Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,029

You may have come home with it after a recent trip to New England. Or you may have gotten it from that friend or family member who flew in from New York over the holidays.

The newest Omicron subvariant of concern is XBB.1.5, and it has arrived in Southern California. This version of the coronavirus is more contagious and more resistant to existing immunity than any of its predecessors.

“It’s just the latest and greatest and most infectious variant,” said Paula Cannon, a virologist at USC. “It’s amazing to me that this virus keeps finding one more trick to make itself even more infectious, even more transmissible.”

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Summary: Lab-created retinal cells created from human stem cells can reach out and connect to neighboring cells, a new study reports. The cells have the capacity to replace damaged retinal cells and carry sensory information. The findings could pave the way for clinical trials for the treatment of a range of diseases associated with vision loss and blindness.

Source: University of Wisconsin.

Retinal cells grown from stem cells can reach out and connect with neighbors, according to a new study, completing a “handshake” that may show the cells are ready for trials in humans with degenerative eye disorders.

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Prochlorococcus is the smallest and numerically most abundant cyanobacterium in the oceans. It has a large pangenome and hypervariable genomic islands linked to niche differentiation and phage defense. The smallest and most numerous cyanobacterium in the oceans is Prochlorococcus.

According to recent research by MIT, these microscopic bacteria communicate with one another by a previously unidentified mechanism, even when they are far apart. Because of this, they can pass along entire gene sets, such as those enabling them to assimilate a certain type of nutrition or protect themselves against viruses, even in areas where their population in the water is quite low.

According to the findings, a new class of genetic agents involved in horizontal gene transfer —in which genetic material is directly transferred across animals, whether they are of the same species or not—has been discovered by methods other than lineal descent. Tycheposons are DNA sequences that can spontaneously detach from surrounding DNA and can include multiple complete genes, according to scientists.

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It is the first bionic hand with a multi-touch feedback feature and boasts a 32-grip pattern.

Psyonic, a bionic device manufacturer, presented the Ability Hand at CES 2023, the world’s first touch-sensing bionic hand. The hand can feel the things it holds, even the most delicate objects. It is a bionic prosthetic device, and the company aims to deliver it to more people than ever.

Psyonic.

The product is the first bionic hand with a multi-touch feedback feature. It weighs only 490 grams, which is 20 percent less than the average human hand. It has a 200-millisecond closing speed that makes it faster than any other bionic hand available on the market. It means it closes its fingers at a lightning-fast speed that shows its capability to grasp things faster than other bionic hands.

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The robot is used for installing implants.

Could a robot make dentistry speedier and more comfortable? That’s what the new Yomi robot aims to do for implants, according to the device’s website. “We created Yomi to tackle one of the dental procedures people fear the most, implants,” write the robot’s inventors on their site.

The first and only FDA-approved dental surgery robot.

“Yomi is the first and only FDA-cleared robotic system for dental surgery. Through a combination of haptic feedback, intuitive visualization, and audio cues, Yomi helps doctors place implants with superior accuracy and precision.”

Yomi.

Continue reading “This first FDA-approved dental robot will make implants safer” | >

Not as a charger but as an antenna.

A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found that the human body could be a useful tool to harvest waste energy and use it to power devices in the future, including those used for 6G, the next generation of wireless communication, a university press release said.

The world has just begun to experience the wonders of 5G wireless communication that has been rolled out in many countries across the world. The next generation, though, referred to as 6G, promises up to 1,000 times faster, even faster data rate and a tenth of the latency seen with 5G.

Tippapatt/iStock.

The era of the Internet of Things (IoT) that is expected to begin with 5G will enter a new phase with its successor, with an even larger number of devices and sensors expected to come online. The higher communication speeds in 6G are being estimated due to the development of Visible Light Communication (VLC), a type of wireless fiber-optic network.

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Though the team largely explains the function of SLYM in mice, they do study its presence in the adult human brain as well.

The human brain is tremendously complex, and scientists are yet to unlock its full potential. Now, a discovery has identified a previously unknown component of brain anatomy that doubles up as a protective barrier for our grey matter and a platform from which immune cells can monitor the brain, according to a release.

Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester and the University of Copenhagen, and Kjeld Møllgård, M.D.

Nopparit/iStock.

The researchers named the layer SLYM, an abbreviation of Subarachnoidal LYmphatic-like Membrane. SLYM divides the space below the arachnoid layer and the subarachnoid space into two sections.

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What it means to be conscious is more than just a philosophical question. Researchers continue to investigate how conscious experience arises from the electrochemical activity of the human brain. The answer has important implications for the way brain health is understood—from coma, wherein a person is alive but unable to move or respond to his or her environment, to surgical anesthesia, to the altered thought processes of schizophrenia.

Recent research suggests that there’s no one location in the brain that causes consciousness, pointing to a network phenomenon. However, tracing the various linkages between regions in the brain networks that give rise to awareness and wakefulness has been elusive.

A new approach using functional MRI, an imaging technique that allows you to see and measure brain activity through changes in blood flow over time, provides new insight into how we describe and study conscious states.

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What percentage of your battery is used…

AMHERST, Mass. – 5G wireless technology is just starting to take off worldwide, but a new study is already speculating on the future of 6G! Researchers from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst say, unlike older technology, 6G could end up using people as antennas.

Specifically, 6G telecommunications could possibly take advantage of Visible Light Communication (VLC), which is like a wireless version of fiberoptics. Right now, fiberoptics use incredibly thin glass or plastic strands to transmit information on flashes of light. These wires are extremely small, but also extremely fragile.

The UMass Amherst team says they have created a low-cost and innovative way of harvesting waste energy from VLC — using the human body as an antenna. Their invention can recycle waste energy to power wearable devices and possibly larger electronics as well.

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