Lifeboat Foundation

Since May, the engineering team with NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft had been trying to solve a mystery. The 45-year-old spacecraft seemed to be in excellent condition, receiving and executing commands from Earth, along with gathering and returning science data — but the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was sending garbled information about its health and activities to mission controllers.

The AACS controls the spacecraft’s orientation and keeps Voyager 1’s high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth, enabling it to send data home. Though all signs suggested that the AACS was still working, the telemetry data was invalid.

While the spacecraft continues to return science data and otherwise operate as normal, the mission team is searching for the source of a system data issue.

Continue reading “The 45-year-old probe is aging gracefully” »

Managing Complex Transplant (and Xenotransplant) Cases Globally — Dr Robert A Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS, Director, NYU Langone Health

Dr. Robert A. Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS, (https://nyulangone.org/doctors/1467404137/robert-montgomery) is the Director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, and Chair and a Professor in their Department of Surgery, where he oversees a diverse team of medical and surgical specialists who provide a wide variety of surgery and transplantation services including bone marrow, heart, kidney, liver, lung, and facial transplantation.

Continue reading “Dr Robert A. Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS — NYU Langone — Managing Complex Transplant Cases Globally” »

For the first time, RIPE researchers have proven that multigene bioengineering of photosynthesis increases the yield of a major food crop in field trials. After more than a decade of working toward this goal, a collaborative team led by the University of Illinois has transgenically altered soybean plants to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis, resulting in greater yields without loss of quality.

Results of this magnitude couldn’t come at a more crucial time. The most recent UN report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022, found that in 2021 nearly 10% of the world population was hungry, a situation that has been steadily worsening over the last few years and eclipsing all other threats to global health in scale. According to UNICEF, by 2030, more than 660 million people are expected to face food scarcity and malnutrition. Two of the major causes of this are inefficient food supply chains (access to food) and harsher growing conditions for crops due to climate change. Improving access to food and improving the sustainability of food crops in impoverished areas are the key goals of this study and the RIPE project.

Continue reading “Bioengineering better photosynthesis increases yields in food crops” »

Engineers have repaired an issue affecting data from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. Earlier this year, the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which keeps Voyager 1’s antenna pointed at Earth, began sending garbled information about its health and activities to mission controllers, despite operating normally. The rest of the probe also appeared healthy as it continued to gather and return science data.

The team has since located the source of the garbled information: The AACS had started sending the telemetry data through an onboard computer known to have stopped working years ago, and the computer corrupted the information.

Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager, said that when they suspected this was the issue, they opted to try a low-risk solution: commanding the AACS to resume sending the data to the right computer.

Dr. Asha M. George, DrPH (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/asha-m-george-drph/) is Executive Director, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, which was established in 2014 to assess gaps in and provide recommendations to improve U.S. biodefense. The Panel determines where the United States is falling short of addressing biological attacks and emerging and reemerging infectious diseases.

Dr. George is a public health security professional whose research and programmatic emphasis has been practical, academic, and political. She served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a senior professional staffer and subcommittee staff director at the House Committee on Homeland Security in the 110th and 111th Congress. She has worked for a variety of organizations, including government contractors, foundations, and non-profits. As a contractor, she supported and worked with all Federal Departments, especially the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Continue reading “Dr Asha M George, DrPH — Building Defenses Against Bio-Terrorism And (Re)Emerging Infectious Disease” »

https://youtu.be/3EnzFULP3nc

To learn more about a meritocratic society you can check out my website at:

https://theinternetoftransportation.com.

Continue reading “How a meritocratic society will increase the mental and physical health of it’s people” »

Biomedical researchers working with lambs got promising results from an experiment designed to prevent the health problems associated with premature births.

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Continue reading “Artificial womb possibility” »

This analysis of 2-year retrospective cohort studies of individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 showed that the increased incidence of mood and anxiety disorders was transient, with no overall excess of these diagnoses compared with other respiratory infections. In contrast, the increased risk of psychotic disorder, cognitive deficit, dementia, and epilepsy or seizures persisted throughout. The differing trajectories suggest a different pathogenesis for these outcomes. Children have a more benign overall profile of psychiatric risk than do adults and older adults, but their sustained higher risk of some diagnoses is of concern. The fact that neurological and psychiatric outcomes were similar during the delta and omicron waves indicates that the burden on the health-care system might continue even with variants that are less severe in other respects. Our findings are relevant to understanding individual-level and population-level risks of neurological and psychiatric disorders after SARS-CoV-2 infection and can help inform our responses to them.

National institute for health and care research oxford health biomedical research centre, the wolfson foundation, and MQ mental health research.

A proportion of patients experience long-lasting symptoms in the weeks and months after a diagnosis of COVID-19. ^1–3 Of those symptoms, cognitive impairment (also referred to as ‘brain fog’) is particularly worrisome: it is one of the most common, ^{4, 5} can affect those with even relatively mild acute COVID-19 illness ^{1, 5} and results in the inability to work for many affected patients. ³ While emerging research is starting to characterize the clinical presentation of post-COVID cognitive deficits, ⁶ its pathogenesis remains elusive. Identifying therapeutic targets is critical to reducing the burden of this COVID-19 complication.

Endotheliopathy has been hypothesized as one potential mechanism underlying post-COVID cognitive deficits. ⁷ According to recent research, microvascular brain pathology following COVID-19 can be caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) main protease M^pro cleaving nuclear factor-κB essential modulator thus inducing the death of brain endothelial cells. ⁸ The same study showed that pharmacologically inhibiting receptor-interacting protein kinase (RIPK) signaling prevents the M^pro-induced microvascular pathology. ⁸

This research leads to the following hypothesis: exposure to a pharmacological inhibitor of RIPK signaling at the time of COVID-19 infection reduces the risk of post-COVID cognitive deficits. In this study, we tested this hypothesis using a retrospective cohort study based on electronic health records (EHRs) data. While many pharmacological agents inhibit RIPK signaling, ⁹ most are only used in very rare clinical scenarios (e.g. sunitinib for the treatment of advanced renal cell carcinoma or pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors). The exception is phenytoin which is used as an anti-epileptic drug and which, among its other effects, is a RIPK1 inhibitor protecting against necroptosis. ^{10, 11} In this study, we compared the incidence of post-COVID cognitive deficits between patients exposed to phenytoin and matched cohorts of patients exposed to other anti-epileptic drugs at the time of their COVID-19 diagnosis.