Lifeboat Foundation

The research team reconstructed an ancestral enzyme by searching databases for corresponding modern enzymes, using the obtained sequences to calculate the original sequence, and introducing the corresponding gene sequence into lab bacteria to produce the desired protein. The enzyme was then studied in detail and compared to modern enzymes.

The research team, led by Professors Mario Mörl and Sonja Prohaska, focused on enzymes called tRNA nucleotidyltransferases, which attach three nucleotide building blocks in the sequence C-C-A to small RNAs (transfer RNAs) in cells. These RNAs are subsequently used to supply amino acids.

<div class=””> <div class=””><br />Amino acids are a set of organic compounds used to build proteins. There are about 500 naturally occurring known amino acids, though only 20 appear in the genetic code. Proteins consist of one or more chains of amino acids called polypeptides. The sequence of the amino acid chain causes the polypeptide to fold into a shape that is biologically active. The amino acid sequences of proteins are encoded in the genes. Nine proteinogenic amino acids are called “essential” for humans because they cannot be produced from other compounds by the human body and so must be taken in as food.<br /></div> </div>

According to a recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, ships may be contributing to the spread of a deadly coral disease called stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) throughout Florida and the Caribbean.

This disease, which was first detected near Miami in 2014, has now impacted coral reefs in Jamaica, St. Maarten, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Belize, among other locations. The findings of this study may help researchers to develop testing and treatment methods that can reduce the risk of further disease transmission.

Researchers suggest that transport through ship hulls, where the vessel takes on ballast water in one region to keep it stable and releases it at a different port, may have contributed to disease spread.

Following China’s abrupt U-turn on zero-COVID policy last month, the country has seen an increase in COVID cases. A leading doctor at one of Shanghai’s top hospitals estimates that up to 70% of the city’s population has been infected with COVID-19.

VALL-E can generate various outputs with the same input text while maintaining the speaker’s emotion and the acoustical prompt. VALL-E can synthesise natural speech with high speaker accuracy by prompting in the zero-shot scenario. According to evaluation results, VALL-E performs much better on LibriSpeech and VCTK than the most advanced zero-shot TTS system. VALL-E even achieved new state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS results on LibriSpeech and VCTK.

It is interesting to note that people who have lost their voice can ‘talk’ again through this text-to-speech method if they have previous voice recordings of themselves. Two years ago, a Stanford University Professor, Maneesh Agarwala, also told AIM that they were working on something similar, where they had planned to record a patient’s voice before the surgery and then use that pre-surgery recording to convert their electrolarynx voice back into their pre-surgery voice.

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers meets PayPal Co founder David Sacks.

Read the accompanying article:
https://unherd.com/thepost/david-sacks-the-tech-purge/

Continue reading “David Sacks: The tech reset has only just begun” »

Interesting interview about the future of Ageing with leading expert with Aubrey De Grey.

This week we interview the phenomenal Aubrey De Grey, the world’s foremost authority on longevity and developing strategies to slow or eliminate aging altogether. The author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and Ending Aging (2007), De Grey is probably best known for the concept of Longevity Escape Velocity, a view that soon medical technology will enable human beings to prevent age-related deterioration, and eventually eliminated aging entirely.

The future of Ageing with Aubrey De Grey.

An international research team has discovered a potential new target for a drug that could prevent the deadly metastases responsible for 90% of cancer deaths.

According to a study published in Nature, an international team of researchers has identified a mechanism that allows cancer cells to spread throughout the body. They found that cancer cells move faster when they are surrounded by thicker fluids, a change that occurs when lymph drainage is disrupted by a primary tumor.

These findings provide a potential new target for stopping metastasis, which is responsible for 90% of cancer deaths.

Sepsis affects 750,000 people in the U.S. and nearly 50 million people globally.

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition arising from the body’s overreactive response against an infection, leading it to injure its own tissues and organs. The first known reference to “sepsis” dates back more than 2,700 years, when the Greek poet Homer used it as a derivative of the word “sepo,” meaning “I rot.”

Despite dramatic improvements in understanding the immunological mechanisms behind sepsis, it still remains a major medical concern, affecting 750,000 people in the U.S. and nearly 50 million people globally each year.

Continue reading “Breakthrough research finds new targets to help fight the costliest disease in the world” »

A team from University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University has identified a small-molecule drug that effectively reduces cholesterol by 70% in animal models.

PCSK9 inhibitors are the second most common type of medication used to manage cholesterol levels, following statins. These drugs are highly effective at reducing excess cholesterol in the blood, but unlike statins, which can be taken orally, PCSK9 inhibitors must be injected. This can be a barrier to their use for some people.

A small-molecule drug that can be taken orally has been developed by researchers at University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The drug has been shown to significantly reduce PCSK9 levels and lower cholesterol by 70% in animal models. These findings, published in the journal Cell Reports.