Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,785

Think you don’t need to worry about COVID-19 while using a public restroom? A group of researchers from Yangzhou University in China recently reported that flushing public restroom toilets can release clouds of virus-laden aerosols for you to potentially inhale.

If that’s not cringeworthy enough, after running additional computer simulations, they’ve concluded that flushing urinals does likewise. In Physics of Fluids, the group shares its work simulating and tracking virus-laden particle movements when urinals are flushed.

The researchers’ work clearly shows public restrooms can be dangerous places for potentially becoming infected from a virus, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other work has shown that both feces- and urine-based virus transmission is possible.

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Ogba Educational Clinic

Long before coronavirus appeared and shattered our pre-existing “normal,” the future of work was a widely discussed and debated topic. We’ve watched automation slowly but surely expand its capabilities and take over more jobs, and we’ve wondered what artificial intelligence will eventually be capable of.

The pandemic swiftly turned the working world on its head, putting millions of people out of a job and forcing millions more to work remotely. But essential questions remain largely unchanged: we still want to make sure we’re not replaced, we want to add value, and we want an equitable society where different types of work are valued fairly.

To address these issues—as well as how the pandemic has impacted them—this week Singularity University held a digital summit on the future of work. Forty-three speakers from multiple backgrounds, countries, and sectors of the economy shared their expertise on everything from work in developing markets to why we shouldn’t want to go back to the old normal.

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Aside from staying alive and healthy, the biggest concern most people have during the pandemic is the future of their jobs. Unemployment in the U.S. has skyrocketed, from 5.8 million in February 2020 to 16.3 million in July 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s not only the lost jobs that are reshaping work in the wake of COVID-19; the nature of many of the remaining jobs has changed, as remote work becomes the norm. And in the midst of it all, automation has become potentially a threat to some workers and a salvation to others. In this issue, we examine this tension and explore the good, bad, and unknown of how automation could affect jobs in the immediate and near future.

Prevailing wisdom says that the wave of new AI-powered automation will follow the same pattern as other technological leaps: They’ll kill off some jobs but create new (and potentially better) ones. But it’s unclear whether that will hold true this time around. Complicating matters is that at a time when workplace safety has to do with limiting the spread of a deadly virus, automation can play a role in reducing the number of people who are working shoulder-to-shoulder — keeping workers safe, but also eliminating jobs.

Even as automation creates exciting new opportunities, it’s important to bear in mind that those opportunities will not be distributed equally. Some jobs are more vulnerable to automation than others, and uneven access to reskilling and other crucial factors will mean that some workers will be left behind.

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Liquid blood and urine were found inside the 42,000-yr-old foal. The oldest blood ever found by 10,000 years!

It made headlines in 2018 when researchers discovered the frozen remains of a foal that died 42,000 years ago in the Verkhoyansk region of Siberia, miraculously preserved in permafrost. But now an even more startling announcement has been made: Liquid blood and urine were found inside of the foal.

In an interview given to the Siberian Times, Semyon Grigoryev, head of the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, said, “The autopsy shows beautifully preserved internal organs. Samples of liquid blood were taken from heart vessels — it was preserved in the liquid state for 42,000 years thanks to favorable burial conditions and permafrost. The muscle tissues preserved their natural reddish color.”

Grigorvev then made the statement which is reverberating throughout the scientific community: “We can now claim that this is the best-preserved Ice Age animal ever found in the world.”

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First, we found that every cancer organoid retains the properties of the tissue of origin, so this shows that if the samples were obtained from the surgery of a colon or pancreatic cancer, the organoid closely resembles the original primary tumor. Second, we discovered that there is no contamination of normal cells, thus, the malignant pure transformed cells can be analyzed without interferences. And finally, the 3D organoid cancers are closer to the patient tumors than the commonly used 2-D cell lines.

Scientists have used 3D models to break down the DNA behavior of cancer cells, in a breakthrough new study which could revolutionize treatment for the disease.

In what is a first for science, a research team led by Dr. Manel Esteller, Director of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC), demonstrated how 3D models (known as organoids) can now be used to develop a characterization of the DNA make-up—or the epigenetic fingerprint—of human cancer.

Pubished in Epigenetics, the research validates the use of these 3D samples for cancer research that could deliver new oncology treatments.

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“How would you like to be known as the neurosurgeon who cured Parkinson’s disease?”

A month before the scheduled surgery, the four researchers were ready to chaperone the brain cells on their 190-mile journey. They never anticipated they were in for “The Amazing Race”-meets-“ER.”

It was after midnight on a late summer night in 2017, and they had less than eight hours to get the cells by ambulance, private plane, and another ambulance from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston to Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. If it took longer, the cells would almost certainly be DOA, and so might the researchers’ plan to carry out an experimental transplant surgery unprecedented in the annals of medicine: replacing the dysfunctional brain cells of a Parkinson’s disease patient with the progeny of an extraordinary type of stem cell. Created in the lab from a patch of the patient’s own skin, these cells, it was hoped, would settle into the brain like they belonged there and permanently restore the patient’s ability to walk and move normally.

If successful, the surgery could forever change Parkinson’s disease, from an inexorable, cruel, and sometimes fatal decline to — for at least some patients — a condition that can be successfully treated.

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When drugs to kill microbes are ineffective, host-directed therapy uses the body’s own immune system to deal with the infection. This approach is being tested in patients with COVID-19, and now a team of researchers at Trinity College Dublin has published a study showing how it might also work in the fight against tuberculosis (TB). The findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology.

Although the bacteria that causes TB (called Mtb) has scourged humankind for millennia, we do not fully understand the complexities and interplay of the human to this ancient bug. Worryingly, there are increasing numbers of people with antibiotic resistant TB, which is hard to treat and is becoming a global threat to .

Scientists at the Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI) at St. James’s Hospital are dedicated to understanding the intricacies of the human immune response to Mtb with the aim of finding ways to target and promote the immune response to overcome the infection. Scientists already know that the human immune response can both under or over respond to the bacteria resulting in a difficulty to treat the disease. This complex immune response is analogous to driving with both the accelerator and the brakes fully engaged at the same time.

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“For the first time ever, we have direct experimental evidence that an external quantum efficiency above 100% is possible in a single photodiode without any external antireflection,” says Hele Savin, associate professor of Micro and Nanoelectonics at Aalto University in Finland. The results come just a few years after Savin and colleagues at Aalto University demonstrated almost unity efficiency over the wavelength range 250–950 nm in photodiodes made with black silicon, where the silicon surface is nanostructured and coated to suppress losses.

Noticing some curious effects in the UV region, Savin’s group extended their study of the devices to focus on this region of the electromagnetic spectrum. UV sensing has multiple applications, including spectroscopy and imaging, flame detection, water purification and biotechnology. While annual market demand for UV photodiodes is expected to increase to 30%, the efficiency of these devices has been limited to 80% at best. To Savin’s surprise, closer analysis of their device’s response to UV light revealed that the external quantum efficiency could exceed 130%. Independent measurements at Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) verified the results.

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Individual frequency can be used to specifically influence certain areas of the brain and thus the abilities processed in them — solely by electrical stimulation on the scalp, without any surgical intervention. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have now demonstrated this for the first time.

Stroke, Parkinson’s disease and depression — these medical illnesses have one thing in common: they are caused by changes in brain functions. For a long time, research has therefore been conducted into ways of influencing individual brain functions without surgery in order to compensate for these conditions.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have taken a decisive step. They have succeeded in precisely influencing the functioning of a single area of the brain. For a few minutes, they inhibited exactly the area that processes the sense of touch by specifically intervening in its rhythm. As a result, the area that was less networked with other brain regions, its so-called functional connectivity, decreased, and thus also the exchange of information with other brain networks.

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