Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have successfully produced human kidney tissue within a living organism which is able to produce urine, a first for medical science.

The study led by Professors Sue Kimber and Adrian Woolf from The University of Manchester, signifies a significant milestone in the development of treatment for kidney disease.

The Medical Research Council and Kidney Research UK funded project is published in the journal Stem Cell Reports.

Continue reading “Scientists create functioning kidney tissue” »

For the first time, scientists have grown human eggs to full maturity in a lab, in a move that could open the doors to new fertility treatments.

This monumental feat was achieved by scientists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Their research is published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction. A similar venture has previously been achieved with mouse eggs, even using the lab-grown eggs to create live mice offspring. However, even after decades of work, researchers have always struggled with replicating the research with human cells.

The lab-grown human eggs start off life, so to speak, as immature egg cells that were removed from ovarian tissue at their earliest stage of development. Scientists then cultured the immature egg cells in a multi-stage process over a few weeks, sensitively controlling the fine balance of oxygen, hormones, and necessary proteins. This process matured the immature egg cells to the same stage “normal” eggs would be when released from the ovaries.

Continue reading “Human Eggs Have Been Grown In The Lab For First Time” »

This pillow is dedicated to reducing acid reflux. This is the MedCline Reflux Relief System. It reclines your body, so stomach acid can’t reach your esophagus.

Liz Jassin, Business Insider:

I’ve had acid reflux for five years. I went to the doctor, and they gave me a long list of foods to cut out of my diet to reduce my reflux symptoms. No chocolate. No alcohol. No coffee. Which, I can’t do that. No spicy foods, to cut acidic foods. It was a ridiculous list that I couldn’t cut out.

Continue reading “This pillow claims to reduce acid reflux symptoms — I decided to try it” »

But not all parents may want to know the results.

Because of how much it impairs the ability to breathe, a seemingly simple injury—a broken rib—is the second leading cause of trauma deaths. A team of Penn State surgeons and a biomedical engineer have invented a better way to help broken ribs heal.

There are 6,000 tweets sent a second. In the time you have read this sentence, 42,000 tweets will have been sent. At an average of 34 characters per tweet that’s 1,428,000 characters.

A new study suggests that printing drugs on a QR code that patients can scan with their phones could pave the way for personalized medicine.

As a group, simple creatures following simple rules can display a surprising amount of complexity, efficiency, and even creativity. Known as swarm intelligence, this trait is found throughout nature, but researchers have recently begun using it to transform various fields such as robotics, data mining, medicine, and blockchains.

Ants, for example, can only perform a limited range of functions, but an ant colony can build bridges, create superhighways of food and information, wage war, and enslave other ant species—all of which are beyond the comprehension of any single ant. Likewise, schools of fish, flocks of birds, beehives, and other species exhibit behavior indicative of planning by a higher intelligence that doesn’t actually exist.

Continue reading “How Swarm Intelligence Is Making Simple Tech Much Smarter” »

Rewriting Life

This new company wants to sequence your genome and let you share it on a blockchain.

People will be able to earn cryptocurrency in exchange for letting pharma companies use their data.

Continue reading “This new company wants to sequence your genome and let you share it on a blockchain” »