Lifeboat Foundation

Not science, apparentlyLast month, a Ph.D. student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem breed a new strain of ‘supercharged’ lettuce that expanded its vitamin C and beta carotene content by 800 percent and 70 percent respectively.

Research Interests.

Genomic/metabolomic/proteomic approaches for identification of novel (regulatory and biosynthetic) aroma genes.

Continue reading “What is stopping gene-edited food from saving our planet?” »

New Israeli startup aims to get product to market within two years; technology could also be used to identify early markers of cancer.

An Israeli startup is developing a non-invasive early detection method using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify genetic disorders in human embryos.

Via a simple blood test taken from the pregnant mother during the first trimester, IdentifAI Genetics can read the embryo’s entire DNA and provide in-depth analysis to detect genetic disorders.

There are more than 400,000 fewer affordable homes available for sale for households that earn $75,000 to $100,000, compared to the start of the pandemic.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — We may be on the medical precipice of turning back time, or actually reversing the heart rhythm effects of cardiac events. A potentially game-changing “bionic” pacemaker capable of restoring the human heart’s naturally irregular beat is set to undergo trials involving heart patients in New Zealand this year.

“Currently, all pacemakers pace the heart metronomically, which means a very steady, even pace. But when you record heart rate in a healthy individual, you see it is constantly on the move,” says professor Julian Paton, a lead researcher and director of Manaaki Manawa, the Centre for Heart Research at the University of Auckland, in a university release.

Continue reading “Revolutionary ‘bionic’ pacemaker capable of reversing heart failure now set for human trials” »

The Human Genome Project received a lot of media attention from scientific journals and the mainstream press.

Left to right: Time July 3, 2000; Science February 16, 2001; Nature February 15, 2001.

Green: Or sloppy transcription, that our enzymes are just going off and making a bunch of RNA because they don’t know how to control themselves. And it’s just garbage. But, no. And I like your point about 20 years ago, we couldn’t imagine. I would propose that 20 years from now, we might look back at this conversation and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, think about all these other ways that the genome functions.’ There’s no reason to think we have our hands around it all in terms of all the biological complexity of DNA; I’m quite sure we don’t.

Much like people can learn more about themselves by stepping outside of their comfort zones, researchers can learn more about a system by giving it a jolt that makes it a little unstable—scientists call this “out of equilibrium”—and watching what happens as it settles back down into a more stable state.

In the case of a superconducting material known as yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO, experiments have shown that under certain conditions, knocking it out of equilibrium with a laser pulse allows it to superconduct—conduct electrical current with no loss—at much closer to room temperature than researchers expected. This could be a big deal, given that scientists have been pursuing room-temperature superconductors for more than three decades.

But do observations of this unstable state have any bearing on how high-temperature superconductors would work in the real world, where applications like power lines, maglev trains, particle accelerators and medical equipment require them to be stable?

Multiple changes in brain cells during the first month of embryonic development may contribute to schizophrenia later in life, according to a new study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

The researchers, whose study was published in Molecular Psychiatry, used stem cells collected from patients with schizophrenia and people without the disease to grow 3-dimensional “mini-brains” or organoids in the laboratory. By comparing the development of both sets of organoids, they discovered that a reduced expression of two genes in the cells stymies early development and causes a shortage of brain cells in organoids grown from patient stem cells.

“This discovery fills an important gap in scientists’ understanding of schizophrenia,” said senior author Dr. Dilek Colak, assistant professor of neuroscience at the Feil Family Brain and Mind Institute and the Center for Neurogenetics at Weill Cornell Medicine. Symptoms of schizophrenia typically develop in adulthood, but postmortem studies of the brains of people with the disease found enlarged cavities called ventricles and differences in the cortical layers that likely occurred early in life.

Researchers have created intricately patterned materials that mimic antimicrobial, adhesive and drag reducing properties found in natural surfaces.

The team from Imperial College London found inspiration in the wavy and spiky surfaces found in insects, including on cicada and dragonfly wings, which ward off bacteria.

They hope the new materials could be used to create self-disinfecting surfaces and offer an alternative to chemically functionalized surfaces and cleaners, which can promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Still from the future.

A potential fertility treatment involves taking skin cells and reverse engineering them into eggs and sperm.