Lifeboat Foundation

The mesh has already proved successful on fruit fly larvae in Minnesota, and with two species of mushroom coral in Hawaii and Australia. In Florida, Hagedorn and colleagues were trying it on Diploria labyrinthiformis, a kind of brain coral whose larvae are more than 100 times bigger than those of mushroom coral. In the first few attempts, rewarmed larvae were falling apart. Each larval size, Hagedorn was learning, needs its own version of the treatment. “We’re struggling a little bit to get this to work,” she says.

WHILE SCIENTISTS such as Bischof and Hagedorn wrestle with vitrification, others are seeking an easier route by avoiding ultralow temperatures that require large infusions of cryoprotectant and make rewarming so challenging.

At Harvard University and MGH, scientists are taking cues from nature to push tissues below freezing while holding back the ice. The wood frog (Rana sylvatica) is a champion of this realm. Found in much of North America, including the frigid Canadian Arctic, it can spring to life after spending months with as much as two-thirds of its body frozen at temperatures as low as −16°C.

Each time our cells divide, the protective caps that keep our chromosomes from fraying, called telomeres, lose a bit of their DNA. Telomeres shorten steadily as we age, but in certain medical conditions like dyskeratosis congenita, the process is accelerated.

“Your telomeres determine your lifeline; how long they are determines how old your body is,” says Becca Hudson, who was diagnosed with dyskeratosis congenita at age 14. “My telomere length was below the first percentile for my age.”

Trying out for cheerleading, 14-year-old Becca was pulled when testing found something amiss with her blood work. She had very low counts of platelets, red cells, and white cells. Her doctor called later that day and said she should be admitted that night to Boston Children’s Hospital.

A bit long 😪

Anyone can have a Mastodon server. People turned their backs on Tom, whose Myspace was the best space. Zuckerberg copied both Tom and the Twins. I rejoined Myspace after Facebook started harrassing my account because of the Virality Project because I questioned the popular vaccines, and told people how long it took to create an effective vaccine, and the effectiveness of the BCG vaccine I took as an infant. They silenced me.

In this group even before Musk paid for Twitter I posted about Mastodon, an open source Twitter option, and I still will pay for a blue tick. I won’t pay for anything Zuckerberg does what Mastodon already did, and people line up like sheep, yet… More.

Continue reading “Fully Managed Mastodon Hosting” »

Discovering new materials and drugs typically involves a manual, trial-and-error process that can take decades and cost millions of dollars. To streamline this process, scientists often use machine learning to predict molecular properties and narrow down the molecules they need to synthesize and test in the lab.

Researchers from MIT and the MIT-Watson AI Lab have developed a new, unified framework that can simultaneously predict molecular properties and generate new molecules much more efficiently than these popular deep-learning approaches.

To teach a machine-learning model to predict a molecule’s biological or mechanical properties, researchers must show it millions of labeled molecular structures—a process known as training. Due to the expense of discovering molecules and the challenges of hand-labeling millions of structures, large training datasets are often hard to come by, which limits the effectiveness of machine-learning approaches.

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief… in recent days, DARPA has announced a new program that aims to protect warfighters from bloodstream infections caused by bacterial and fungal agents. This week, we’ll be examining 1) the announcement of the agency’s new SHIELD program, 2) past challenges that inspired the new DARPA initiative, and 3) how they say SHIELD will manage to clean your bloodstream, similar to a Roomba.

Quote of the Week

Continue reading “DARPA’S New SHIELD Program Plans to Purge Your Blood of Pathogens, Roomba-Style” »

Which types of cells can be located in various human tissues, and where? Which genes show activity in these individual cells, and which proteins can be identified within them? Detailed answers to these inquiries and more are expected to be supplied by a specialized atlas. This atlas will particularly elucidate how different tissues take shape during embryonic development and the underlying causes of diseases.

In the process of developing this atlas, the researchers have the goal to chart not just tissues directly procured from humans but also structures referred to as organoids. These are three-dimensional tissue aggregates that are grown in the lab and develop in a manner similar to human organs, albeit on a smaller scale.

“The advantage of organoids is that we can intervene in their development and test active substances on them, which allows us to learn more about healthy tissue as well as diseases,” explains Barbara Treutlein, Professor of Quantitative Developmental Biology at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel.

Ever wonder where in your brain that interesting character called “I” lives? Stanford Medicine physician-scientist Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD, has news of its whereabouts.

If skulls were transparent, you still wouldn’t see much going on in someone else’s brain. But Parvizi has ways of peeking into people’s heads and finding out what makes us tick. His experiments have pinpointed specific brain regions crucial to capabilities ranging from perceiving faces to recognizing numerals.

Synthetic cells are a versatile technology with the potential to serve as smart delivery devices or as chassis for creating life from scratch. Despite the development of new tools and improvements in synthetic cell assembly methods, the biological parts used to regulate their activity have limited their reach to highly controlled laboratory environments¹². In the field’s preliminary work, well-established arabinose and IPTG-inducible transcription factors and theophylline-responsive riboswitches were used to control in situ gene expression^5,6. Still, each performed poorly in vitro and represented a leaky, insensitive route of transcription/translation control. Later, the transition to AHSL-sensitive transcription factors afforded synthetic cells the ability to sense and produce more biologically useful QS molecules, which are central to coordinating collective bacterial behaviors. Although this marked considerable progress toward integrating synthetic cells with living cells, the most frequently adopted QS systems used to date, LuxR/LuxI and EsaR/EsaI, recognize and synthesize the same AHSL (3OC6-HSL), limiting the variety of synthetic cell activators that work orthogonally^5,7,10,11.

In this work, we diverged from using naturally derived parts to control gene expression, instead utilizing chemically modified LA-DNA templates to tightly and precisely control the location of synthetic cell activation with UV light. This LA-DNA approach was subsequently implemented to regulate communication with E. coli cells using the BjaI/BjaR QS system, adding this unique branched AHSL into the synthetic cell communication toolbox. We believe this system is ideally suited to synthetic cell communication. It couples an acyl-CoA-dependent synthase, BjaI, which efficiently synthesizes IV-HSL from its commercially available substrates, IV-CoA and SAM, with a highly sensitive IV-HSL-dependent transcription factor, BjaR, that activates gene expression at picomolar concentrations of IV-HSL.

Researchers have combined research with real and robotic insects to better understand how they sense forces in their limbs while walking, providing new insights into the biomechanics and neural dynamics of insects and informing new applications for large legged robots. They presented their findings at the SEB Centenary Conference 2023.

Campaniform sensilla (CS) are force receptors found in the limbs of insects that respond to stress and strain, providing important information for controlling locomotion. Similar force receptors exist in mammals known as golgi tendon organs, suggesting that understanding the role of force sensors in insects may also provide new insights into their functions in vertebrates such as humans.

Continue reading “Big robot bugs reveal force-sensing secrets of insect locomotion” »