierarchy is a condition not solely claimed by humans. In the animal kingdom, male peacocks exhibit brightly colored plumes to illustrate dominance, and underwater, male fish show pops of bright colors to do the same. Despite the links identified between social status, physiology and behavior, the molecular basis of social status has not been known, until now.

“We discovered that two paralogous androgen receptor genes control social status in African cichlid fish,” reports Beau Alward in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Alward is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Houston with a joint appointment in biology and biochemistry. Paralogs are duplicate genes; androgens are hormones like testosterone necessary for male sexual development.

“Testosterone binds to androgen receptors to exert its effects. What we found through genome editing is that the two genes encoding these receptors are required for different aspects of social status,” said Alward. “This type of coordination of social status may be fundamental across species that rely on social information to optimally guide physiology and behavior.”

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Continue reading “Four Quick Stories on Press Freedoms and Venture Funding: Age of Ingenuity” »

A genetic disposition that plays a role in the development of the heart in the embryo also appears to play a key role in the human immune system. This is shown by a recent study led by the University of Bonn (Germany). When the gene is not active enough, the immune defense system undergoes characteristic changes, causing it to lose its effectiveness. Doctors speak of an aging immune system, as a similar effect can often be observed in older people. In the medium term, the results may contribute to reduce these age-related losses. The study is published in the journal Nature Immunology.

The gene with the cryptic abbreviation CRELD1 has so far been a mystery to science. It was known to play an important role in the development of the heart in the embryo. However, CRELD1 remains active after birth: Studies show that it is regularly produced in practically all cells of the body. For what purpose, however, was previously completely unknown.

The Bonn researchers used a novel approach to answer this question. Nowadays, scientific studies with human participants often include so-called transcriptome analyses. By these means, one can determine which genes are active to what extent in the respective test subjects. Researchers are also increasingly making the data they obtain available to colleagues, who can then use it to work on completely different matters. “And this is exactly what we did in our study,” says Dr. Anna Aschenbrenner from the LIMES Institute at the University of Bonn and member of the ImmunoSensation² Cluster of Excellence.

The deep-sea is one of the most mysterious and unexplored extreme environments, holding great potential and interest for science. Despite extensive studies on deep-sea prokaryotes, the diversity of fungi, one of the most ecologically important groups of eukaryotic micro-organisms, remains largely unknown. However, the presence of fungi in these ecosystems is starting to be recognised. Many fungi have been isolated by culture-dependent methods from various deep-sea environments, with the majority showing similarity to terrestrial species. However, culture-independent methods have revealed many novel fungal phylotypes, including novel fungal lineages recently described as Cryptomycota, which are suspected to lack typical fungal chitin-rich cell walls. Although true fungal diversity and its role in deep-sea environments is still unclear, the intention of this review is to assess current knowledge of the diversity of fungi in these ecosystems and to suggest future direction for deep-sea fungal research.

Metabolites from marine fungi have hogged the limelight in drug discovery because of their promise as therapeutic agents. A number of metabolites related to marine fungi have been discovered from various sources which are known to possess a range of activities as antibacterial, antiviral and anticancer agents. Although, over a thousand marine fungi based metabolites have already been reported, none of them have reached the market yet which could partly be related to non-comprehensive screening approaches and lack of sustained lead optimization. The origin of these marine fungal metabolites is varied as their habitats have been reported from various sources such as sponge, algae, mangrove derived fungi, and fungi from bottom sediments. The importance of these natural compounds is based on their cytotoxicity and related activities that emanate from the diversity in their chemical structures and functional groups present on them. This review covers the majority of anticancer compounds isolated from marine fungi during 2012–2016 against specific cancer cell lines.

Marine fungi are important source of secondary metabolites useful for the drug discovery purposes. Even though marine fungi are less explored in comparison to their terrestrial counterparts, a number of useful hits have been obtained from the drug discovery perspective adding to their importance in the natural product discovery (Molinski et al., 2009; Butler et al., 2014), which have yielded a wide range of chemically diverse agents with antibacterial, antiviral and anticancer properties in animal systems. Starting with the celebrated example of cephalosporins, marine fungi have provided unique chemical skeletons that could be used to develop drugs of clinical importance (Bhadury et al., 2006; Saleem et al., 2007; Javed et al., 2011; Sithranga and Kathiresan, 2011). Fungi, in general, have been generous source of drugs as evidenced by the isolation of many drugs in use such as paclitaxel, camptothecin, vincristine, torreyanic acid and cytarabine to name a few.

The fast food chain is radically rethinking what the Golden Arches experience looks like, from a new loyalty program to more high-tech drive-thrus.

Gonzalez thinks that Tesla taxis could help reinvigorate the city’s yellow-cab industry, which has taken a major hit from ride-hailing services like Uber, Via, and Lyft. He also predicts that the city could, for sustainability reasons, start mandating electric cabs, so he’s looking to get ahead of the curve, even if the commercial charging infrastructure isn’t quite there yet.

Read More: Tesla has released ‘full self-driving’ in beta — here’s how experts rank it, Waymo and 16 other power players in the world of self-driving cars

Drive Sally plans to bring hundreds of Teslas to New York’s streets in the near future, but for now, the company is still working out the kinks. Gonzalez suspects that the EVs may be better suited for for-hire “black cars” than yellow cabs, and he also said that the more-spacious Model Y would likely work better as a cab than the Model 3, but they’re still too expensive.