Lifeboat Foundation

Cops would love to have a system that uses DNA from a crime scene to generate a picture of a suspect’s face, but that tech is still restricted to science fiction.

That technology may never exist, but a team of Belgian and American engineers just developed something similar. Using what they know about how DNA shapes the human face, the researchers built an algorithm that scans through a database of images and selects the faces that could be linked to the DNA found at a crime scene, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications — a powerful crime-fighting tool, but also a terrifying new way to subvert privacy.

An international study on MDMA and PTSD discovered that over half of patients no longer qualified for PTSD after just two guided psychotherapy sessions.

Today, we want to point out a new publication that recently appeared in the Science Translational Medicine journal, as its authors have discovered a new mechanism by which the brain protects itself from the harmful α-synuclein protein aggregates associated with Parkinson’s and that may open the door to new therapies against these conditions.

To understand where these harmful protein aggregates come from, we should take a look at how proteins are created and what goes wrong during the process of proteostasis.

Scientists convert blood type A into universal donor blood!

A team of scientists from the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences have successfully tested a laser that can track down cancer cells and kill them — all from outside the skin.

While being completely non-invasive, “this technology has the potential to significantly inhibit metastasis progression,” Vladimir Zharov, author of the paper that was published today in Science Translational Medicine, tells IEEE Spectrum. The idea is to kill of cancer cells before they are able to metastasize, or spread, through the body — the primary cause of cancer-related deaths.

A relatively inexpensive egg-based formula and a Star Trek-like plasma patch can accelerate healing of serious and chronic wounds, which affect millions of Europeans every year.

According to trade association MedTech Europe, around 4 million people in the EU develop non-healing wounds each year. These are most commonly bedsores or diabetic ulcers, and the problem is likely to become worse as lower birth rates and higher life expectancy means the European population is getting older.

Dr. Carsten Mahrenholz from German company COLDPLASMATECH says that physicians tend to just re-dress chronic wounds as they are very hard to heal. But he warns that the current issues we are experiencing with multidrug-resistant bacteria means that we are on the brink of a return to the Middle Ages in terms of our susceptibility to infection.

Continue reading “Science fiction and folk medicine inspire novel wound dressings” »

This fantastic project will involve sharing visual images between two brains. It will read the vision of a sighted person and transfer the images this person sees into the brain of a blind person “telepathically” in less than 1/20th of a second.

A team of neuroengineers has begun working on a headset or a helmet that directly links the human brain to machines without the need for surgery. This headset and the technologies that power it will enable this telepathic visual sharing.

The gold vapor laser has been widely used in the treatment of cancer using photodynamic therapy.

Using Blue Light to See Through Fire in Optical Imaging Dr Matthew Hoehler AZoOptics talks to Dr Matthew Hoehler about his recent research, using blue light to see through fires and make previously impossible qualitative observations about material damage during a fire.

Scientists really never back down. A new dental replacement procedure is in the works, and it could be a whole lot better than getting regular dentures or standard implants.

Losing a tooth is a source of major pain, and it also comes with a lot of issues and long-term discomforts. Dentures are one way to replace a lost or bad tooth, but they come with a lot of burdens on their own.

It takes a while to get used to having teeth you were not born with, and some people’s gums and jaw bones are just not suitable to receive implants.

Continue reading “Stem Cell Dental Implants Grow New Teeth In 2 Months!” »