Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,376

Imperial researchers have developed a new bioinspired material that interacts with surrounding tissues to promote healing.

Materials are widely used to help heal wounds: Collagen sponges help treat burns and pressure sores, and scaffold-like implants are used to repair broken bones. However, the process of tissue repair changes over time, so scientists are looking to biomaterials that interact with tissues as healing takes place.

Creatures from sea sponges to humans use cell movement to activate healing. Our approach mimics this by using the different cell varieties in wounds to drive healing. Dr Ben Almquist Department of Bioengineering

Read more

Since my previous post about Youtube and anti-vaccination was such a hit, here’s now Pinterest handles it. They broke their own search engine to keep these things from getting passed around. They also blocked the ability to pin links or images from any number of pseudoscience websites such as Mercola, Natural News, GreedMedInfo, and HealthNutNews.

They also did this to their hash-tag library to keep people from finding workarounds.

O n Wednesday morning, Adam Schiff, the powerful chair of the House intelligence committee, joined journalists around the world in a nascent Twitter meme: he searched “vaccine” on Facebook and posted a screenshot of the results.

Schiff’s search results were indeed alarming: autofill suggestions for phrases such as “vaccination re-education discussion forum”, a group called “Parents Against Vaccination”, and the page for the National Vaccine Information Center, an official-sounding organization that promotes anti-vaccine propaganda. And while search results on Facebook are personalized to each user, a recent Guardian report found similarly biased results for a brand new account.

If the congressman had tried to search “vaccines” on the rival social media site Pinterest, however, he would have had little more to screenshot than a blank white screen. Recognizing that search results for a number terms related to vaccines were broken, Pinterest responded by “breaking” its own search tool.

Read more

That’s why Ellington sees a more immediate use for the technology in the up-and-coming field of DNA data storage. Large tech firms and startups alike are evaluating whether nucleotides can beat out silicon when it comes to long-term, archival information storage. DNA is notoriously data-dense, and the arrival of hachimoji just doubled its information-carrying capacity.

But first, chemists hope to improve DNA data storage and churn out new medical compounds.

Read more

Recently University of Glasgow developed a Graphene based E-Skin for prosthetic limbs. The research started with making a prosthetic arm that could sense even the minutest of pressure for gripping soft objects. It eventually yielded a prosthetic limb that was also self powering.

This was because of the development of Graphene based supercapacitors.

Graphene is now being explored for wearable electronics and health pathes because of its flexibility and ability to pick the smallest of signals.

Read more

A study published today in Cell describes a form of “interspecies communication” in which bacteria secrete a specific molecule — nitric oxide — that allows them to communicate with and control their hosts’ DNA, and suggests that the conversation between the two may broadly influence human health.

The researchers out of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School tracked nitric oxide secreted by gut bacteria inside tiny worms (C. elegans, a common mammalian laboratory model). Nitric oxide secreted by gut bacteria attached to thousands of host proteins, completely changing a worm’s ability to regulate its own gene expression.

The study is the first to show gut bacteria can tap into nitric oxide networks ubiquitous in mammals, including humans. Nitric oxide attaches to human proteins in a carefully regulated manner — a process known as S-nitrosylation — and disruptions are broadly implicated in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Read more

Three years ago Kate Phillips, who has suffered congenital heart disease her whole life, received a heart and lung transplant which saved her life.

But her successful operation isn’t a reality for many patients on vital organ waiting lists.

Out of 381 hearts only 81 were successfully transplanted in Australia last year. Hearts are usually lucky to withstand a transport time of about four hours, with only one in four reaching operating tables.

Read more