Lifeboat Foundation

When Sartre said hell is other people, he wasn’t living through 2020. Right now, other people are the only thing between us and species collapse. Not just the people we occasionally encounter behind fugly masks—but the experts and innovators out in the world, leading the way. The 17-year-old hacker building his own coronavirus tracker. The Google AI wonk un-coding machine bias. A former IT guy helping his community thwart surveillance. There are people everywhere, in and out … See More.

The scientists, technologists, artists, and chefs who are standing between us and species collapse.

TLDR: Scroll down to Conclusions.

Elon Musk has recently unveiled his company’s first Neuralink device implanted in an experimental animal — a pig.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Neuralink — The Dark Side” »

Summary: Glial cells not only control the speed of nerve conduction, but they also influence the precision of signal transduction.

Source: University of Münster

For the brain to work efficiently, it is important that a nerve impulse arrives at its destination as quickly and as precisely as possible. It has been long been known that the nerve fibres — also known as axons — pass on these impulses. In the course of evolution, an insulating sheath — myelin — developed around the axons which increases the speed of conduction. This insulating sheath is formed by the second type of cell in the nervous system — the glial cells, which are one of the main components of the brain. If, as a result of disease, myelin is depleted, this leads to neurological disorders such as Multiple Sclerosis or Morbus Charcot-Marie-Tooth.

Canada reported no new deaths from COVID-19 on Friday for the first time in six months. The last time the country reported no new deaths from the virus on March 15, at the start of lockdowns in North America due to the pandemic, Reuters reports.

As of Friday evening, over 6 million people had been tested for COVID-19 in Canada, 2.1% of which came back positive. Some 702 new cases were reported on Friday, but no new deaths, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported.

An early analysis of the data, which did not include patients enrolled later in the trial, found that median time to recovery was 11 days for patients on remdesivir and 15 days for patients on placebo. It also suggested a lower death rate, 8 percent on remdesivir compared to 11.6 percent on placebo, but that difference was just short of statistical significance.

UCSF and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital together enrolled about 30 patients in the NIH trial. Because the trial was double-blinded, neither the doctors nor the patients knew which patients received remdesivir or placebo. With survival rates in San Francisco relatively high compared to harder hit cities, it was hard to attribute any specific improvement to the drug, said Chin-Hong and Doernberg, who both cared for patients in the trial.

Continue reading “Antiviral Drug Remdesivir Can Help Fight the Coronavirus, But Can Patients Get It?” »

Because much cancer research and clinical trials have been based on white populations, efforts to explore the ways race and ethnicity influence disease are underway.

O,.o.

Bloodhound LSR reached 628 mph during testing but now needs cash to fund a rocket booster to ultimately hit a goal of 1,000 mph.

Our planet vibrates incessantly, sometimes with notable but more often with imperceptible intensity. Conventional seismology attempts to decipher vibrational sources and path effects by studying seismograms—records of vibrations measured with seismometers. In doing so, scientists seek either to understand the tectonic processes that lead to strong ground motions and earthquake failure (1) or to probe otherwise inaccessible planetary interiors (2). Progress in these areas of research typically has relied on the rare and geographically irregular occurrence of large earthquakes. However, anthropogenic (human) activities at Earth’s surface also generate seismic waves that instruments can detect over great distances. On page 1338 of this issue, Lecocq et al. (3) report on a quieting of anthropogenic vibrations since the start of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic.

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This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.

Cutting calories significantly may not be an easy task for most, but it’s tied to a host of health benefits ranging from longer lifespan to a much lower chance of developing cancer, heart disease, diabetes and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

A new study from teams led by Scripps Research Professors Bruno Conti, Ph.D., and Gary Siuzdak, Ph.D., illuminates the critical role that body temperature plays in realizing these diet-induced health benefits. Through their findings, the scientists pave the way toward creating a medicinal compound that imitates the valuable effects of reduced body temperature.

Continue reading “Linking calorie restriction, body temperature and healthspan” »