Lifeboat Foundation

People in Ethiopia did not live in low valleys during the last ice age. Instead they lived high up in the inhospitable Bale Mountains. There they had enough water, built tools out of obsidian and relied mainly on giant rodents for nourishment. This discovery was made by an international team of researchers led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in cooperation with the Universities of Cologne, Bern, Marburg, Addis Ababa and Rostock. In the current issue of “Science”, the researchers provide the first evidence that our African ancestors had already settled in the mountains during the Palaeolithic period, about 45,000 years ago.

At around 4,000 metres above sea level, the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia are a rather inhospitable region. There is a low level of oxygen in the air, temperatures fluctuate sharply, and it rains a lot. “Because of these adverse living conditions, it was previously assumed that humans settled in the Afro-Alpine region only very lately and for short periods of time,” says Professor Bruno Glaser, an expert in soil biogeochemistry at MLU. Together with an international team of archaeologists, soil scientists, palaeoecologists, and biologists, he has been able to show that this assumption is incorrect. People had already begun living for long periods of time on the ice-free plateaus of the Bale Mountains about 45,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene Epoch. By then the lower valleys were already too dry for survival.

For several years, the research team investigated a rocky outcrop near the settlement of Fincha Habera in the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia. During their field campaigns, the scientists found a number of stone artefacts, clay fragments and a glass bead. “We also extracted information from the soil as part of our subproject,” says Glaser. Based on the sediment deposits in the soil, the researchers from Halle were able to carry out extensive biomarker and nutrient analyses as well as radiocarbon dating and thus draw conclusions as to how many people lived in the region and when they lived there. For this work, the scientists also developed a new type of palaeothermometer which could be used to roughly track the weather in the region — including temperature, humidity and precipitation. Such analyses can only be done in natural areas with little contamination, otherwise the soil profile will have changed too much by more recent influences.

We recently had the opportunity to catch up with Sarah Constantin, one of the founders of the new biotech startup company Daphnia Labs. The company is developing a new platform for the discovery of geroprotective drugs: in vivo phenotypic screens in model organisms. The company plans to use high-resolution video to track Daphnia during its lifespan in order to screen for drugs that might extend healthspan.

Can you tell us a little about the company, its founders, and what motivated you to start this biotech company?

I’d been working for about a year at the Longevity Research Institute, which is a nonprofit that funds aging research. LRI focuses on trying to replicate studies on interventions that have been reported to extend lifespan in mammals. Basically, of the 50+ compounds out there that have some mammalian evidence for an anti-aging effect, which ones have the best chance of being viable geroprotectors in humans?

Evgeny became wider known to the Russian public in March, after becoming one of the first to implant a chip – between his thumb and forefinger – even though such surgical procedures are forbidden in Russia.

He sleeps two hours a night, plays guitar with a custom prosthesis, and has illegally implanted a microchip. When Evgeny Nekrasov was disfigured by an accident at 14, he decided to leverage future technology to build a new life.

Evgeny, now 21, has no recollection of “messing around” after school with his friends in hometown Vladivostok and picking up the gas canister that exploded in his hands and into his face.

Continue reading “The transhumanist: Russian student who lost sight after explosion developing bionic eyes for himself” »

Bioethicists hope a national committee will help close loopholes in the country’s biomedical ethics regulations.

HOUSTON — (July 30, 2019) One of the most extensively studied genes in cancer, TP53 is well known for its role as a tumor suppressor. It senses cellular stress or damage, and in response stops cell division or initiates cell death, thereby preventing a damaged cell from reproducing. Mutation of this gene eliminates a key cellular fail-safe mechanism and is a step leading to cancer. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have conducted the most comprehensive study of TP53 mutations to better understand the processes leading to the inactivation of this important gene. Their findings, published in the journal Cell Reports, shed light on how the gene becomes mutated and how those mutations can help predict clinical outlook.

The team, led by Dr. Larry Donehower, professor of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, studied 10,225 patient samples from 32 different cancers, from The Cancer Genome Atlas, and compared them to another 80,000 mutations in a database collected over three decades by Dr. Thierry Soussi, professor of molecular biology at Sorbonne University. After analyzing this large data sample, they have a more thorough understanding of how the TP53 gene mutation impacts cancer.

The team found that across all cancer types studied, TP53 mutations were more frequent in patients with poorer survival rates. But they also identified a way to more accurately predict prognosis. Donehower said he identified four upregulated genes in mutant TP53 tumors, whose expression correlated to patient outcome.

Lost and broken teeth could one day be regrown, scientists believe after finding the stem cells responsible for tooth formation and the gene that switches it on.

Scientists at the University of Plymouth discovered a new group of stem cells which form skeletal tissue and contribute to the making dentin — the hard tissue that surrounds the main body of the tooth. They also showed that a gene called Dlk1 sparks the stem cells into action, so they can mend damage such as decay, crumbling or cracked teeth.

Currently there is nothing to be done to repair damaged teeth apart from fillings or crowns.

Researchers have developed a soft neural implant that can be wirelessly controlled using a smartphone. It is the first wireless neural device capable of indefinitely delivering multiple drugs and multiple colour lights, which neuroscientists believe can speed up efforts to uncover brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, addiction, depression, and pain. A team under Professor Jae-Woong Jeong from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST and his collaborators have invented a device that can control neural circuits using a tiny brain implant controlled by a smartphone. The device, using Lego-like replaceable drug cartridges and powerful, low-energy Bluetooth, can target specific neurons of interest using drugs and light for prolonged periods. This study was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

“This novel device is the fruit of advanced electronics design and powerful micro and nanoscale engineering,” explained Professor Jeong. “We are interested in further developing this technology to make a brain implant for clinical applications.”

Patience proved the key ingredient to what researchers are saying may be an important discovery about how complex life evolved. After 12 years of trying, a team in Japan has grown an organism from mud on the seabed that they say could explain how simple microbes evolved into more sophisticated eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are the group that includes humans, other animals, plants, and many single-celled organisms. The microbe can produce branched appendages, which may have helped it corral and envelop bacteria that helped it—and, eventually, all eukaryotes—thrive in a world full of oxygen.

“This is the work that many people in the field have been waiting for,” says Thijs Ettema, an evolutionary microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The finding has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but on Twitter, other scientists reviewing a preprint on it have already hailed it as the “paper of the year” and the “moon landing for microbial ecology.”

The tree of life has three major branches—bacteria and archaea make up two, both of which are microbes that lack nuclei and mitochondria, distinct membrane-bound compartments to store DNA or generate energy, respectively. Those components, or organelles, characterize cells of the third branch, the eukaryotes. The prevailing thinking is that roughly 2 billion years ago, a microbe belonging to a group called the Asgard archaea absorbed a bacterium called an alphaproteobacterium, which settled inside and became mitochondria, producing power for its host by consuming oxygen as fuel. But isolating and growing Asgard archaea has proved a challenge, as they tend to live in inhospitable environments such as deep-sea mud. They also grow very slowly, so they are hard to detect. Most evidence of their existence so far has been fragments of DNA with distinctive sequences.