Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2020

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a rapid test for SARS-CoV-2 that uses an enzyme to cleave viral RNA, initiating a fluorescent signal that can be detected using a smartphone camera, and which can provide a quantitative measurement of the level of viral particles in the sample. The test produce a result in as little as 30 minutes and does not require bulky or expensive laboratory equipment.

Continue reading “CRISPR Test Uses Cell Phone Camera to Detect SARS-CoV-2” »

A ball of 4000-year-old hair frozen in time tangled around a whalebone comb led to the first ever reconstruction of an ancient human genome just over a decade ago.

Stimulation of the nervous system with neurotechnology has opened up new avenues for treating human disorders, such as prosthetic arms and legs that restore the sense of touch in amputees, prosthetic fingertips that provide detailed sensory feedback with varying touch resolution, and intraneural stimulation to help the blind by giving sensations of sight.

Scientists in a European collaboration have shown that optic nerve stimulation is a promising neurotechnology to help the blind, with the constraint that current technology has the capacity of providing only simple visual signals.

Nevertheless, the scientists’ vision (no pun intended) is to design these simple visual signals to be meaningful in assisting the blind with daily living. Optic nerve stimulation also avoids invasive procedures like directly stimulating the brain’s visual cortex. But how does one go about optimizing stimulation of the optic nerve to produce consistent and meaningful visual sensations?

Continue reading “The vision: Tailored optical stimulation for the blind” »

Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

Automated data searches and new customized patient care are the future of cancer treatment.

Each day information floods into every cancer clinic. Oncologists are scrambling for new ways to tap it to deliver the best of modern cancer care.

This article was produced by Hackensack Meridian Health in partnership with Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.

Continue reading “A New Challenge For Personalized Cancer Care: The Information Explosion” »

After a decade of design and fabrication, General Atomics is ready to ship the first module of the Central Solenoid, the world’s most powerful magnet. It will become a central component of ITER, a machine that replicates the fusion power of the Sun. ITER is being built in southern France by 35 partner countries.

ITER’s mission is to prove energy from hydrogen fusion can be created and controlled on earth. Fusion energy is carbon-free, safe, and economic. The materials to power society with hydrogen fusion for millions of years are readily abundant.

Continue reading “ITER Global Fusion Energy Project: After a Decade of Design and Fabrication, Worlds Most Powerful Magnet Ready” »

When exposed to human-made noise, seagrass posidonia reveals permanent severe lesions in their sensory organs that sense gravity, which threatens their survival. This is the main conclusion of a recent study of the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB) of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech (UPC) titled “Seagrass Posidonia is impaired by human-generated noise,” which is published in Nature Communications Biology.

These new findings demonstrate that plants have the physiological ability to perceive sounds, and just as importantly, reveal that commonly encountered sources of noise in the ocean can contribute to deplete their populations.

The last 100 years have seen the introduction of many sources of artificial noise in the sea environment, which have shown to negatively affect marine organisms. Many aspects of how noise and other forms of energy may critically impact the natural balance of the oceans are still unstudied. A lot of attention has been devoted to determining the sensitivity to noise of fish and marine mammals, especially cetaceans and pinnipeds, because they are known to possess hearing organs. Recent studies conducted at the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona Tech (UPC) have also shown that cephalopods, anemones and jellyfish, while lacking similar auditory receptors, are also affected by artificial sounds. Indeed, marine invertebrates have sensory organs whose main functions allow these species to maintain equilibrium and sense gravity in the water column.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now calls the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus, also known as B.1.617.2, a “variant of concern.”

The variant of concern designation is given to strains of the virus that scientists believe are more transmissible or can cause more severe disease. Vaccines, treatments and tests that detect the virus may also be less effective against a variant of concern. Previously, the CDC had considered the Delta variant to be a variant of interest.

Possibly one of the most surprising ways in which our mind and body are interlinked with one another is the gut-brain axis, which is a collection of bidirectional biochemical signals which are transmitted between the nervous system of the body and the digestive system. This is understandably surprising, as the functions of these two distinct parts of the body are completely different to one another. The gut is unlike most other parts of the body, because a large part of its function and health is dictated by cells which are not part of the body, but are instead bacteria cells which colonise the inner lining of the gut.

It has been known for a while now that the makeup of the gut flora changes as we age, which has in turn been linked to cognitive decline through the disruption of the aforementioned gut-brain axis. It has even been shown that faecal transplants can help to correct this cognitive decline in mice, and has been shown to be able to generate a direct positive effect on cognitive function.

Further research into this phenomenon has revealed that the graduate degradation of the gut flora, or more commonly referred to as the ‘good’ bacteria inside the gut has revealed that these bacteria play an important role at keeping unwanted bacteria in check. Researchers at the University Of Florida have found that certain types of ‘good’ bacteria inside the gut produce a chemical known as butyrate, which supresses the growth of pathogenic bacteria such as Enterobacteriaceae. These pathogenic, or ‘bad’ bacteria effect the body in numerous ways, such as interfering with the protein folding, resulting in a build up of toxic and mis-formed proteins within the body. This disruption to protein folding causes problems all across the body, including in the muscles, intestines, gonads, and most notably the brain and central nervous system.