Lifeboat Foundation

Slather me in it!

When it comes to venomous snake bites, time is tissue. Even non-fatal snake bites still rapidly kill skin and muscle in a gruesome process called necrosis, often leaving victims permanently disfigured. In an effort to help reduce the global health burden of these bites, a team of scientists has developed an antivenom cocktail that saves tissue after a snake bite, sparing survivors a lifetime of disability.

In a paper published Thursday in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, researchers demonstrate that their formula, when injected into mice that had been exposed to venom from a black-necked spitting cobra (Naja nigricollis), protected against any tissue-killing effects. What’s unique about their new treatment is that it’s not made up of any one substance but a mixture of nanoparticles, which can target the individual compounds that make up a snake’s poison.

“If this is achieved, then the progression of this local necrosis would be halted, and then the person can be transported to a health facility to receive the antivenom, but the local tissue damage would have been controlled and the frequency of permanent tissue damage and sequelae would be reduced,” José María Gutiérrez, Ph.D.. a senior professor of microbiology at Instituto Clodomiro Picado (the University of Costa Rica) and one of the paper’s authors, tells Inverse.

Continue reading “New Weapon Against Gruesome Venomous Snakebites Is Invisible to the Eye” »

A new discovery could add to a “checklist” of options to make sure women with ovarian cancer get the right treatment.

Leon Lederman, the former head of the Fermi National Accelerator Lab and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1988, died at a nursing home in Idaho on October 3rd. He was 96.

Lederman will perhaps best be remembered for coining the phrase “the God particle,” referring to the Higgs boson, which was theorized for decades before it was finally observed in 2012.

Scarlet protein has a protective effect against Parkinson’s disease in fruit flies.

Researchers at the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, discovered that a protein known as Scarlet has protective effects against the fruit fly version of Parkinson’s disease [1].

Abstract

Continue reading “Scarlet Protein Might Protect Against Parkinson’s Disease” »

Today, we want to bring your attention to a recent mouse study on fisetin, a commonly available supplement that has proven effective at destroying senescent cells.

What are senescent cells?

As we age, increasing amounts of our cells enter into a state known as senescence. Normally, these cells destroy themselves by a self-destruct process known as apoptosis and are disposed of by the immune system. Unfortunately, as we age, the immune system declines, and increasing numbers of senescent cells escape apoptosis and accumulate in the body.

Humans aren’t built for deep space exploration. We’ve evolved to live here on Earth with an atmosphere, gravity, and a vitally important magnetic field that deflects high-energy cosmic radiation. It will take all our technological prowess to expand on to other worlds, and it won’t simply be a matter of physically getting there. We also need to preserve delicate human biology. A new study from Georgetown University and NASA suggests it may be much harder than we thought to ensure astronauts maintain healthy gastrointestinal (GI) tract tissue in space.

While doctors expect long-term exposure to high-energy radiation will have myriad effects, it’s difficult to study them in a lab on Earth. The effects of the GI tract are easier to assess because the cells lining this body system are replaced every few days. New cells migrate upward from a structure called a “crypt” to take their places lining the gut. Any disturbance of this mechanism can lead to dysfunction.

The study assessed mice under exposure to different radiation conditions as an analog for humans. They’re much smaller, so they can’t handle as much radiation has a human. However, their GI tracts respond much like ours would from exposure to high-energy particles. The researchers used the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) in Brookhaven National Laboratory to bombard the mice with either simulated galactic cosmic radiation (sometimes called cosmic rays), gamma rays, or no radiation (control group).

Continue reading “Deep Space Exploration Could Permanently Damage Human GI Tracts” »

The Arch Foundation plans to encode important books and crowdsourced images into synthetic DNA molecules and store them on the Moon.

They were right. Last week, writing in Science, a Japanese team reported a formula that transforms human blood cells into immature eggs. With the help of an artificial womb made from mouse ovary cells, the human cells underwent changes to their DNA that mimics those in a 10-week-old, normal human egg.

The resulting eggs are far from full-blown eggs, and they can’t yet be fertilized to create human embryos.

But “this cannot be denied as a spectacular next step,” said Dr. Eli Adashi at Brown University, who was not involved in the study. “Considering how difficult this has been in a human, [this new study] in a way broke the ice.”

Continue reading “Human Immature Eggs Made From Blood Cells for the First Time” »