Lifeboat Foundation

Pearls have long been favored as objects of beauty. Now, Purdue University innovators are using the gem to provide potential new opportunities for spectral information processing that can be applied to spectroscopy in biomedical and military applications.

The Purdue team demonstrated light transport-assisted information processing by creating a pearl spectrometer.

Spectrometers probe interactions of matter and light as a function of the electromagnetic spectrum and are commonly used in biomedical and military applications. For example, they have been used for diagnostics of various types of cancer and for military gas sensing.

Cancer Research UK scientists have invented a new experimental drug that aims to harness the full power of the body’s own immune system, launching a two-pronged response against cancer, according to a study published in Nature Cancer today.

In the study, partly funded by Cancer Research UK, the new immunotherapy drug, which targets suppressive ‘regulatory’ immune cells inside a tumor, significantly improved long-term survival in animal models even when used without other drugs.

Continue reading “Scientists develop next-generation immunotherapy now entering early phase clinical trials” »

Circa 2017 o.o

When life gave one Chinese company giant panda poop, it decided to make paper — and profits. The Qianwei Fengsheng Paper Company in southwest Sichuan province has teamed up with the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda to recycle the animal’s faeces and food debris into toilet paper, napkins and other household products, state media reported Wednesday. The goods, soon to be released on the Chinese market, will be marketed as part of a “panda poo” product line decorated with a picture of the bamboo-eating, black-and-white bear. “They’re taking care of our garbage for us,” Huang Yan, a researcher at the giant panda centre, told the Chengdu Business Daily. Huang told Xinhua state news agency that the 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of bamboo poo that adult pandas unleash daily are rich in fibre after absorbing the fructose from the shoots. In addition to their valuable dung, pandas also produce 50 kilograms of food waste every day from the bamboo husks they spit out after chewing. While the process of turning bamboo into paper generally involves the breaking down of fructose to extract fibre, this step naturally occurs in the pandas’ digestive tract, the paper company’s president, Yang Chaolin, told Xinhua. Fengsheng will collect the faeces from three panda bases in Sichuan a couple of times a week. After it is boiled, pasteurised and turned into paper, it will be tested for bacteria before going on sale. Boxes of “panda poo” tissues will be sold at 43 yuan ($6.5) a pop. “Pandas get what they want and we do too,” Yang said. “It’s a win-win.”

It took dozens of park rangers, searchers, doctors and nurses, but Michael Knapinski, who became lost amid freezing, whiteout conditions in Mount Rainier National Park last weekend, was brought back to life in what his medical team is calling a miraculous recovery.

The 45-year-old from Woodinville was on a snowy hike with a friend on the morning of Nov. 7. The two separated below the Muir Snowfield. His friend planned to continue on skis to Camp Muir while Knapinski snowshoed down toward Paradise, where they expected to meet up.

“I was pretty close to the end (of the trail). … Then it turned to whiteout conditions, and I couldn’t see anything,” Knapinski told The Seattle Times in a phone interview Friday. The last thing he said he remembers is taking baby steps down the mountain, surrounded by white.

A 2002 article published in the American Psychological Association’s prevention & treatment, by University of Connecticut psychology professor Irving Kirsch titled, “The Emperor’s New Drugs,” made some more shocking discoveries. He found that 80 percent of the effect of antidepressants, as measured in clinical trials, could be attributed to the placebo effect. This professor even had to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get information on the clinical trials of the top antidepressants.

A Baylor School of Medicine study, published in 2002 in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at surgery for patients with severe and debilitating knee pain. Many surgeons know there is no placebo effect in surgery, or so most of them believe. The patients were divided into three groups. The surgeons shaved the damaged cartilage in the knee of one group. For the second group, they flushed out the knee joint, removing all of the material believed to be causing inflammation. Both of these processes are the standard surgeries people go through who have severe arthritic knees. The third group received a “fake” surgery, the patients were only sedated and tricked that they actually had the knee surgery. For the patients not really receiving the surgery, the doctors made the incisions and splashed salt water on the knee as they would in normal surgery. They then sewed up the incisions like the real thing and the process was complete.

Would you be okay to have these injected in you?

Engineers at Cornell University developed a microscopic robot – so small it’s invisible to the naked eye – that walks. It’s so tiny that ten could fit within a period. The team says they can manufacture one million of the robots per week.

The new robot is essentially a microchip on four origami-inspired legs that can be activated by lasers. It was designed to crawl inside the human body, find and eliminate diseases. It can be steered by beaming a laser at its feet, which causes their leg to bend.

Continue reading “Scientists Seek To Inject Microscopic Robots Into Patients To Hunt Disease” »

A new project has been set up to develop an immunologic-based treatment strategy where cancer cells are reprogrammed to become ‘visible’ to the patient’s immune system.

Sean Eddy stood awkwardly next to fossil exhibits at a 2015 wine reception at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. He was new to the University and didn’t know a soul. Then up strolled a smiling Rob Lue, who “started telling me about his new work on data-driven urban planning in Paris, and we immediately hit it off,” Eddy recalls.

The Ellmore C. Patterson Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and department chair would eventually come to learn that Lue was a highly regarded researcher, an energetic leader in innovative teaching, and roundly cherished for his warm and generous spirit. “Rob was an optimist with a passion that would draw you in and get you talking with him about the good things in the world — art and books and education — and how we could make the world an even better place together,” Eddy said. “He saw the best in people.”

Lue, who died Wednesday at 56 from cancer, had an impact felt deeply among undergraduates on campus and beyond. He was professor of the practice in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, founding faculty director of HarvardX, faculty director of the Harvard Ed Portal, Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, UNESCO Chair on Life Sciences and Social Innovation, and faculty director and principal investigator of LabXchange.

This was the second drone flash mob event this year, aimed at invigorating and encouraging the public to overcome the economic difficulties and COVID-19 challenges.

More than 120 of new cases were reported on Friday in densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, where officials have struggled to stem transmissions tied to various places, including hospitals, nursing homes, churches, schools, restaurants and offices.