Lifeboat Foundation

It might be tempting to not take your contacts off before bed, however, graphic images of an eye ulcer that formed when someone slept with their soft lenses might make you think twice about it.

Patrick Vollmer, an eye doctor who works at the Vita Eye Clinic in Shelby, North Carolina, posted stomach-churning photos of a patient he recently treated, who had a cultured pseudomonas ulcer from wearing their contacts when they slept, The New York Post reported. Vollmer shared the graphic images on Facebook and urged people to think about the harmful consequences of sleeping with contacts.

Organ preservation could be an effective therapy for end-stage organ failure, says Sebastian Giwa, the Chairman and CEO of the Organ Preservation Alliance, a non-profit organization focused on advancing organ preservation. Giwa discusses the challenges and strategies related to organ preservation.

Personal gadgets known as “hearables,” which communicate with the neural signals passing through our ears in order to monitor and interact with our brains, are on their way.

Hearables could help us focus on specific conversations, like smart hearing aids, or monitor our brain activity to treat tinnitus. That’s according to Poppy Crum, the Stanford University neuroscientist and chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories who coined the term, who recently wrote about the concept in IEEE Spectrum.

The emerging tech stands to blur the lines between artificial and biological intelligence, Crum argues — augmenting our thought processes and collaborating with our brains.

Continue reading “Stanford Scientist Says in-Ear Gadgets Will Be Able to Monitor Our Brains” »

This revolutionary model could have a major impact on organ donations.

As he sits stroking his Rip Van Winkle-worthy beard, it’s easy to see how de Grey’s achieved this “kind of a spiritual leader-status,” as he calls it. He dives easily into intricate explanations of two research projects unfolding in the lab down the hall, eagerly describing how one studies mitochondrial mutations, which are thought to cause an increase in oxidative stress. The other looks at atherosclerosis, the narrowing and hardening of artery walls. If we understood more about this buildup, the logic goes, we could better clean it up before too much damage is done.

Though he attends lab meetings and oversees the SENS’s research, his primary task is convincing the general public that death is, in fact, bad and that we should be doing everything we can to stop it. This focus on messaging suits him just fine. “I’m not in this to do science for the sake of doing science,” he says. “I’m in it for the ultimate goal.” He does a “ridiculous” amount of media, he says, and gives around 50 talks a year, from Vietnam to the Czech Republic.

Back in April, at a San Francisco blockchain conference called Block 2 the Future, de Grey began his talk with a disclaimer: “I probably ought to start by emphasizing that I don’t know fuck-all about cryptocurrencies. I am really only here because I have apparently quite a significant fan base in this community, and I am delighted that I do.”

Continue reading “The Bitcoiners Who Want to Defeat Death” »

Being able to measure, and monitor, temperatures and temperature changes at miniscule scales—inside a cell or in micro and nano-electronic components—has the potential to impact many areas of research from disease detection to a major challenge of modern computation and communication technologies, how to measure scalability and performance in electronic components.

Experts caution that addressing lingering questions will require more research.

• By Nicholette Zeliadt, Spectrum on May 2, 2019

In air-breathing vertebrates, the circulatory and pulmonary systems contain separate networks of channels that intertwine but do not intersect with each other. Recreating such structures within cell-compatible materials has been a major challenge; even a single vasculature system can be a burden to create. Grigoryan et al. show that natural and synthetic food dyes can be used as photoabsorbers that enable stereolithographic production of hydrogels containing intricate and functional vascular architectures. Using this approach, they demonstrate functional vascular topologies for studies of fluid mixers, valves, intervascular transport, nutrient delivery, and host engraftment.

Science, this issue p. 458

Solid organs transport fluids through distinct vascular networks that are biophysically and biochemically entangled, creating complex three-dimensional (3D) transport regimes that have remained difficult to produce and study. We establish intravascular and multivascular design freedoms with photopolymerizable hydrogels by using food dye additives as biocompatible yet potent photoabsorbers for projection stereolithography. We demonstrate monolithic transparent hydrogels, produced in minutes, comprising efficient intravascular 3D fluid mixers and functional bicuspid valves. We further elaborate entangled vascular networks from space-filling mathematical topologies and explore the oxygenation and flow of human red blood cells during tidal ventilation and distension of a proximate airway. In addition, we deploy structured biodegradable hydrogel carriers in a rodent model of chronic liver injury to highlight the potential translational utility of this materials innovation.

Continue reading “Multivascular networks and functional intravascular topologies within biocompatible hydrogels” »

As we dive into the brave new world of gene editing, CRISPR technologies are undoubtedly becoming increasingly precise, but alongside enhanced precision is also the necessity for developing ways to inhibit or block the process – an anti-CRISPR molecule, if you will. New work from the Broad Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital has presented a study that homes in on small molecules that may have the ability to safely block the CRISPR gene editing process.