Lifeboat Foundation

In the future, some commonly prescribed medication may have tiny trackers built into each capsule that monitor patients who take them. The technology is part of the ID-Cap system created by etectRx, a Florida company. The system has been submitted to the FDA for review and will undergo a 90-day study with Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Fenway Institute.

In Nordic countries, where cold winters can keep people indoors, buildings often feature what are known as “displacement ventilation” systems. A Spanish study now suggests that such technology may also help keep patients from acquiring infections while in hospitals.

Pain is something that the vast majority of us just have to deal with, and sometimes on a daily basis. Not being able to feel pain is almost unimaginable, but that’s the life one woman in Scotland has been living for 66 years. She doesn’t feel cuts, burns, and even surgery doesn’t register with her, and she’s lived her entire life thinking that was perfectly normal.

Her case, which was published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia, only caught the attention of doctors after she recovered from orthopedic hand surgery with no reported pain. As with all patients, she was given a suite of pain-numbing meds while the operation was carried out, but even after the drugs wore off she reported absolutely no pain whatsoever. That’s when doctors realized something was amiss.

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Neal vanderee officiator at the church of perpetual life.

Continue reading “The Pursuit of Immortality, Regeneration & Longevity” »

Researchers from Yale and a medical company called Humacyte have published the results of a long term study that shows engineered blood vessels that are implanted into humans eventually evolved into living tissue. The vessels are known as bioengineered acellular human vessels (HAVs).

A doomsday fungus known as Bd has condemned more species to extinction than any other pathogen.

Arthritis is usually painful. So is the surgery to fix it, at least in the immediate aftermath. So when a 66-year old woman at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, Scotland, told doctors that her severely arthritic hand felt fine both before and after her operation, they were suspicious. The joint of her thumb was so severely deteriorated that she could hardly use it—how could that not hurt?

So they sent her to see teams specializing in pain genetics at University College London and the University of Oxford. Those researchers took DNA samples from both her and some of her family members and uncovered her secret: a tiny mutation in a newly-discovered gene. They recently published their results in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

This minuscule deletion is inside something called a pseudogene, which is a partial copy of a fully functioning gene inserted elsewhere in the genome. Pseudogenes don’t always have a function—sometimes they’re just junk DNA—but some of them have residual functionality leftover from the original gene’s purpose.

Continue reading “This woman’s genetic mutation shields her from pain and anxiety” »

The marriage of these two technologies can only mean something great is in store.

Prof Jennifer Doudna, one the pioneers of Crispr-Cas9 gene editing, explains how this revolutionary discovery enables precise changes to our DNA, which can be used to correct mutations that cause genetic diseases and eradicate them from a germ line. Doudna raises the key issues of debate around gene editing and suggests what will have the most immediate impact.