Lifeboat Foundation

An exploration of whether aliens are out there, what kind of extraterrestrial life is most likely to exist, and how we’re looking for it.

Shared with Dropbox.

A speech prosthetic developed by a collaborative team of Duke neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and engineers can translate a person’s brain signals into what they’re trying to say.

In a groundbreaking feat, a deep space experiment travelling on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has successfully transmitted data via a near-infrared laser to Earth from 16 million kilometres away!

A deep space experiment traveling on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has just beamed a message via laser to Earth from far beyond the Moon for the first time, an achievement that could transform how spacecraft communicate.

In the farthest-ever demonstration of this type of optical communication, the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data from its position around 16 million kilometers (10 million miles) away – which is around 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth – to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California.

Continue reading “Earth Just Received A Laser-Beamed Message From 16 Million Kilometers Away” »

Maples Scientific Publisher brings together the best original research, analyses, reviews, news updates, practice updates, and thought-provoking editorials.

New light activated cancer treatment.

Several antibodies and antibody fragments have been previously developed for the treatment of various diseases, including cancer^3,4. These antibodies bind to cell surface receptors expressed at higher levels on cancer cells, addressing a major challenge of selective cell targeting in cancer therapy. Although full-length antibodies have shown promise for treatment of several cancers, limited success has been demonstrated in eliminating solid tumors. Due to their large size, full-length antibodies are unable to diffuse deep into solid tumors⁵. In addition, it has been shown that high-affinity antibodies bind to the periphery of the tumor tissues, forming a barrier and preventing their further penetration⁶. Some studies in patients with cancer estimate that only 0.01% of the injected antibodies accumulate per gram of solid tumor tissue⁷. Small antibody fragments with low molecular weight can diffuse much deeper into tissues, presenting an excellent alternative to full-length antibodies. However, small antibody fragments have a low residence time in the body and often have a higher rate of dissociation (k_off) from the target compared with full-length antibodies, limiting their clinical utility⁸. To address these challenges, antibody fragments are often multimerized^9,10 and/or conjugated to larger proteins¹¹, which increases the size of antibody fragments, again reducing their ability to penetrate into the tumor.

One solution to overcome the limitation of low residence time would be to replace the noncovalent interactions between the antibody fragment and its antigen with a covalent bond. In a notable effort, an affibody containing a photocrosslinker in its antigen binding region was shown to covalently link to its antigen and demonstrated higher accumulation on tumor tissues¹². Another pioneering study involved developing affibodies containing a latent bioreactive amino acid in their antigen binding region that forms a covalent bond with the target antigen by proximity-dependent reaction without any external impetus¹³. However, the former had substantially lower binding affinity compared with its wild-type (wt) counterpart and thus, requires using a high concentration for efficient initial binding, while the latter could react with target antigen expressed on healthy cells causing side effects.

Continue reading “Site-specific encoding of photoactivity and photoreactivity into antibody fragments” »

This is a nontoxic version of cancer treatment that works on any type of cancer.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer affecting women in Singapore. Treatment is multimodal and often involves surgery to remove the cancer and lymph nodes involved.

Adjuvant therapy, given after the initial treatment, is used to irradiate and destroy micrometastases, which are cancer cells in the blood stream or lymphatics, to decrease recurrence. This form of therapy is subdivided into local (radiotherapy) and systemic therapy (endocrine therapy, chemotherapy and targeted therapy).

Continue reading “New tumor-selective light treatment could kill breast cancer cells with greater accuracy and improve tumor control” »

Move over Perseverance, a new kind of robot is coming to town.

Starship Troopers.
by Robert A. Heinlein.
Read by Christopher Hurt.
Originally issued by NLS on cassette in 1982
Can we refrain from inane comments about fascism? Unless you have something constructive to say I’ll probably just delete it and block you from commenting in the future. Or I might turn off comments altogether. With that out of the way, enjoy the book.
“Thousands of years in the future, a young man joins mobile infantry and fights in an interplanetary war against insect-like aliens.“
Chapter list:
00:00:00 — (i) Book info.
00:01:03 — (01)
00:38:44 — (02)
01:17:03 — (03)
01:35:28 — (04)
01:51:35 — (05)
02:24:49 — (06)
03:03:54 — (07)
03:23:54 — (08)
03:49:49 — (09)
04:05:24 — (10)
04:36:24 — (11)
05:13:19 — (12)
06:25:44 — (13)
08:20:23 — (14)

Like these books? Want to help?
These books come from the National Library Services.
I encourage you to donate:
https://www.loc.gov/nls/about/donate/