Lifeboat Foundation

The experiments use human cells to imitate the blastocyst phase — offering a crucial window into human development.

I will try to live as long as possible.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel plans to reject life-extending medical care at the age of 75. The reason he does this is quite similar to why the Kaelons commit ritual suicide in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Does this make sense?

Continue reading “How Long Should You Live? Star Trek, Dr. Emanuel, & The Ethics of Life Extension” »

The FDA on Friday approved Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ Veopoz (pozelimab-bbfg), the first and only treatment indicated specifically for CHAPLE disease, also known as CD55-deficient protein-losing enteropathy, according to the company.

A fully human monoclonal antibody, Veopoz is approved for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients 1 year of age and older with CHAPLE, an ultra-rare hereditary disease that can cause potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal and cardiovascular symptoms.

- CHAPLE—which stands for complement hyperactivation, angiopathic thrombosis, and protein-losing enteropathy—is an inherited immune disease that causes the complement system (the part of your immune system that defends the body against injury and foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses) to become overactive.-FDA.

Continue reading “Regeneron’s Antibody Gets FDA Approval for Ultra-Rare Hereditary Disease” »

Contact Lens Health Week will be observed Aug. 21–25, which makes this a good time to learn more about contact lenses and whether they might be right for you.

Eyeglasses can be fun and fashionable. And they’re a safe and effective way to provide vision correction for most people. Contact lenses also can provide a safe and effective way to correct your vision, and more than 45 million people in the U.S. wear contact lenses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If you’re considering switching to contact lenses, here are some things you should consider.

Hundreds of elders are using an AI-powered robot to combat their loneliness — and it appears to be offering companionship to one New Yorker getting daily breast cancer treatments.

Priscilla O’Kesson, a 77-year-old, told Spectrum News she has been using ElliQ, an AI-powered robot made by Israeli startup Intuition Robotics, to keep her company at her home in a town in Greene County called Catskill.

The AI-robot, designed to help older adults age on their own, uses voice commands and on-screen instructions to talk to and interact with users in real-time. ElliQ can conduct daily check-ins, act as a personal trainer, play games to stimulate the brain, and track their wellness goals, according to the robotics company.

Group A streptococci are one of the most common pathogens that humans are exposed to, and they can cause infections with a wide range of severities, from mild rashes and sore throats to flesh-eating and systemic infections that can be fatal. The number of these infections is also on the rise, although the reasons are unclear. Now researchers have learned more about why these pathogens can be mild in some people, and hit others hard. The findings have been reported in Nature Communications.

Scientists suspected that some interaction between a person’s genetics and the bacterial pathogen could be leading to such varied outcomes, said study co-author Fredric Carlsson, a researcher at Lund University.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the largest institutes in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), conducts and supports basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and ultimately prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases. The Bacterial Pathogenesis and Antimicrobial Resistance Unit (chief John Dekker) in the Laboratory of Clinical Immunology and Microbiology in the Division of Intramural Research (DIR) within NIAID seeks candidates for a postdoctoral fellowship position in microbial genomics.

This position will offer a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of pathogen genomics, systems biology, and clinical infectious diseases. The lab uses a variety of genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, imaging, and molecular approaches to study bacterial pathogens and antimicrobial resistance, with a focus on intra-host evolution in the context of infection. Access to state-of-the-art short-and long-read sequencing, metabolomics, optical, and computational resources is available. See more information about the Bacterial Pathogenesis and Antimicrobial Resistance Unit under chief John P. Dekker and an example of their recent work.

Imagine a person on the ground guiding an airborne drone that harnesses its energy from a laser beam, eliminating the need for carrying a bulky onboard battery.

That is the vision of a group of University of Colorado at Boulder scientists from the Hayward Research Group.

In a new study, the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering researchers have developed a novel and resilient photomechanical material that can transform light energy into mechanical work without heat or electricity, offering innovative possibilities for energy-efficient, wireless and remotely controlled systems. Its wide-ranging potential spans across diverse industries, including robotics, aerospace and biomedical devices.

Chiral molecules are those that have two versions that are mirror images, like our right and left hands. These molecules have the same structure but different properties when they interact with other molecules, including those inside our bodies. This is important for example in drug molecules, where only the right-or left-handed version may have the desired effect.

Detecting and quantifying the chirality of matter however has been difficult. Current methods using a form of light that produces a (right-or left-twisting) helix have the problem that each turn of the helix is much larger than the molecules. This creates important challenges for detecting molecular chirality.

Now, researchers at Imperial College London, with collaborators in Germany and Spain, have come up with a new way to use light to detect chirality. Instead of making light helix in space, they have devised a way to make it helix in time using lasers with moderate intensities.