Lifeboat Foundation

“As complex living systems, we likely have trillions upon trillions of tiny nanoscopic holes in our cells that facilitate and regulate the crucial processes that keep us alive and make up who are,” says Marija Drndić, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania who develops synthetic versions of the biological pores that “guide the exchange of ions and molecules throughout the body.”

The ability to control and monitor the flow of molecules through these pores has opened new avenues for research in the last two decades, according to Drndić, and the field of synthetic nanopores, where materials like graphene and silicon are drilled with tiny holes, has already led to significant advances in DNA sequencing.

In a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology (“Coupled nanopores for single-molecule detection”), Drndić and Dimitri Monos, her longtime collaborator at the Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), presented a new kind of nanopore technology with the development of a dual-layer nanopore system: a design that consists of two or more nanopores, stacked just nanometers apart, which allows for more precise detection and control of molecules like DNA as they pass through.

Noncanonical amino acids are efficiently incorporated into proteins by optimizing mRNA codon usage.

Given the right conditions, certain types of cells are able to self-assemble into new lifeforms after the organism they were once part of has died.

Google researchers have created an innovative AI model called Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR), designed to identify acoustic biomarkers for diseases like tuberculosis.

It can listen to human sounds and flag early signs of disease.

Continue reading “New AI model helps researchers detect disease based on coughs” »

Dr. Sam Parnia talks about reviving people adter they died. Very informative. Fast forward a little to listen to it.

Photonic applications harness the power of light-matter interactions to generate various intriguing phenomena. This has enabled major advances in communications, medicine, and spectroscopy, among others, and is also used in laser and quantum technologies.

In this sense, the cemi theory incorporates Chalmers’ (Chalmers 1995) ‘double-aspect’ principle that information has both a physical, and a phenomenal or experiential aspect. At the particulate level, a molecule of the neurotransmitter glutamate encodes bond energies, angles, etc. but nothing extrinsic to itself. Awareness makes no sense for this kind matter-encoded information: what can glutamate be aware of except itself? Conversely, at the wave level, information encoded in physical fields is physically unified and can encode extrinsic information, as utilized in TV and radio signals. This EM field-based information will, according to the double-aspect principle, be a suitable substrate for experience. As proposed in my earlier paper (McFadden 2002a) ‘awareness will be a property of any system in which information is integrated into an information field that is complex enough to encode representations of real objects in the outside world (such as a face)’. Nevertheless, awareness is meaningless unless it can communicate so only fields that have access to a motor system, such as the cemi field, are candidates for any scientific notion of consciousness.

I previously proposed (McFadden 2013b), that complex information acquires its meaning, in the sense of binding of all of the varied aspects of a mental object, in the brain’s EM field. Here, I extend this idea to propose that meaning is an algorithm experienced, in its entirety from problem to its solution, as a single percept in the global workspace of brain’s EM field. This is where distributed information encoded in millions of physically separated neurons comes together. It is where Shakespeare’s words are turned into his poetry. It is also, where problems and solutions, such as how to untangle a rope from the wheels of a bicycle, are grasped in their entirety.

There are of course many unanswered questions, such as degree and extent of synchrony required to encode conscious thoughts, the influence of drugs or anaesthetics on the cemi field or whether cemi fields are causally active in animal brains. Yet the cemi theory provides a new paradigm in which consciousness is rooted in an entirely physical, measurable and artificially malleable physical structure and is amenable to experimental testing. The cemi field theory thereby delivers a kind of dualism, but it is a scientific dualism built on the distinction between matter and energy, rather than matter and spirit. Consciousness is what algorithms that exist simultaneously in the space of the brain’s EM field, feel like.

Life insurers and those offering income protection and permanent disability insurance will be banned from using genetic testing to refuse cover, or hike up charges, for a range of insurance products.

The federal government announced on Tuesday it would ban the practice that saw consumers discriminated against if they disclosed the results of genetic tests that predict their likelihood of an inherited disease.

It comes after consultation to address genetic discrimination in life insurance earlier this year. More than 1,000 submissions were received with 97 per cent supporting a total ban.

UC San Diego researchers have identified a new inflammatory mechanism in the heart’s borderzone after a heart attack, driven by stressed cardiomyocytes. This discovery may lead to novel therapies aimed at preventing heart failure by targeting mechanical stress, DNA sensing, and IFN signaling.

Ischemic heart disease is the leading cause of death globally. It typically starts with a heart attack, or myocardial infarction (MI), during which part of the heart muscle dies because it doesn’t receive enough blood from the coronary arteries. This event triggers intense inflammation, changes to the structure of the heart wall, and eventually can lead to heart failure.

Anti-inflammatory drugs have been surprisingly ineffective at preventing heart failure. As a consequence, they are not a routine part of post-MI care. However, it is possible that the most potent molecular and cellular inflammation targets have yet to be discovered.