Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,100

Building safer medical devices with innovative protective nanoparticle coating

Every year, over a million people develop health care-acquired infections during their hospital stays. And around 100000 of them die from those complications.

But researchers at the University of Georgia are determined to change that, and their new study shows a promising tool for preventing infections before they happen.

Published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, the study examined how an innovative UGA scientists developed can prevent liquids like water and blood from sticking onto surfaces. The researchers also found that the liquid-repellant coating can kill and halt blood clot formation on an object’s surface.

CityHawk eVTOL Gets Off The Ground Following Initial Orders

“We are excited to partner with Hatzolah Air on the development of our CityHawk EMS vehicle,” says Rafi Yoeli, CEO of Urban Aeronautics. “Its compact size will enable it to land in the middle of a busy city street, making it a perfect fit for medical evacuation missions by dramatically decreasing the time it takes to arrive on-scene, treat and transport sick or injured patients to appropriate medical facilities.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the CityHawk, it’s much, much more than a few concept drawings. The vehicle has been in development since the company’s inception in 2001, and an unmanned version of the CityHawk has been flying successfully for at least a year. Successfully enough, at least, to merit an agreement of, “mutual exploration by Boeing and Tactical Robotics of Autonomous Unmanned VTOL aircraft based on Urban Aeronautics … unique Fancraft™ technology.”

Why We Get Old & How We Can Stop It

Andrew Steele is a scientist, writer and presenter.

Ageing is a phenomenon we’re all familiar with and is completely taken for granted as a fact of reality, but do we have to accept.

Expect to learn why curing ageing might be easier than curing cancer and all other diseases, the unfortunate truth of fasting for longevity, why the next decade will be the most exciting for lifespan research and much more…

Sponsors:
Get 35% discount on everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (use code MODERN35)

Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20)

Extra Stuff:

Continue reading “Why We Get Old & How We Can Stop It” | >

Prosthetic hands get smart — and a sense of touch

“I can feel touching my daughter’s hand or touching my wife’s hand, or picking up a hollow eggshell without crushing it,” Anderson says of his work with Psyonic, a startup operating out of the University of Illinois’ Research Park, in Urbana-Champaign. Psyonic expects to provide commercial prostheses with pressure sensing next year, and ones with sensory feedback sometime after that.

Technology is on the threshold of turning the unthinkable into reality. Awkward, unfeeling prostheses are morphing into mind-controlled extensions of the human body that give their wearers a sense of touch and a greater range of motion.

Along with sensory feedback, Psyonic’s rubber and silicone prosthesis uses machine learning to give its wearers intuitive control. The Modular Prosthetic Limb from Johns Hopkins University promises to deliver “humanlike” strength, thought-controlled dexterity and sensation. It’s currently in the research phase. And Icelandic company Ossur is conducting preclinical trials on mind-controlled leg and foot prostheses. These and other advances could make it dramatically easier for amputees to perform the sorts of tasks most people take for granted.

Scientists Want to Give Neural Networks Virtual Drugs

Trip Planning

With their AI approximation for psychedelic trips in place, the team says they can start to probe for similarities with how the human brain processes drugs, citing the structural similarity between neural nets and the human visual cortices.

“The process of generating natural images with deep neural networks can be perturbed in visually similar ways and may offer mechanistic insights into its biological counterpart — in addition to offering a tool to illustrate verbal reports of psychedelic experiences,” Schartner told PsyPost.

Urban Aeronautics announces first pre-orders of its EMS CityHawk VTOL aircraft from Hatzolah Air

Lightweight VTOL Air Ambulances To Be Optimized For Emergency Response

Urban Aeronautics Ltd., a leading Israeli aerospace company, today announced it has reached an agreement to provide four CityHawk VTOL aircraft to Hatzolah Air for emergency medical service (EMS) applications.

In addition, Hatzolah Air will become Urban Aeronautics’ official sales representative and distribution channel to other EMS and rescue organizations worldwide. The companies previously signed an MOU to develop, produce, and market the CityHawk aircraft for EMS applications.

‘Incredible’ gene-editing result in mice inspires plans to treat premature-aging syndrome in children

One mouse is hunched over, graying, and barely moves at 7 months old. Others, at 11 months, have sleek black coats and run around. The videos and other results from a new study have inspired hope for treating children born with progeria, a rare, fatal, genetic disease that causes symptoms much like early aging. In mice with a progeria-causing mutation, a cousin of the celebrated genome editor known as CRISPR corrected the DNA mistake, preventing the heart damage typical of the disease, a research team reports today in. Treated mice lived about 500 days, more than twice as long as untreated animals.

“The outcome is incredible,” says gene-therapy researcher Guangping Gao of the University of Massachusetts, who was not involved with the study.

Although the developers of the progeria therapy aim to improve it, they are also taking steps toward testing the current version in affected children, and some other scientists endorse a rush. The mouse results are “beyond anyone’s wildest expectations,” says Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “The new data are an imperative to treat a child with progeria … and do so in the next 3 years.”

/* */