Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,256

Though it may not have the sting of death and taxes, presbyopia is another of life’s guarantees. This vision defect plagues most of us starting about age 45, as the lenses in our eyes lose the elasticity needed to focus on nearby objects. For some people reading glasses suffice to overcome the difficulty, but for many people the only fix, short of surgery, is to wear progressive lenses.

“More than a billion people have presbyopia and we’ve created a pair of autofocal lenses that might one day correct their vision far more effectively than traditional glasses,” said Stanford electrical engineer Gordon Wetzstein. For now, the prototype looks like virtual reality goggles but the team hopes to streamline later versions.

Wetzstein’s prototype glasses—dubbed autofocals—are intended to solve the main problem with today’s progressive lenses: These traditional glasses require the wearer to align their head to focus properly. Imagine driving a car and looking in a side mirror to change lanes. With progressive lenses, there’s little or no peripheral focus. The driver must switch from looking at the road ahead through the top of the glasses, then turn almost 90 degrees to see the nearby mirror through the lower part of the lens.

Read more | >

Sirtuins can be activated by a lack of amino acids or of sugar, or through an increase in NAD. — David Sinclair If you have not heard of #davidsinclair then it is time you have. he is at the forefront of anti aging research and one of my heroes. While we wait for the miracle pills there are alot of thing we can do to help us age better already. #biohacking #biohacker

Can a single molecule extend lifespan?

Read more | >

Researchers may be closer to improving the lives of people with coronary artery disease and children born with pediatric congenital cardiovascular defects through the development of a new vascular graft created by Johns Hopkins engineers that takes less than one week to make and has regenerative properties.

Coronary artery disease, or CAD, is the leading cause of death worldwide and people with the disease often require surgery to repair damaged cardiovascular . Bypass surgery, another common intervention, requires removing the damaged tissue and replacing it with from another part of the body, such as the saphenous vein, which runs the length of the leg and is the longest vein in the body. This method puts substantial stress on the body and has other risk factors: it requires patients to have multiple surgical sites, and those in need of the surgery because of plaque build-up may also have plaque accumulation in the grafted vein, causing further complications.

Congenital cardiovascular defects, or CCD, occurs in 1% of live births worldwide, and children born with the condition often undergo repeated surgical reconstruction as they grow. But repeated surgeries reduce the amount of usable vascular tissue for reconstruction and synthetic grafts do not grow as the child grows.

Read more | >

Cancer cells use a bizarre strategy to reproduce in a tumor’s low-energy environment; they mutilate their own mitochondria! Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) also know how this occurs, offering a promising new target for pancreatic cancer therapies.

Why would a cell want to destroy its own functioning mitochondria? “It may seem pretty counterintuitive,” admits M.D.-Ph. D. student Brinda Alagesan, a member of Dr. David Tuveson’s lab at CSHL.

According to Alagesan, the easiest way to think about why may do this is to think of the mitochondria as a powerplant. “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” she recites, recalling the common grade school lesson. And just like a traditional powerplant, the mitochondria create their own pollution.

Read more | >

For most of their lives, our hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs)—which produce all of our blood and immune cells—are quiet and inactive. But they also are the toughest cells in the blood system, able to survive exposure to levels of radiation or viral infections that kill most other blood cells.

A new study from researchers in Columbia’s Stem Cell Initiative has discovered how HSCs cheat death, which could lead to new therapies for blood cancers and other diseases related to aging and improve stem cell transplantation.

Read more | >

Female bedbugs who are ‘full bellied’ and therefore more attractive mates for males, are able to boost their immune systems in anticipation of catching sexually transmitted infections, research has found.

Led by the University of Sheffield, the research discovered a correlation between fed females and the chances of them being inseminated and therefore infected as a result.

To mitigate this, female bedbugs that have just dined on blood and are therefore full, are able to cleverly manage their simple in anticipation of mating. This is in comparison to female bedbugs that do not get regular food, do not mate regularly and therefore do not have the same need to boost their immune system in defence of .

Read more | >

DARPA-funded chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have devised a way to rapidly synthesize and screen millions of novel proteins that could be used as drugs against Ebola and other viruses. The team supports DARPA’s Fold F(x) synthetic chemistry program.

MIT News Office • Building 11–400 Massachusetts Institute of Technology • Cambridge, MA 02139–4307.

Read more | >

Certain plants, insects, crustaceans and fish possess the uncanny ability to change the sex of their offspring before they are born. Mammals have never before demonstrated this genetic skill, until now.

A new Tel Aviv University study reveals a genetic system in that enables two animals to mate and produce only females. A similar system based on identical principles would produce only males.

Research for the breakthrough study was led by Prof. Udi Qimron, Dr. Ido Yosef and Dr. Motti Gerlic and conducted by Dr. Liat Edry-Botzer, Rea Globus, Inbar Shlomovitz and Prof. Ariel Munitz, all of the Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at TAU’s Sackler School of Medicine. The research was published on July 1 in EMBO Reports.

Read more | >