Lifeboat Foundation

Engineering organs to replace damaged hearts or kidneys in the human body may seem like something out of a sci-fi movie, but the building blocks for this technology are already in place. In the burgeoning field of tissue engineering, live cells grow in artificial scaffolds to form biological tissue. But to evaluate how successfully the cells develop into tissue, researchers need a reliable method to monitor the cells as they move and multiply.

Now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed a noninvasive method to count the live cells in a three-dimensional (3D) scaffold. The real-time technique images millimeter-scale regions to assess the viability of the cells and how the cells are distributed within the scaffold—an important capability for researchers who manufacture complex biological tissues from simple materials such as living cells.

Their findings have been published in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A.

Dementia is a brain disease that affects around 55 million people worldwide and is characterized by the loss of cognitive functions like memory and reasoning.

The classic, early cognitive symptoms of dementia – like misplacing valuable objects, forgetting names, and finding planning difficult – can creep up slowly over time.

But there are other, more noticeable changes to the body that correlate with dementia risk and can be picked up over a decade before diagnosis. Recent research has found that hearing difficulties may be a warning sign of dementia that arises years before other symptoms of the disease.

Using non-invasive techniques to manipulate our emotions, it might be possible to curtail the screaming horrors that plague our sleep.

A study last year conducted on 36 patients diagnosed with a nightmare disorder showed that a combination of two simple therapies reduced the frequency of their bad dreams.

Scientists invited the volunteers to rewrite their most frequent nightmares in a positive light and then played sound associated with positive experiences as they slept.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed an artificial intelligence system that can create proteins not found in nature using generative diffusion, the same technology behind popular image-creation platforms such as DALL-E and Midjourney.

The system will help advance the field of generative biology, which promises to speed drug development by making the design and testing of entirely new therapeutic proteins more efficient and flexible.

“Our model learns from image representations to generate fully new proteins, at a very high rate,” says Philip M. Kim, a professor in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine. “All our proteins appear to be biophysically real, meaning they fold into configurations that enable them to carry out specific functions within cells.”

The WHO says covid is no longer an emergency, yet does not say where covid originated from. No one knows. What I know is that covid is a cute name for SARS/Coronavirus. Something made in a lab at UNC Chapel Hill with Ralph Baric and his collegue from Wuhan China which he shared his gain of function research with. However the Nature article published in 2015 has this disclaimer, yet there is no animal origin after more than 3 years. So what do we believe?

“30 March 2020 Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”

The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. ACE2 🤔

Continue reading “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence Medicine” »

Will new molecular bioprinting technologies soon allow us to print our DNA?

Other research points to a future when we will be able to print DNA, nucleotide by nucleotide.

Servers running software sold by Salesforce are leaking sensitive data managed by government agencies, banks, and other organizations, according to a post published Friday by KrebsOnSecurity.

At least five separate sites run by the state of Vermont permitted access to sensitive data to anyone, Brian Krebs reported. The state’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program was among those affected. It exposed applicants’ full names, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and bank account numbers. Like the other organizations providing public access to private data, Vermont used Salesforce Community, a cloud-based software product designed to make it easy for organizations to quickly create websites.

Another affected Salesforce customer was Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank. It recently acquired TCF Bank, which used Salesforce Community to process commercial loans. Data fields exposed included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, titles, federal IDs, IP addresses, average monthly payrolls, and loan amounts.

An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experiments—as many as 10,000 per day—potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science.

Reported today in Nature Microbiology, the research was led by a professor now at the University of Michigan.

Continue reading “AI could run a million microbial experiments per year, says study” »

Scientists used a new, noninvasive method to successfully isolate DNA found on the prehistoric artifact.