Lifeboat Foundation

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, Jan. 28, 2020 — Time is critical when diagnosing sepsis, but the tests currently used to identify this disease can take up to 72 hours. Researchers at the Laboratory of Bionanophotonic Systems (BIOS) at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed an optical biosensor that reduces sepsis diagnosis time from several days to a few minutes. The portable biosensor is based on nanoparticle-enhanced digital plasmonic imaging.

Researchers are investigating how the community of microbes living in the gut might help people with multiple sclerosis, lupus and type 1 diabetes.

Nanosafety researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have developed a new intervention to fight infectious disease by more effectively disinfecting the air around us, our food, our hands, and whatever else harbors the microbes that make us sick.

They used a nano-enabled platform developed at the center to create and deliver tiny, aerosolized water nonodroplets containing non-toxic, nature-inspired disinfectants wherever desired.

ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng – Inactivation of Hand Hygiene-Related Pathogens Using Engineered Water Nanostructures.

New cancer immunotherapies involve extracting a patient’s T cells and genetically engineering them so they will recognize and attack tumors. This technique is a true medical breakthrough, with an increasing number of leukemia and lymphoma patients experiencing complete remissions since CAR T therapy was FDA approved in 2017.

This type of therapy is not without challenges, however. Engineering a patient’s T cells is laborious and expensive. And when successful, the alterations to the immune system immediately make patients very sick for a short period of time, with symptoms including fever, nausea and neurological effects.

Now, University of Pennsylvania researchers have demonstrated a new engineering technique that, because it is less toxic to the T cells, could enable a different mechanism for altering the way they recognize cancer.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China and one in Korea has developed a micro-robot system that regenerated knee cartilage in rabbits. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their system and how well it worked.

In many developed countries, the population is growing older, which means aging-related health conditions are on the rise. One such ailment common in older people is degeneration of the cartilage in the knees and hips. When this happens, a common treatment is replacing the knee or hip joint with an artificial device. In this new effort, the researchers have found a better way to handle the problem—regrowing the cartilage.

Prior research has shown that mesenchymal stem cells found in bone marrow and fat can be coaxed into growing into cartilage cells. And researchers have also found that stem cells can be used to repair damaged cartilage. The challenge is placing the cells in the body where they are needed and keeping them in place until they attach to the surrounding tissue. In this new effort, the researchers have created a system that was able to overcome these hurdles—at least in rabbits.

Early mammalian development is a highly complex process involving elaborate and highly coordinated biological processes. One such process is zygotic genome activation (ZGA) which occurs following the union of the sperm and egg, marking the beginning of life. The resultant early embryos, termed ‘zygotes’ are capable of generating the entire organism, a property known as totipotency.

Totipotent cells sit atop the developmental hierarchy and have the greatest potency of all cell types, giving it limitless therapeutic potential. Surpassing pluripotent embryonic stem cells, which are only able to differentiate into all cell types within the embryo, the totipotent zygote loses its totipotency as it matures into pluripotency.

Scientists at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine have now found a way to manipulate pluripotent cells into acquiring the totipotent capacity previously thought to exist only in the zygote. This not only provides key insights into how totipotency is formed and the earliest events in mammalian development, but opens new doors for potential cell therapies that were previously unexplored.

About 50 years ago, scientists believed magic mushrooms and LSD held a lot of medicinal promise. So then, how did they become such a taboo to even discuss? Government officials thought that if young men were on LSD, they wouldn’t want to fight in wars.

In this video, author Michael Pollan describes the little known history of psychedelic drugs in America.

Circa 2018

It may look like just another giant smokestack, but a 200-foot tower in the central Chinese city of Xi’an was built to pull deadly pollutants from the air rather than add more. And preliminary research shows the tower — which some are calling the world’s largest air purifier — has cut air pollution significantly across a broad swath of the surrounding area.

Given those findings, the researchers behind the project say they hope to build an even taller air-purifying tower in Xi’an, and possibly in other cities around China.

Continue reading “This skyscraper-sized air purifier is the world’s tallest” »

Scientists-prove-dna-can-be-reprogrammed-by-our-own-words.

Russian Scientists Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed by just our Words and other outside Frequencies THE HUMAN DNA IS A BIOLOGICAL INTERNET and can be reprogrammed.