Lifeboat Foundation

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), manufactured chemicals used in products such as food packaging and cosmetics, can lead to reproductive problems, increased cancer risk and other health issues. A growing body of research has also linked the chemicals to lower bone mineral density, which can lead to osteoporosis and other bone diseases. But most of those studies have focused on older, non-Hispanic white participants and only collected data at a single point in time.

Now, researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have replicated those results in a longitudinal study of two groups of young participants, primarily Hispanics, a group that faces a heightened risk of bone disease in adulthood.

“This is a population completely understudied in this area of research, despite having an increased risk for bone disease and osteoporosis,” said Vaia Lida Chatzi, MD, Ph.D., a professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the study’s senior author.

In 2006, Paul Rothemund transformed the field of DNA nanotechnology when he unveiled an innovative approach for making shapes and patterns from genetic material.

On the internet, nothing is safe — not even your DNA, apparently.

That’s the dystopian lesson from the commercial genetic testing company 23andMe, which disclosed on Friday in a regulatory filing that hackers managed to access information on about 14,000 users or 0.1 percent of its customer user base.

But the problem goes beyond this relatively small number of people. Because the website allows users to share DNA information with other users in order to find relatives, the true number impacted is orders of magnitude larger — with about 6.9 million customers having their personal information compromised, according to TechCrunch. Big yikes on that figure, because it affects something like half of the 14 million users at 23andMe.

“It is particularly challenging, expensive, and time-consuming to find polar bears in the Arctic, let alone count them and understand how they are coping with climate change,” said Dr. Melanie Lancaster.

Can scientists use DNA from polar bear footprints to help improve conservation efforts during this age of climate change? This is what a recent study published in Frontiers in Conservation Science hopes to address as a team of international researchers have developed a novel tool designed to use DNA from polar bear footprint skin cells with the goal of tracking the large mammals without the need to capture them, which often risks the safety of both the polar bears and their human captors in the process. This study holds the potential to develop new methods in tracking animals whose populations are at risk as climate change continues to warm the planet.

Polar bear near Utqiagvik, Alaska in May 2022. (Credit: Elisabeth Kruger, World Wildlife Fund)

Continue reading “Snowy Footprints as DNA Gold Mines: A New Frontier in Polar Bear Research” »

Scientists have created tiny, self-assembling robots made from human cells that could one day repair damaged skin and tissue.

These tiny biological machines, called Anthrobots, are made from human tracheal cells without any genetic modification. Lab dish experiments revealed they can encourage neurons, or nerve cells, to grow in damaged tissue.

Recent technological advancements have opened invaluable opportunities for assisting people who are experiencing impairments or disabilities. For instance, they have enabled the creation of tools to support physical rehabilitation, to practice social skills, and to provide daily assistance with specific tasks.

Researchers at Meta AI recently developed a promising and non-invasive method to decode speech from a person’s brain activity, which could allow people who are unable to speak to relay their thoughts via a computer interface. Their proposed method, presented in Nature Machine Intelligence, merges the use of an imaging technique and machine learning.

“After a stroke, or a brain disease, many patients lose their ability to speak,” Jean Remi King, Research Scientist at Meta, told Medical Xpress. “In the past couple of years, major progress has been achieved to develop a neural prosthesis: a device, typically implanted on the motor cortex of the patients, which can be used, through AI, to control a computer interface. This possibility, however, still requires brain surgery, and is thus not without risks.”

With a processor that has fewer qubits, IBM has improved error correction, paving the way for the use of these processors in real life.

IBM has unveiled its much-awaited 1,000+ qubit quantum processor Condor, alongside a utility-scale processor dubbed IBM Quantum Heron at its Quantum Summit in New York. The latter is the first in the series of utility-scale quantum processors that IBM took four years to build, the company said in a press release.

Continue reading “IBM finally unveils quantum powerhouse, a 1,000+ qubit processor” »

Jellagen and NPL’s groundbreaking research unveils jellyfish collagen’s potential for medical applications, from tissue regeneration to lab-grown organs.

As if space travel didn’t present enough challenges — from bone thinning and an elevated risk of cancer to the sheer tedium of spending months confined to a small capsule — scientists have now warned that prolonged exposure to microgravity and cosmic radiation could lead to erectile dysfunction.

For a NASA-funded study, published in The Faseb Journal, researchers exposed rats to doses of radiation equivalent to that found in deep space, and suspended them in harnesses to simulate weightlessness for four weeks. A year later the blood supply to the rats’ erectile tissue was found to be impaired, apparently mainly as a result of the radiation. The scientists described it as “a new health risk to consider with deep space exploration”, but said that there were signs it could be treatable. When astronauts are in orbit, such as on the International Space Station, they are protected from cosmic radiation by Earth’s magnetic field, which deflects the rays. Further out, they’re fully exposed, and transporting the material needed to shield them is difficult and expensive.