Lifeboat Foundation

Could Zika be used as a cancer treatment?

SAN FRANCISCO – Radar satellite operator Iceye released a product Jan. 20 to detect dark vessels, ships at sea that are not identifying themselves with Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders.

Iceye combines observations from its constellation of three synthetic aperture radar satellites with other data sources to provide customers with radar satellite images of vessels that are not broadcasting their identification, position and course with AIS transponders. The technology is designed to help government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and commercial customers curb drug and human trafficking, find illegal fishing vessels and enforce rules against illegal transshipment of goods, Finland-based Iceye said in a Jan. 20 news release.

Dark vessel detection is a popular application for radar satellites which gather data day, night and in all weather conditions, Pekka Laurila, Iceye co-founder and chief strategy officer told SpaceNews. With three satellites in orbit, Iceye offers customers the ability to frequently revisit areas of interest. In addition, the company has developed machine learning algorithms to speed up dark vessel detection, he added.

Generet prize will fund more trials by Steven Laureys to help written-off ‘vegetative’ patients.

The lungs and placentas of fetuses in the womb — as young as 11 weeks after conception — already show a bacterial microbiome signature, which suggests that bacteria may colonize the lungs well before birth. This first-time finding deepens the mystery of how the microbes or microbial products reach those organs before birth and what role they play in normal lung and immune system development.

A team led by University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher Charitharth Vivek Lal, M.D., found that a human fetal microbiome DNA signature is present in lungs as early as the first trimester. This fetal lung microbiome showed changes in diversity during fetal development, suggesting microbiome maturation with advancing gestational age. Finally, a placental microbiome was also present in human fetal tissue, and this microbiome signature showed some taxonomic overlap with the corresponding human fetal lung microbiome.

“We speculate that maternal-fetal microbial DNA transfer — and perhaps of other microbial products and whole live or dead bacteria — is a realistic possibility,” said Lal, an associate professor in the UAB Pediatrics Division of Neonatology. “This may serve to ‘prime’ the developing innate immune system of the fetus and help in establishment of a normal host-commensal relationship.”

Northwestern University researchers have added a new dimension to the importance of diversity.

For the first time, physicists have experimentally demonstrated that certain systems with interacting entities can synchronize only if the entities within the system are different from one another.

This finding offers a new twist to the previous understanding of how collective behavior found in nature—such as fireflies flashing in unison or pacemaker cells working together to generate a heartbeat—can arise even when the individual insects or cells are different.

3D bio-printed Lung tissue.

Rice University researcher’s bioprinting method could be scaled up to one day construct an entire organ and allow organs to be made using some of a patient’s own cells to prevent organ rejection. Researcher’s long term goals are to bioprint fully functioning organs. Synthetic organs can extend the waiting period of an average 3.6 years for a real organ.

Continue reading “3D Bioprinted Organ Just Took Its First ‘Breath’” »

Research is at an early stage but scientists said it had huge potential for destroying cancers.

Jane McLelland beat cervical, lung, and blood cancers using the missing link to defeat cancer: starving it. She is partnering with Life Extension® to help other patients achieve the same results.

By Laurie Mathena.

After getting a considerable success in convincing scientists and investors, in the last decades, that undoing aging through a damage repair approach is possible and desirable, Aubrey de Grey is turning his advocacy efforts to politicians. In this video, he explains why.

https://thelongevityforum.com/
Aubrey de Grey delivers a keynote on the next steps for longevity for policy makers.

Continue reading “Aubrey de Grey, CSO, SENS, ‘Scientists, check — Investors, check — Next up, policy makers’” »