Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have for the first time characterized a unique molecular mechanism of the early stages of programmed cell death or apoptosis, a process which plays a crucial role in prevention of cancer.

The study, which is published June 2, 2023 in Science Advances, was led by Dr. Luke Clifton at the STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source (ISIS) in Oxfordshire, alongside co-lead Professor Gerhard Gröbner at the University of Umeå and partners at the European Spallation Source in Sweden. It is the most recent in a series of research collaborations by this team, investigating the cellular proteins responsible for apoptosis.

Apoptosis is essential for human life, and its disruption can cause cancerous cells to grow and not respond to cancer treatment. In healthy cells, it is regulated by two proteins with opposing roles known as Bax and Bcl-2.

Year 2022 face_with_colon_three

New way of altering DNA is used to engineer an “exciting”, experimental therapy for a 13-year-old girl.

Year 2022 o.o!!!

From ocean depths to mountain peaks, humans have littered the planet with tiny shards of plastic. We have even absorbed these microplastics into our bodies—with uncertain implications.

Images of plastic pollution have become familiar: a turtle suffocated by a shopping bag, water bottles washed up on beaches, or the monstrous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” of floating detritus.

Continue reading “‘They’re everywhere’: microplastics in oceans, air and human body” »

On Monday, Apple is more than likely going to reveal its long-awaited augmented or mixed reality Reality Pro headset during the keynote of its annual WWDC developer conference in California. It’s an announcement that has been tipped or teased for years now, and reporting on the topic has suggested that at various times, the project has been subject to delays, internal skepticism and debate, technical challenges and more. Leaving anything within Apple’s sphere of influence aside, the world’s overall attitude toward AR and VR has shifted considerably — from optimism, to skepticism.

Part of that trajectory is just the natural progression of any major tech hype cycle, and you could easily argue that the time to make the most significant impact in any such cycle is after the spike of undue optimism and energy has subsided. But in the case of AR and VR, we’ve actually already seen some of the tech giants with the deepest pockets take their best shots and come up wanting — not for lack of trying, but because of limitations in terms of what’s possible even at the bleeding edge of available tech. Some of those limits might actually be endemic to AR and VR, too, because of variances in the human side of the equation required to make mixed reality magic happen.

The virtual elephant in the room is, of course, Meta. The name itself pretty much sums up the situation: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg read a bad book and decided that VR was the inevitable end state of human endeavor — the mobile moment he essentially missed out on, but even bigger and better. Zuckerberg grew enamored by his delusion, first acquiring crowdfunded VR darling Oculus, then eventually commandeering the sobriquet for a shared virtual universe from the dystopian predictions of a better book and renaming all of Facebook after it.

Imagine a world where every conceivable facet of your reality is nothing more than sensory experience devoid of any real meaning; And that your emotions, organs, and even your closest relationships were nothing but pleasurable impulses being transmitted directly into your brain.

This is the hypothesis posited by the Brain in a Vat theory. If an evil scientist (or rich transhumanist, whichever you prefer) were to take your brain, submerge it in a jar or vat of nutrients, in theory, you could be force fed the information you process on a daily basis.

If your neurons were connected to some type of hardware and/or software that could continuously provide the necessary stimuli, you’d be ripe for this process.

A typical human cell is metabolically active, roaring with chemical reactions that convert nutrients into energy and useful products that sustain life. These reactions also create reactive oxygen species, dangerous by-products like hydrogen peroxide which damage the building blocks of DNA in the same way oxygen and water corrode metal and form rust. Similar to how buildings collapse from the cumulative effect of rust, reactive oxygen species threaten a genome’s integrity.

Cells are thought to delicately balance their energy needs and avoid damaging DNA by containing metabolic activity outside the nucleus and within the cytoplasm and mitochondria. Antioxidant enzymes are deployed to mop up reactive oxygen species at their source before they reach DNA, a defensive strategy that protects the roughly 3 billion nucleotides from suffering potentially catastrophic mutations. If DNA damage occurs anyway, cells pause momentarily and carry out repairs, synthesizing new building blocks and filling in the gaps.

Despite the central role of cellular metabolism in maintaining genome integrity, there has been no systematic, unbiased study on how metabolic perturbations affect the DNA damage and repair process. This is particularly important for diseases like cancer, characterized by their ability to hijack metabolic processes for unfettered growth.

Infections and other diseases can cause red blood cells to rupture, releasing the oxygen-binding molecule hemoglobin, which breaks down into heme. Free heme can cause significant inflammation and organ damage, leading to morbidity and mortality.

Researchers from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital discovered NLRP12, an innate immune pattern recognition receptor, to be the key molecule responsible for inducing inflammatory cell death and pathology in response to heme combined with other cellular damage or infection. The finding provides a new potential drug target to prevent morbidity in certain illnesses. The research was published today in Cell.

Many infectious and inflammatory diseases, including malaria or SARS-CoV-2 virus infections and sickle cell disease, cause red blood cells to break apart and spill their contents. The process, hemolysis, releases the hemoglobin. In the bloodstream, hemoglobin then breaks down into a substance called heme.

Severe brain injuries or head traumas in humans can lead to various stages of so-called disorders of consciousness (DoC). These are states in which consciousness is either partly or entirely absent, such as a coma; unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, also known as a vegetative state; and minimally conscious state.

Accurately evaluating patients who have lost consciousness is of crucial importance, as it allows doctors to determine what treatments to administer and how to facilitate the re-emergence of consciousness. Typically, to clinically evaluate consciousness, doctors observe the behavior of patients in response to sensory stimuli, such as sounds or images.

For instance, while patients in a vegetative state are awake but continue to be unresponsive to external stimuli, patients with MCS exhibit some behaviors that indicate that they are conscious. So far, most methods to assess the consciousness level of patients rely on sounds or visual stimuli, yet olfactory stimuli could potentially prove useful too.

Researchers from Zhejiang University, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Northwest University, and Yunnan University, Aarhus University, and BGI-Research have jointly led a series of significant new studies are published in a special issue of the journal Science, and in papers in Nature Ecology & Evolution and Science Advances.

Co-led by Guojie Zhang from Centre for Evolutionary & Organismal Biology at Zhejiang University, Dong-Dong Wu at Kunming Institute of Zoology, Xiao-Guang Qi at Northwest University, Li Yu at Yunnan University, Mikkel Heide Schierup at Aarhus University, and Yang Zhou at BGI-Research, the Primate Genome Consortium reported a series of publications from its first phase program. The program includes high quality reference genomes from 50 primate species, of which 27 were sequenced for the first time. These studies provide new insights on the speciation process, genomic diversity, social evolution, sex chromosomes, and the evolution of the brain and other biological traits.

The comparative analysis of primate genomes within a phylogenetic context is crucial for understanding the evolution of the human genetic architecture and the inter-species genomic differences associated with primate diversification. Previous studies of primate genomes have focused mainly on primate species closely related to humans and were constrained by the lack of broader phylogenetic coverage.