Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,022

Homeroom with Sal & David Sinclair, PhD — Tuesday, July 14

Want to learn how we age and whether we can slow or even reverse aging? David Sinclair, PhD, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, says in his book “Lifespan” that aging is a disease, and that disease is treatable. Tune in to Homeroom with Sal on Tuesday at noon PT to get your questions answered by a leading expert on aging and age-associated diseases.

For more information visit: keeplearning.khanacademy.org

Khan Academy is a nonprofit with a mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. If you’d like to contribute, please visit:
https://www.khanacademy.org/donate?utm_source=youtube&utm_me…oolclosers

Rebirth of leading European facility promises revolutionary advances in x-ray science

A brilliant new light shines in Grenoble, France, where officials at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility(ESRF) last week announced the reopening of their completely rebuilt x-ray source. The ring-shaped machine, 844 meters around, generates x-ray beams 100 times brighter than its predecessor and 10 trillion times brighter than medical x-rays. The intense radiation could open up new vistas in x-ray science, such as imaging whole organs in three dimensions while resolving individual cells.

Shining 100 times brighter than its predecessor, the new European Synchrotron Radiation Facility is the first of more than a dozen of its kind in the works.

On eve of bankruptcy, U.S. firms shower execs with bonuses

(Reuters) — Nearly a third of more than 40 large companies seeking U.S. bankruptcy protection during the coronavirus pandemic awarded bonuses to executives within a month of filing their cases, according to a Reuters analysis of securities filings and court records.

Under a 2005 bankruptcy law, companies are banned, with few exceptions, from paying executives retention bonuses while in bankruptcy. But the firms seized on a loophole by granting payouts before filing.

Six of the 14 companies that approved bonuses within a month of their filings cited business challenges executives faced during the pandemic in justifying the compensation.

AI 50 Founders Predict What Artificial Intelligence Will Look Like After Covid-19

Do you agree with these predictions?

The first few months of 2020 have radically reshaped the way we work and how the world gets things done. While the wide use of robotaxis or self-driving freight trucks isn’t yet in place, the Covid-19 pandemic has hurried the introduction of artificial intelligence across all industries. Whether through outbreak tracing or contactless customer pay interactions, the impact has been immediate, but it also provides a window into what’s to come. The second annual Forbes’ AI 50, which highlights the most promising U.S.-based artificial intelligence companies, features a group of founders who are already pondering what their space will look like in the future, though all agree that Covid-19 has permanently accelerated or altered the spread of AI.

“We have seen two years of digital transformation in the course of the last two months,” Abnormal Security CEO Evan Reiser told Forbes in May. As more parts of a company are forced to move online, Reiser expects to see AI being put to use to help businesses analyze the newly available data or to increase efficiency.

With artificial intelligence becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives, DeepMap CEO James Wu believes people will abandon the common misconception that AI is a threat to humanity. “We will see a shift in public sentiment from ‘AI is dangerous’ to ‘AI makes the world safer,’” he says. “AI will become associated with safety while human contact will become associated with danger.”

In a first, astronomers watch a black hole’s corona disappear, then reappear

Could be used for quasar propulsion: 3.

It seems the universe has an odd sense of humor. While a crown-encrusted virus has run roughshod over the world, another entirely different corona about 100 million light years from Earth has mysteriously disappeared.

For the first time, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have watched as a supermassive black hole’s own corona, the ultrabright, billion-degree ring of high-energy particles that encircles a black hole’s event horizon, was abruptly destroyed.

The cause of this dramatic transformation is unclear, though the researchers guess that the source of the calamity may have been a star caught in the black hole’s gravitational pull. Like a pebble tossed into a gearbox, the star may have ricocheted through the black hole’s disk of swirling material, causing everything in the vicinity, including the corona’s high-energy particles, to suddenly plummet into the black hole.

Coronavirus latest: WHO says health workers account for 10% of global infections

🤔 The WHO Chief is urging African nations to take part in clinical trials for a vaccine, yet is sending a team to China 7 months after the fact, and after China destroyed samples. The same WHO also is complaining about countries handling of the outbreak.

The UN body announced that over 1.4 million infections of COVID-19 are accounted for by health care sector workers, at least 10% of all cases. EU leaders have met to discuss a recovery package. Follow DW for the latest.

New Amphibious Assault Ship USS Tripoli Joins the U.S. Navy

The U.S. Navy welcomed a new amphibious assault ship into the fleet this week even as one of its sister ships lay burning. The ship, designed to deliver Marines by air into hostile territory, was commissioned in a low-key virtual ceremony to ensure social distancing. Tripoli will be based at San Diego Naval Base, California, where sister ship USS Bonhomme Richard is currently on fire.

The ship’s traditional commissioning ceremony, a public event that would have drawn thousands and originally set to take place at Pensacola, Florida, was canceled due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Instead the ship was commissioned by “administrative message” from the Navy to the fleet, while onboard the crew raised the commissioning flag to signify the event.

Researchers discover 2 paths of aging and new insights on promoting healthspan

Aging/longevity link!

Molecular biologists and bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have unraveled key mechanisms behind the mysteries of aging. They isolated two distinct paths that cells travel during aging and engineered a new way to genetically program these processes to extend lifespan.

The research is described July 17 in the journal Science.

Our lifespans as humans are determined by the aging of our individual . To understand whether different cells age at the same rate and by the same cause, the researchers studied aging in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a tractable model for investigating mechanisms of aging, including the aging paths of skin and .

Sperm discovery reveals clue to genetic ‘immortality’

New insights into an elusive process that protects developing sperm cells from damage in growing embryos, sheds light on how genetic information passes down, uninterrupted, through generations.

The study identified a protein, known as SPOCD1, which plays a key role in protecting the early-stage precursors to sperm, known as , from damage in a developing embryo.

During their development, germ cells undergo a reprogramming process that leaves them vulnerable to rogue genes, known as jumping genes, which can damage their DNA and lead to infertility.

Molecular ‘tails’ are secret ingredient for gene activation

It might seem as though humans have little in common with the lowly yeast cell. Humans have hair, skin, muscles, and bones, among other attributes. Yeast have, well, none of those things.

But besides their obvious differences, yeast and humans, and much of life for that matter, have a great deal in common, especially at the cellular level. One of these commonalities is the our cells use to make RNA copies of sections of our DNA. The enzyme slides along a strand of DNA that has been unpacked from the chromosome in which it resides, to “read” the genetic code, and then assembles an RNA strand that contains the same code. This copying process, known as transcription, is what happens at a when a gene is activated in an organism. The enzyme responsible for it, RNA polymerase, is found in all (cells with a nucleus) and it is essentially the same in all of them, whether the cells are from a redwood, an earthworm, a caribou, or a mushroom.

That fact has presented a mystery for scientists, though: Although the DNA in a yeast cell is different in many ways from the DNA in a human cell, the same enzyme is able to work with both. Now, a team of Caltech researchers has discovered one way this happens.

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