Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,128

I Was Diagnosed with Stage III Lung Cancer. Here’s What I Want Everyone to Know

I get emotional talking about my lung cancer. When I was first diagnosed and learned how serious it was, I thought it was a death sentence. And it all started with something so small: a cyst under my armpit.

My husband and I usually go to all of our routine doctor’s visits together. At one of my husband’s appointments, I happened to mention the cyst, since it had been bothering me. I was hoping the doctor could help, but he said it was too big to take care of in the office, and made me an appointment with a surgeon.

At the time, the cyst removal didn’t seem like a big deal, and I didn’t think much of it. I was 72 years old, and I didn’t feel sick in any way. As part of the routine procedure prep, my surgeon ordered a chest X-ray. We were all surprised when the imaging showed that I had a cancerous tumor in my right lung that needed to be surgically removed. Initially, my surgeon told me it was Stage I, small, and not serious, so I wasn’t too concerned.

This Company Built a Gigantic Centrifuge to Fling Rockets Into Space

In some biology classes, teachers will place vials of spit into a funny looking contraption and let it spin around the samples until the stringy DNA separates from the rest of the saliva. It’s a pretty rudimentary experiment, but it quickly gets to the heart of not only your own genetic material, but also how centrifugal force works: Spinning really fast in a circle creates a force strong enough to push a moving object out and away from the center of its path.

But what happens when that moving object is a rocket that weighs thousands of pounds? We might find out as soon as this year, when a cryptic startup called SpinLaunch starts suborbital test flights of a rocket that is launched using an enormous centrifuge.

Here’s the gist: A centrifuge the size of a football field will spin a rocket around in circles for about an hour until its speed eventually exceeds 5,000 miles per hour. At that point, the rocket and its payload will feel forces 10,000 times stronger than gravity. When the centrifuge finally releases the rocket at launch speed, it should, practically speaking, fly through the stratosphere until it fires its engines at the periphery of our atmosphere.

New Drug Combo May Lead to Novel and Effective Diabetes Therapy

If this can be done, it is a game changer. Too much medicine treats instead of cures. Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai along with collaborators study result is an important step toward a diabetes treatment that restores the body’s ability to produce insulin, according to the team.

Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai along with collaborators from other institutions say they have discovered a novel combination of two classes of drugs that, together, cause the highest rate of proliferation ever observed in adult human β cells without harming most other cells in the body. The result is an important step toward a diabetes treatment that restores the body’s ability to produce insulin, according to the team.

The finding involved a DYRK1A inhibitor, which is known to cause β cells to proliferate, and a GLP1R agonist, already in widespread use in people with diabetes. Together, they caused the cells to proliferate at a rate of 5–6% per day. The team’s research (“GLP-1 receptor agonists synergize with DYRK1A inhibitors to potentiate functional human beta cell regeneration”) appears in Science Translational Medicine online.

Drones and self-driving robots used to fight coronavirus in China

China is deploying robots and drones to remotely disinfect hospitals, deliver food and enforce quarantine restrictions as part of the effort to fight coronavirus.

Chinese state media has reported that drones and robots are being used by the government to cut the risk of person-to-person transmission of the disease.

There are 780 million people that are on some form of residential lockdown in China. Wuhan, the city where the viral outbreak began, has been sealed off from the outside world for weeks.

King’s College to Test Senolytic for Heart Repair

King’s College in London, UK has been awarded a grant to investigate the role of senescent cells, which accumulate as we age, in the context of the heart and how using a therapy to remove them influences its ability to recover from injury.

What are senescent cells?

As you age, increasing numbers of your cells enter into a state known as senescence. Senescent cells do not divide or support the tissues of which they are part; instead, they emit a range of potentially harmful chemical signals that encourage nearby healthy cells to enter the same senescent state. Their presence causes many problems: they reduce tissue repair, increase chronic inflammation, and can even eventually raise the risk of cancer and other age-related diseases.