Lifeboat Foundation

The televised gala, broadcast on the National Geographic Channel as well as YouTube and China’s Tencent, whose founder Ma Huateng is also a sponsor, played heavily on a theme that’s become somewhat tarnished in Silicon Valley in recent years—that scientific and technological progress will solve humanity’s biggest problems. For the past two years, Facebook and Google have both been battered by lawmakers and the public for how they’ve failed to eliminate the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories (sometimes about science) and content that connects violent extremists. Both Zuckerberg and Pichai have also countered rising complaints from the tech giants’ workforces.

Some of the top scientists who accepted Breakthrough Prize awards used the nationally broadcast ceremony to decry the spread of misinformation, problems that continue to dog the tech giants whose leaders, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, celebrated at the glitzy Silicon Valley gala Sunday evening.

“Science is a rock of truth in a sea of fake news,” said physicist Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, who with collaborators Sergio Ferrara and Daniel Freedman accepted an award Sunday evening for their work around the theory of supergravity.

Continue reading “At Gala Held” »

New technique makes it easier to build stable “tissues”.

A fascinating new study from scientists at UC Berkeley has homed in on exactly which phase of sleep seems to best keep anxiety levels in check. The research both affirms a causal association between sleep and anxiety, and suggests sleep deprivation lowers activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that helps regulate our emotions.

For well over a century scientists have observed a correlation between sleep disruption and mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. Only in the last few years have clear neural mechanisms been discovered helping us understand exactly what our brains are doing when we are asleep, and how physiologically disruptive sleep deprivation can be.

A new study from UC Berkeley has focused more specifically on how sleep can modulate a person’s anxiety levels. Using a number of experimental measures, including polysomnography and functional MRI, the research first found that just one night of sleep deprivation resulted in 50 percent of the study subjects reporting anxiety levels the next day equal to those detected in subjects with clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders.

In a surprise to many researchers around the world, Chinese authorities recently approved a novel drug claimed to improve cognitive function in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The drug, derived from a marine algae, is the first new Alzheimer’s drug to reach the market anywhere in the world in almost 20 years, and is suggested to reduce neuroinflammation by modulating a person’s gut microbiome.

GV-971, or sodium oligomannate, is derived from a common form of seaweed called brown algae. For several years the compound has been under investigation in China as a treatment to slow, or even reverse, cognitive decline associated with mild to moderate cases of Alzheimer’s disease.

The latest announcement from China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has granted the drug “conditional approval”, meaning it is to be fast-tracked to market based on positive early Phase 3 trial results. The “conditional approval” requires ongoing studies to verify efficacy and safety, however, it can now move to open market sales in China within the next month or two.

Boston University researchers have developed a new, “intelligent” metamaterial—which costs less than ten bucks to build—that could revolutionize magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), making the entire MRI process faster, safer, and more accessible to patients around the world. The technology, which builds on previous metamaterial work by the team, was described in a new paper in Advanced Materials.

MRI is used by clinicians to diagnose medical problems by spotting abnormalities that could indicate anything from a torn meniscus to muscular dystrophy. But MRIs are expensive, expose patients to radiation, and they take a long time—often the greater part of an hour for a single scan. Finding enough MRI time for waiting patients can be a problem, even in US hospitals, but in hospitals in countries like India, waiting periods of a year or more can put patients’ lives at risk.

So how do we speed up the MRI process without jeopardizing the quality of imaging? Xin Zhang, a BU College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering and a Photonics Center professor, and a team of researchers that includes Stephan Anderson, a Boston Medical Center radiologist and BU School of Medicine professor of radiology, and Xiaoguang Zhao, a MED assistant research professor of radiology, are getting creative with metamaterials to solve the problem.

All children will be able to receive whole genome sequencing at birth, under ambitions laid out by the Health Secretary.

Matt Hancock said that in future, the tests would be routinely offered, alongside standard checks on newborns, in order to map out the risk of genetic diseases, and offer “predictive, personalised” care.

Ministers have already promised that such tests will be offered to all children diagnosed with cancer by the end of this year.

Human aging has been reversed in a new medical breakthrough. John Iadarola, Brooke Thomas, and Greg Fahy break it down on The Damage Report. Follow The Damage Report on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheDamageReportTYT/

Help build the Home of the Progressives http://tyt.com/JOIN

Continue reading “Human Aging REVERSED In New Medical Breakthrough” »

Tissue injury‐induced senescence is conserved in zebrafish. Fin amputation in adult fish lead to the appearance of senescent cells at the site of damage, and their removal impairs tissue regeneration…

Scientists successfully extended the average lifespan of mice by breeding them using embryonic stem cells with extra-long telomeres. The findings are significant because the researchers managed to extend lifespan without genetic modification, and they also shed light on the aging process and techniques that might someday slow it.

The study — published October 17 in Nature Communications — focuses on telomeres, which are stretches of DNA found at the end of chromosomes.

Because telomeres protect the genetic material inside chromosomes, they’ve been likened to the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces. But telomeres have also been compared to bomb fuses, or “molecular clocks,” because they become shorter each time a cell divides, eventually shrinking so much that the cell dies or stops dividing. This shortening of our telomeres is associated with aging, cancer, and death.