Lifeboat Foundation

In this animation, the differences between bacteria and viruses are explained. How does a bacterium or virus enter the body? And what are typical complaints of a viral or bacterial infection? Finally, the different treatments for bacterial and viral infections are mentioned.

Health TV makes complex medical information easy to understand. With 2D and 3D animations checked by medical doctors, we give information on certain diseases: what is it, wat are the causes and how is it treated? Subscribe to our Youtube channel and learn more about your health!

Continue reading “Bacteria and viruses — What is the difference between bacteria and viruses?” »

Scientists have created thin, elastic bottlebrush polymer films that can function as artificial muscles at significantly lower voltages than currently available materials, potentially enabling their use in safer medical devices and artificial organs.

Whether wriggling your toes or lifting groceries, muscles in your body smoothly expand and contract. Some polymers can do the same thing — acting like artificial muscles — but only when stimulated by dangerously high voltages. Now, researchers in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces report a series of thin, elastic films that respond to substantially lower electrical charges. The materials represent a step toward artificial muscles that could someday operate safely in medical devices.

Artificial muscles could become key components of movable soft robotic implants and functional artificial organs. Electroactive elastomers, such as bottlebrush polymers, are attractive materials for this purpose because they start soft but stiffen when stretched. And they can change shape when electrically charged. However, currently available bottlebrush polymer films only move at voltages over 4,000 V, which exceeds the 50 V maximum that the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration states is safe. Reducing the thickness of these films to less than 100 µm could lower the required voltages, but this hasn’t been done successfully yet for bottlebrush polymers. So, Dorina Opris and colleagues wanted to find a simple way to produce thinner films.

Four small rooms, a gym and a lot of red sand—NASA unveiled on Tuesday its new Mars-simulation habitat, in which volunteers will live for a year at a time to test what life will be like on future missions to Earth’s neighbor.

The facility, created for three planned experiments called the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), is located at the US space agency’s massive research base in Houston, Texas.

Four volunteers will begin the first trial this summer, during which NASA plans to monitor their physical and mental health to better understand humans’ fortitude for such a long isolation.

While a pandemic unleashed by a disease from the distant past sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, scientists warn that the risks, though low, are underappreciated. Chemical and radioactive waste that dates back to the Cold War, which has the potential to harm wildlife and disrupt ecosystems, may also be released during thaws.

Permafrost covers a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere, having underpinned the Arctic tundra and boreal forests of Alaska, Canada and Russia for millennia. It serves as a kind of time capsule, preserving — in addition to ancient viruses — the mummified remains of a number of extinct animals that scientist have been able to unearth and study in recent years, including two cave lion cubs and a woolly rhino.

Warmer temperatures in the Arctic are thawing the region’s permafrost — a frozen layer of soil beneath the ground — and potentially stirring viruses that, after lying dormant for tens of thousands of years, could endanger animal and human health.

Continue reading “Scientists have revived a ‘zombie’ virus that spent 48,500 years in permafrost” »

This paper aims to promote a quantum framework that analyzes Industry 4.0 cyber-physical systems more efficiently than traditional simulations used to represent integrated systems. The paper proposes a novel configuration of distributed quantum circuits in multilayered complex networks that enable the evaluation of industrial value creation chains. In particular, two different mechanisms for the integration of information between circuits operating at different layers are proposed, where their behavior is analyzed and compared with the classical conditional probability tables linked to the Bayesian networks. With the proposed method, both linear and nonlinear behaviors become possible while the complexity remains bounded. Applications in the case of Industry 4.0 are discussed when a component’s health is under consideration, where the effect of integration between different quantum cyber-physical digital twin models appears as a relevant implication.

Subject terms: Quantum simulation, Qubits.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are integrations of computational and physical components that can interact with humans through new and different modalities. A key to future technological development is precisely this new and different capacity of interaction together with the new possibilies that these systems pose for expanding the capabilities of the physical world through computation, communication and control¹. When CPS are understood within the industrial practice fueled by additional technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), people refer to the Industry 4.0 paradigm². The design of many industrial engineering systems has been performed by separately considering the control system design from the hardware and/or software implementation details.

In a recent study published in the journal Eurosurveillance, researchers examine antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and their mobility in Bifidobacteriales and Lactobacillales species through the use of a unified bioinformatic pipeline to isolate these bacteria from food and probiotic sources.

Study: A survey on antimicrobial resistance genes of frequently used probiotic bacteria, 1901 to 2022. Image Credit: MilletStudio / Shutterstock.com.

Identifying potential sources of AMR is important, as it is one of the key threats to the treatment of multiple communicable diseases worldwide in both humans and animals. Excessive antimicrobial use (AMU) has contributed to a surge in AMR rates worldwide; however, despite mitigation measures to decrease AMU, excessive antibiotic use by animals and humans remains a common practice in many nations.

Welcome to the Radical Remission Project, the online community created by NY Times bestselling author Kelly A. Turner, PhD, author of Radical Remission & Radical Hope! We are dedicated to continuing research and creating community for survivors, patients, friends, family, and health professionals.

People around the globe are so dependent on the internet to exercise socioeconomic human rights such as education, health care, work, and housing that online access must now be considered a basic human right, a new study reveals.

Particularly in developing countries, internet access can make the difference between people receiving an education, staying healthy, finding a home, and securing employment—or not.

Even if people have offline opportunities, such as accessing social security schemes or finding housing, they are at a comparative disadvantage to those with Internet access.

Tom is a writer in London with a Master’s degree in Journalism whose editorial work covers anything from health and the environment to technology and archaeology.