Lifeboat Foundation

Plant based fabric can help reduce exposure to oil based fabrics so there are less cancer risk with clothing. Washi is made many different ways but can be done even with paper pulp and also paper thread.

“The fabric is soft, resistant to water, and it is even washable,” said 61-year-old company president and granddaughter of the founder, Akemi Kawamura, describing the characteristics of washi jackets.

Japanese paper is cut thin and twisted into threads before being woven into fabrics with special machines. “It’s light and airy, so it’s warm in winter, but breathable and comfortable in the summer,” she said.

Continue reading “Heard of Washi Craft Paper? This Japanese Company Uses It to Make Stylish Jackets” »

Some researchers and public health experts have also expressed concerns that microplastic exposure can lead to babies being born underweight.

Recent studies found that the average liter of store-bought bottled water contains more than 240,000 nanoplastics while the majority of meat and plant-based alternatives contain tiny plastics linked to cancer.

Scientists have cautioned that it will take time to transfer to creating the new material because existing manufacturing equipment was only built for traditional plastic.

More than 4 million people in the U.S. have glaucoma, a group of eye diseases that can damage the optic nerve and lead to vision loss. It’s the second-leading cause of blindness worldwide and there’s currently no cure, but there’s a way to help prevent vision loss through early detection and treatment.

The two main treatment options, however, are inefficient and have downsides. Medicated eyedrops are noninvasive but can’t be absorbed for full effectiveness. Repeated injections into the eye can lead to infections or inflammation, not to mention patient discomfort.

Researchers at Binghamton University are exploring several new glaucoma treatments that would be less invasive. In a study recently published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry B, Assistant Professor Qianbin Wang and Ph.D. student Dorcas Matuwana from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Biomedical Engineering shared their findings for drug-carrying liposomes that could be activated in the eye using near-infrared light.

The recipient of the world’s first Neuralink brain-chip transplant is able to control a computer mouse by thinking, the tech startup’s founder Elon Musk announced this week.

“Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of,” Reuters reported that Musk said in an X Spaces event on Monday. “Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking.”

Musk added that Neuralink was trying to get the patient to click the mouse as much as possible, Reuters reported.

The billionaire’s brain device company is currently recruiting patients in the US, UK and Canada.

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An engineered cardiac patch has been created that incorporates human cells with flexible electronics and a nanocomposite structure to not only replace damaged heart tissue, but also provide remote monitoring, electrical stimulation, and the release of medication on demand. Using electroactive polymers and a combination of biological and engineered parts, the patch contracts and expands just like normal human heart tissue, but regulates those actions with the precision of a finely-tuned machine.

Invented by Professor Tal Dvir and PhD student Ron Feiner of Tel Aviv University (TAU), this new breakthrough medical device is claimed by its creators to have capabilities that surpass those of human tissue alone. As such, this patch may give new hope to people such as those 25 percent on the US national waiting list that may die before a suitable transplant heart becomes available, by effectively offering a way to fix – rather than replace – their own heart.

Continue reading “Cyborg cardiac patch offers alternative to heart transplants” »

Musk said he thinks Neuralink will “solve a lot of brain-related diseases,” naming autism and schizophrenia as examples. Autism is not a disease.

Scientists say bioelectricity is the body’s master control. A few aim to use it to regrow limbs, treat cancer — even unlock immortality.

Tissues take shape during development through a series of morphogenetic movements guided by local cell-scale forces. While current in vitro approaches subjecting tissues to homogenous stresses, it is currently no possible to recapitulate highly local spatially varying forces. Here we develop a method for local actuation of organoids using embedded magnetic nanoparticles. Sequential aggregation of magnetically labelled human pluripotent stem cells followed by actuation by a magnetic field produces localized magnetic clusters within the organoid. These clusters impose local mechanical forces on the surrounding tissue in response to applied global magnetic fields. We show that precise, spatially defined actuation provides short-term mechanical tissue perturbations as well as long-term cytoskeleton remodeling. We demonstrate that local magnetically-driven actuation guides asymmetric growth and proliferation, leading to enhanced patterning in human neural organoids. We show that this approach is applicable to other model systems by observing polarized patterning in paraxial mesoderm organoids upon local magnetic actuation. This versatile approach allows for local, controllable mechanical actuation in multicellular constructs, and is widely applicable to interrogate the role of local mechanotransduction in developmental and disease model systems.

The authors have declared no competing interest.