Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists are one step closer to understanding how fish can repair their own heart, offering clues for treatment in millions of heart attack patients.

Zebrafish, a Mexican fish, are often the focus of scientific research because they are known to remarkably regenerate their own heart tissue.

University of Oxford scientists were ‘surprised’ to find that immune cells, called macrophages, were involved in the process.

Researchers from Stanford University and Michigan State University have teamed up to create a nanoparticle that can eat away at the arterial plaques that lead to strokes and heart attacks in a mouse model of atherosclerosis.

The team has created a nanoparticle that acts like a Trojan horse, targeting atherosclerotic plaque to reduce its amount and prevent it from getting out of control. A considerable amount of plaque material consists of dead and dying macrophages, a type of immune cell, which have become trapped and overwhelmed while trying to remove debris and fatty deposits. As these cells die, they attract more macrophages which arrive to try to clear up the waste; they too become trapped, and this is the foundation of atherosclerotic plaque.

The new study demonstrates how the nanoparticle is able to locate the plaque while showing high selectivity for macrophages [1]. Once it has located its target, the nanoparticle enters the macrophages within the plaque and delivers a drug payload to the cells, encouraging the macrophages to engulf and consume cellular debris. Essentially, this means that the macrophages eat the dead and dying cells within the plaque and thus reduce its overall size.

“This is a very serious public health situation,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “Moving forward, we can expect to see more cases, and more cases means more potential for person-to-person spread.”

The virus, which emerged Dec. 31, has already spread to more people than the 2003 SARS epidemic, which sickened roughly 8,100 people across the globe over nine months. The transmission makes the U.S. at least the fifth country where the infection is now spreading through human-to-human contact, including China. Officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there are at least nine cases of human-to-human transmission outside of China, as of Thursday.

As of Thursday afternoon, 8,137 cases were confirmed in mainland China alone, according to Chinese state media, and more than 100 cases were confirmed elsewhere around the world — bringing the global total to at least 8,248.

BEIJING (AP) — China counted 170 deaths from a new virus Thursday and more countries reported infections, including some spread locally, as foreign evacuees from China’s worst-hit region returned home to medical observation and even isolation.

India and the Philippines reported their first cases, in a traveler and a student who had both been in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the new type of coronavirus first surfaced in December. South Korea confirmed a case that was locally spread, in a man who had contact with a patient diagnosed earlier.

Locally spread cases outside China have been a worrying concern among global health officials, as potential signs of the virus spreading more easily and the difficulty of containing it. The World Health Organization is reconvening experts on Thursday to assess whether the outbreak should be declared a global emergency.

Inspired by the functioning of the human brain and based on a biological mechanism called neuromodulation, it allows intelligent agents to adapt to unknown situations.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has enabled the development of high-performance automatic learning techniques in recent years. However, these techniques are often applied task by task, which implies that an intelligent agent trained for one task will perform poorly on other tasks, even very similar ones. To overcome this problem, researchers at the University of Liège (ULiège) have developed a new algorithm based on a biological mechanism called neuromodulation. This algorithm makes it possible to create intelligent agents capable of performing tasks not encountered during training. This novel and exceptional result is presented this week in the magazine PLOS ONE.

Despite the immense progress in the field of AI in recent years, we are still very far from human intelligence. Indeed, if current AI techniques allow to train computer agents to perform certain tasks better than humans when they are trained specifically for them, the performance of these same agents is often very disappointing when they are put in conditions (even slightly) different from those experienced during training.

While China reels under Coronavirus outbreak, India has reported death of a Thai woman, Coronavirus suspect in Kolkata hospital.

The regenerative properties of axolotls has led to them become one of the most studied species of salamander in the world. In 2018 their genome, which is 10 times longer than that of humans, became the longest yet to be sequenced. However, understanding the functions of the genes associated with axolotl regeneration has proven a challenge for scientists, as they are contained within reams of repeated lengths of DNA.

Researchers at Yale University have developed a novel screening platform to potentially circumvent this problem, and bring the possibility of applying this regenerative process to humans a step closer. Their novel screening platform involved the creation of markers to track 25 of the genes suspected to be involved in axolotl limb regeneration.

“It regenerates almost anything after almost any injury that doesn’t kill it,” said Parker Flowers, co-author and Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University.

You’d have to be living under a very isolated rock to be unaware of the dangerous coronavirus outbreak centered on the city of Wuhan in China. The disease has infected several thousand people, and more than 100 have died. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have created a new tool to track and visualize the outbreak. In a world where it’s easy to spread incorrect information, having an authoritative and easily digestible source like this can be essential.

China allegedly sought to keep the epidemic under wraps, arresting people who posted about the virus on social media. However, the rapid spread of coronavirus infections soon made it impossible to hide. The Chinese government eventually sealed the city of Wuhan as it tries to get a handle on the situation, but many people left the city before that happened. Surrounding provinces have confirmed several dozen infections, and there are a handful of cases in other countries like Thailand, Japan, and the US.

Coronaviruses are a common cause of respiratory infections in humans — it’s one of the pathogens that can cause the “common cold.” However, some strains can be much more dangerous. For example, the 2003 SARS outbreak was a strain of coronavirus called SARS-CoV. The new strain doesn’t have a fancy acronym. It’s just known as the Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). Out of over 4,000 infections, 106 have died and only 79 have completely recovered.

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.