Lifeboat Foundation

A team led by NASA in Utah’s West Desert is in the final stages of preparing for the arrival of the first U.S. asteroid sample – slated to land on Earth in this month.

A mockup of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer) sample capsule was dropped last Wednesday from an aircraft and landed at the drop zone at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range in the desert outside Salt Lake City. This was part of the mission’s final major test prior to the arrival of the actual capsule on September 24 with its sample of asteroid Bennu, collected in space almost three years ago.

The study reveals a strong association between gut microbial carbohydrate metabolism and insulin resistance, pointing to gut microbes as a key player in metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. Targeting these microbial activities could offer a new therapeutic pathway for improving insulin resistance and overall metabolic health.

Don’t be deceived: Artificial intelligence will be just as ubiquitous and transformative as advertised.

Microsoft is going to update its services agreement very soon and rival Mozilla is relentlessly questioning the Redmond giant about its true intentions with user data regarding AI services.

Global worming?

Scientists recently revived microscopic creatures frozen for 46,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.

The ancient nematodes, better known as roundworms, are able to shut their bodies down in unsuitable environments — a process called anabiosis.

This comprehensive study explores ChatGPT’s ability to answer questions about diabetes, comparing it to human experts in a Danish diabetes center. While familiar users could more often spot the AI-generated answers, the research underscores the need for rigorous evaluation and safe integration of AI in healthcare.

Like biomarker tests, germline testing can help doctors determine the best treatments for patients, but such testing may also help identify people whose family members should be offered testing for potential cancer-causing gene changes.

Guidelines recommend that germline testing be offered to all people with male breast cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, and metastatic prostate cancer. For other cancers with lower likelihood of harmful inherited mutations, recommendations for germline testing vary.

But new findings from a study that is examining the extent of testing for germline mutations among people diagnosed with cancer in California and Georgia between 2013 and 2019 found that germline testing rates are still low. Among the more than 1.3 million people in the study, only about 93,000, or 6.8%, underwent germline genetic testing through March 31, 2021, according to findings published July 3 in JAMA.

A new cancer therapy developed by Purdue University researchers attacks tumors by tricking cancer cells into absorbing a snippet of RNA that naturally blocks cell division. As reported in Oncogene, tumors treated with the new therapy did not increase in size over the course of a 21-day study, while untreated tumors tripled in size over the same time period. The paper is tiled “A first-in-class fully modified version of miR-34a with outstanding stability, activity, and anti-tumor efficacy.”

Cancer can begin almost anywhere in the human body. It is characterized by cells that divide uncontrollably and that may be able to ignore signals to die or stop dividing, and even evade the immune system. The therapy, tested in mouse models, combines a delivery system that targets cancer cells with a specially modified version of microRNA-34a, a molecule that acts “like the brakes on a car,” slowing or stopping cell division, said Andrea Kasinski, lead author and the William and Patty Miller Associate Professor of biological sciences at Purdue University.

In addition to slowing or reversing tumor growth, the targeted microRNA-34a strongly suppressed the activity of at least three genes—MET, CD44 and AXL—known to drive cancer and resistance to other cancer therapies, for at least 120 hours. The results indicate that the patent-pending therapy, the newest iteration in more than 15 years of work targeting microRNA to destroy cancer, could be effective on its own and in combination with existing drugs when used against cancers that have built drug resistance.

After a certain age, approximately 40% of people experience some degree of hearing loss. While age-related hearing loss is most prevalent in adults over the age of 65, it can start occurring far earlier than that, when people are in their 40s or 50s.

Despite their widespread use, existing diagnostic techniques might be unable to detect earlier signs of hearing loss, such as the loss of the ability to hear speech in crowded or noisy environments. Some researchers have thus been trying to devise viable techniques to detect subtler forms of hearing loss, so that they can be addressed early, before they are irreparable.

To this end, two neuroscientists at the Rotman Research Institute in Canada have recently been exploring the relationship between effortful listening and eye movements. Their most recent paper, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, suggests eye movements tend to decrease while young adults are placing greater effort in trying to hear speech.