Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Researchers have identified a set of heat sensing neurons that prompt both nervous system and behavioral changes that help cool the body.

Source: NIH.

The body’s temperature is closely regulated. We sense temperature changes in the environment through specialized nerve cells in the outer layers of the skin. If we are too hot or too cold, our nervous system activates responses to help change our temperature. We can sweat to cool down or shiver to generate heat. Our blood vessels can constrict to conserve heat or expand to release heat. To avoid discomfort, we sometimes seek out different environments―choosing to go into an air conditioned room or sit by a heater.

In Brief.

Researchers have a new way to deliver antiobesity drugs to specific locations of the body by using nanoparticles, effectively stimulating weight loss without any harmful side effects.

Researchers from MIT, Brigham, and Women’s Hospital have recently tested a new way to stimulate fat loss through a pair antiobesity drugs. In this novel method, they made use of nanoparticles to deliver them to specific areas of the body.

Continue reading “Antiobesity Drugs In Nanoparticles Target Fat Cells Like Missiles” »

In our project to “print” skin cells on burn wounds.we place cells in vials, rather than in cartridges, and “print” them through an ink jet printer head.

Xconomy National —

Drugs that use molecular scissors to snip out or replace defective genes. Altered mosquitoes meant to sabotage entire disease-carrying populations. Both are potential uses of genome editing, which thanks to the CRISPR-Cas9 system has spread throughout the world’s biology labs and is now on the doorstep of the outside world. But with its first applications could also come unintended consequences for human health and the environment. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—a famed military R&D group—wants to finance safety measures for the new gene-editing age.

The idea for the funding program, called Safe Genes, is to get out ahead of problems that could bring the field to a screeching halt. “We should couple innovation with biosecurity,” DARPA program manager Renee Wegrzyn, said Tuesday at the SynBioBeta conference in South San Francisco. “We need new safety measures that don’t slow us down. You have brakes in your car so that you can go fast but can stop when you need to.”

Continue reading “With New Program, DARPA To Encourage Safety ‘Brakes’ For Gene Editing” »

You really have to wonder sometimes.

THE futuristic world depicted in the classic science-fiction film Fantastic Voyage, starring Raquel Welch in a very clingy catsuit, could very soon be a reality as scientists have discovered a way of shrinking vehicles that could be placed inside the human body.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to scientists based in the US, France, and the Netherlands for breakthroughs in designing molecular machines that can carry out tasks— and even mimic a four-wheel-drive car — when given a jolt of energy.

Winners J. Fraser Stoddart, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, and Bernard L. Feringa discovered how to build tiny motors — 1,000 times thinner than a strand of hair.

The machinery includes rings on axles, spinning blades, and even unimaginably small creations consisting of only a few molecules that can lift themselves off a surface like tiny robots rising on tip-toe. Those molecular robots can pluck, grasp, and connect individual amino acids. The machines can also be used as a novel mechanism of drug delivery.

What are the potential uses for molecular machines, which have won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In Brief.

• New research concludes that human lifespan has already reached its peak of 125 years.
• The research does not take into account synthetic biology and advancements in biotech that could extend lifespans further.

Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine assert that they have discovered the maximum lifespan of human beings, and it’s a range we may no longer be able to exceed. Dr. Jan Vijg, professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at Einstein, lead the research, which was published online today in the journal Nature.

Scientific progress is being held back by established experts who lack ambition and vision.

The mainstream of aging research, at least in public, is characterized by a profound lack of ambition when it comes to treating aging as a medical condition. Researchers talk about slightly altering the trajectory of aging as though that is the absolute most that is possible, the summit of the mountain, and are in many cases ambivalent when it comes to advocating for even that minimal goal. It is this state of affairs that drove Aubrey de Grey and others into taking up advocacy and research, given that there are clear paths ahead to rejuvenation, not just a slight slowing of aging, but halting and reversing the causes of aging. Arguably embracing rejuvenation research programs would in addition cost less and take a much shorter span of time to produce results, since these programs are far more comprehensively mapped out than are efforts to produce drugs to alter the complex operations of metabolism so as to slightly slow the pace at which aging progresses. It is most frustrating to live in a world in which this possibility exists, yet is still a minority concern in the research community. This article is an example of the problem, in which an eminent researcher in the field takes a look at a few recently published books on aging research, and along the way reveals much about his own views on aging as an aspect of the human condition that needs little in the way of a solution. It is a terrible thing that people of this ilk are running the institutes and the funding bodies: this is a field crying out for disruption and revolution in the name of faster progress towards an end to aging.

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