Lifeboat Foundation

With support from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University and SciStarter invite libraries to be part of Citizen Science Day on April 13. Now in its third year, Citizen Science Day is expanding to include meetups and events with a special focus on supporting libraries to involve their communities in authentic science projects in need of their help. The signature event this year will be the “Stall Catchers Megathon” by the Human Computation Institute. Complete the registration form to sign up.

In recent years, antibiotic-resistant bacteria has become such a concern that the World Health Organization has cautioned of a “post-antibiotic era,” which may be here soon. According to the CDC, in America alone around 2 million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant infections annually and in less developed countries it is quickly becoming one of the greatest concerns in public health.

In an urgent search for new natural antibiotics, scientists are examining ancient remedies in order to determine what made them effective. One such remedy comes from the Boho Highlands of Northern Ireland, where ancient Irish Druids utilized natural antibiotics from the soil. Inverse reports the findings of these scientists, published in Frontiers in Microbiology:

[The] alkaline soil sampled from the Sacred Heart Church in the town of Toneel North contains a new strain of bacteria they named Streptomyches sp. myrophorea. Testing revealed that this strain inhibited the growth of four of the six multi-resistant pathogens identified by the WHO as “high priority pathogens.”

Continue reading “Amid antibiotic failures, scientists search for answers in ancient remedies” »

Cancer is crafty, using a wide range of insidious tricks to ensure it can survive and spread in the body. But now researchers at Rush University and the University of California, San Diego have found a way to intervene in one of these schemes, preventing tumors from recruiting immune cells to help them grow and metastasize.

In the body, messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules are in charge of instructing cells to produce specific proteins, and hijacking this natural system is emerging as a promising new way to treat a wide variety of illnesses. Now, researchers at MIT have developed an inhalable mRNA aerosol that can take the molecules directly to the lungs, as a potential new treatment for cystic fibrosis or lung cancer.

An exciting recent article to wish everyone here a happy new year!

A super-stealthy holding company called Life Biosciences has launched more than a half dozen biotechs aimed at finding new ways to slow the aging process.

What is the deadliest animal on earth? It’s a question that brings to mind fearsome lions, tigers, sharks, and crocodiles. But the answer is an animal that is no more than 1 centimeter long.

A few mosquito species, out of the thousands that populate different environments, are the deadliest animals on earth. Anopheles mosquitoes alone, transmit malaria through their bite and annually infect more than 200 million people, and are responsible for 400,000 deaths per year, of which 70 percent are children under the age of 5.

Other mosquito species also transmit diseases — dengue, West Nile, and Zika — through their bite.

Continue reading “Scientists Fight Back Against Deadliest Animal on Earth Using ‘Gene Drives’” »

By the time he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, Luke Simons, now 83, had already watched his wife and his longtime business partner struggle with cancer. His wife had chemo for her breast cancer 20 years ago. His business partner with multiple myeloma died 5 years ago. “I was obviously aware of what it could do,” he says of cancer. And of chemo, “my God, that can be just horrible what that can do to you.”

As soon as he got the diagnosis, Simons’ doctor at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (where his wife is on the board) told him about how president Jimmy Carter’s metastatic melanoma had just become undetectable after taking Merck’s new drug Keytruda, which enables a person’s immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells. The doctor gave Simons the option of Keytruda, and he took it.

After his first dose, Simons developed pneumonitis, which he aptly describes as a “fever in my lungs,” that made his doctor question whether to continue the treatment. He did, and the cancer that had spread to Simons’ brain and pancreas is not showing up on scans, three years later.

Continue reading “Can Cancer Care Be Industrialized? Vanderbilt And GE Are Teaming Up To Find Out” »

A new study has discovered that patients with high blood pressure and abnormalities in the periventricular white matter in the brain showed signs of cognitive impairment despite taking medication to lower their blood pressure.

High blood pressure has been linked to an increased risk for dementia, but what’s unclear is what kinds of subtle negative changes take place in the brain that may affect cognitive function, according to researchers. Finding new ways to detect minor types of cognitive impairment may help determine who is at risk for early-stage dementia, they noted.

In the study, researchers looked at 345 men and women with a median age of 65 who had high blood pressure.

Continue reading “High Blood Pressure Implicated in Cognitive Impairment” »

Researchers at the University of Queensland claim to be able to stop the spread and growth of the deadly ca…