Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The scientists also used functional MRI scanners to study the participants’ brain activity, enabling them to map 78 brain regions and examine the connections between these areas.

“The major challenge in this study,” explains first study author Tomoki Tokuda, who is a statistician at OIST, “was to develop a statistical tool that could extract relevant information for clustering similar subjects together.”

Tokuda developed a new statistical method that allowed the researchers to break down more than 3,000 measurable features into five data clusters. The measurable features included the incidence of childhood trauma and the initial severity of the depressive episode.

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An ambitious effort to sequence the genome of every complex organism on Earth was officially launched on 1 November in London.

“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge,” says project member and evolutionary geneticist Jenny Graves of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. “The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”

The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.

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Stem cell research firm Celprogen Inc. has been working on something quite exciting for some time now, which has remained largely under the radar until very recently. The California-based company announced it has successfully 3D printed a human brain organelle using brain stem cells. The bioprinted brain could have applications in studying neurological diseases.

More than just announcing the bioprinted brain organelle, Celprogen has also used the brain to study the “role of Microglia activation and deactivation in neurological diseases.” Through this research and experimentation, the company says it has identified and characterized 11 lead compounds that could be potential drug candidates for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Glioblastoma.

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Yesterday, we announced the successful completion of the NAD+ Mouse Project after a great fundraiser, but it seems we are not done yet. The research team at Harvard has announced a new stretch goal for the last two days of the campaign.

A new $75,000 goal is to be the final step, and to support that, Dr. David Sinclair is offering to fund match the next $5000 in donations to the project to help it reach this final goal. So, for the next two days, all donations are worth double.

The final goal will be to add even more comprehensive testing, such as end-of-life pathology (frequency and specificity of neoplasms/tumors/cancer) and MRI diagnostics (body composition, lean-to-fat ratio). This would really allow the researchers to maximize the useful data they collect during the study and help assess any changes to cancer risk, why each animal died, and what age-related diseases were affected by the drug.

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New research shows how police could use forensic DNA to track down a suspect’s relatives in genealogy databases that store a different kind of genetic data—and that were never intended for use in police investigations.

In other words, if your sibling leaves DNA at a crime scene, it could lead detectives to your door. That suggests new investigative possibilities for police—and also new concerns about genetic privacy and whether authorities who use forensic DNA in creative ways might be overstepping their bounds, says Noah Rosenberg, a professor of biology at Stanford University and senior author of a study, which appears in Cell.

“The potential to link people’s genotypes across databases has been developing for some time. It is both of interest and concerning, depending on one’s point of view,” says Rosenberg, who is also a member of Stanford Bio-X.

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