Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,715

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.

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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.

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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.

Itai Cohen and Paul McEuen Labs, leaders of this invention, envisions them as a beneficial medical tool to do things like hunt down and destroy cancer cells. The micro-bots are so small they can be injected into the body.

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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.

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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.

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https://media.blubrry.com/drjohnday/p/drjohnday.com/podcasts/Podcast217.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS6 Foods to Reverse Aging with Lithium Could a microscopic dose of the psychoactive drug lithium, which occurs naturally in mineral water and certain foods, actually be the secret to less heart disease, better moods, and a longer life? In this article, I share how eating six foods may reverse aging with lithium.

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The quiet shift in strategy, which brings the Vision Fund’s approach closer to that of a traditional venture capital investor, may ease concerns over big, bold bets going sour, a factor that has left a major gap between SoftBank’s market capitalization and the sum of its investments.

TOKYO — SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund is turning to a new strategy as a global pandemic and government stimulus distort tech valuations: Invest smaller in hopes for bigger returns.

After raising nearly $100 billion and investing $85 billion in high-profile companies like Uber Technologies, WeWork and ByteDance over three years, the Vision Fund is now focusing on making smaller bets in early-stage startups.

Among the investments it has led are $100 million in Zhangmen, a Chinese online education startup; $150 million in Unacademy, an Indian peer; and $100 million in Biofourmis, a U.S. startup that tracks health data using wearable devices. In total, it has approved 19 investments worth $3.5 billion for “Vision Fund 2” — a vehicle currently funded entirely by SoftBank.

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