Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,596

This month, a collaboration between NASA and various research institutions pinpointed a “central biological hub” that controls health during space travel. The culprit is the cell’s energy factory, the mitochondria, which breaks down in function in a way eerily similar to aging. Like shutting down power and water in a city, disruptions to the mitochondria reverberate throughout the cells and organs, potentially leading to problems with sleeping, the immune system, and more in space. The results were [published in *Cell](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31461-6).*

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Microsoft Health-Tech Vision

Dr. James Weinstein, is Senior Vice President, Microsoft Healthcare, where he is in charge of leading strategy, innovation and health equity functions.

Prior to Microsoft, Dr. Weinstein was president and CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, a $2.0 billion academic medical center in Northern New England, where he led the organization to adopt a population health model, including the transition from fee-for-service toward global payments.

Continue reading “Dr. James Weinstein, SVP Microsoft — Creating Healthcare With Value, Outcomes & Equity For Patients” | >

If you want to live long enough to see a reversal of aging and everlasting youth, exercise should be at the core of your routine.

Here I look at ten amazing benefits that exercise brings to your body and mind, so if you haven’t already got a regime on the go, hopefully this will convince you to start now.

Have an amazing day 🙂

Continue reading “Why We Should Exercise Regularly — Ten Amazing Benefits” | >

Finding alternatives to antibiotics is one of the biggest challenges facing the research community. Bacteria are increasingly resistant to these drugs, and this resistance leads to the deaths of more than 25,000 around the world. Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, the University of Grenoble (France), the University of Saarland (Germany) and RMIT University (Australia) have discovered that the mechanical deformation of bacteria is a toxic mechanism that can kill bacteria with gold nanoparticles. The results of this research have been published in the journal Advanced Materials and are a breakthrough in researchers’ understanding the antibacterial effects of nanoparticles and their efforts to find new materials with bactericide properties.

Since the times of Ancient Egypt, gold has been used in a range of medical applications and, more recently, as for diagnosing and treating diseases such as cancer. This is due to the fact that gold is a chemically inert material, that is, it does not react or change when it comes into contact with an organism. Amongst the scientific community, nanoparticles are known for their ability to make tumors visible and for their applications in nanomedicine.

This new research shows that these chemically inert nanoparticles can kill thanks to a physical mechanism that deforms the cell wall. To demonstrate this, the researchers have synthesized in the laboratory in the shape of an almost perfect sphere and others in the shape of stars, all measuring 100 nanometres (8 times thinner than a hair). The group analyzed how these particle interact with living bacteria. “We find that the bacteria become deformed and deflate like a ball that is having the air let out before dying in the presence of these nanoparticles,” explained Vladimir Baulin, researcher at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the URV. The researchers state the bacteria seem to have died after a massive leak, “as if the cell wall had spontaneously exploded.”

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The mystery ailment that has afflicted U.S. embassy staff and CIA officers off and on over the last four years in Cuba, China, Russia and other countries appears to have been caused by high-power microwaves, according to a report released by the National Academies. A committee of 19 experts in medicine and other fields concluded that directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy is the “most plausible mechanism” to explain the illness, dubbed Havana syndrome.

The report doesn’t clear up who targeted the embassies or why they were targeted. But the technology behind the suspected weapons is well understood and dates back to the Cold War arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. High-power microwave weapons are generally designed to disable electronic equipment. But as the Havana syndrome reports show, these pulses of energy can harm people, as well.

As an electrical and computer engineer who designs and builds sources of high-power microwaves, I have spent decades studying the physics of these sources, including work with the U.S. Department of Defense. Directed energy microwave weapons convert energy from a —a wall plug in a lab or the engine on a military vehicle—into radiated electromagnetic energy and focus it on a target. The directed high-power microwaves damage equipment, particularly electronics, without killing nearby people.

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Dr. Carolina Reis Oliveria, is the CEO and Co-Founder of OneSkin Technologies, a biotechnology platform dedicated to exploring longevity science.

Carolina holds her Ph.D. in Immunology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in collaboration with the Rutgers University, where she conducted research with pluripotent stem cells as a source of retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) cells, as well as the potential of RPE-stem cells derived as toxicological models for screening of new drugs with intra-ocular applications.

She founded a company called CELLSEQ solutions in Brazil which develops tools to revolutionize the safety and toxicology assays performed by pharmaceutical, cosmetic, agro-chemical and food industries, with technology based on stem cells and big data analysis.

She is an alumnus of IndieBio, the world’s leading biotechnology accelerator.

Continue reading “Reversing Senescence Through The Skin — Dr. Carolina Reis, CEO & Co-Founder, OneSkin Technologies” | >

To visually illustrate the risk of airborne transmission in real time, The Washington Post used a military-grade infrared camera capable of detecting exhaled breath. Numerous experts — epidemiologists, virologists and engineers — supported the notion of using exhalation as a conservative proxy to show potential transmission risk in various settings.

“The images are very, very telling,” said Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering in Johns Hopkins University’s medical and engineering schools and an expert on virus transmission. “Getting two people and actually visualizing what’s happening between them, that’s very invaluable.”

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Drexel University researchers are one step closer to offering a new treatment for the millions of patients who suffer from slow-healing, chronic wounds. The battery-powered applicator — as small and light as a watch — is the first portable and potentially wearable device to heal wounds with low-frequency ultrasound.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the research team an estimated $3 million to test the therapy on 120 patients over the next five years. By using diagnostic monitoring of blood flow in the wound tissue, the clinical trial will also determine how nutrition and inflammation impact wound closure, making treatment customization a possibility.

The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, the College of Medicine and the College of Nursing and Health Professions.

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