Lifeboat Foundation

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), known as “immortal cancer,” is a chronic, progressive autoimmune inflammatory disease. The development and application of an RA high-sensitivity theranostics probe can help to accurately monitor the progression and realize the efficient treatment of RA.

In a study published in Advanced Science, a research group led by Prof. Zhang Yun from Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a dual-triggered theranostics nanoprobe based on persistent luminescence nanoparticles (PLNPs) for RA autofluorescence-free imaging-guided precise treatment and therapeutic evaluation.

The researchers first prepared a renewable near-infrared (NIR)-emitting Zn_1.3 Ga_1.4 Sn_0.3 O₄:0.5%Cr³⁺, 0.3%Y³⁺ (ZGSO) PLNPs by a facile mesoporous silica template method.

Robotic systems have become increasingly sophisticated over the past decades, improving both in terms of precision and capabilities. This is gradually facilitating the partial automation of some surgical and medical procedures.

Researchers at Tsinghua University have recently developed a soft robotic tentacle that could potentially be used to improve the efficiency of some standard medical procedures. This tentacle, introduced in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, is controlled through their novel control algorithm, together with the so-called active cooling for shape memory alloy, the actuating candidate for the robot.

Continue reading “A soft robotic tentacle controlled via active cooling” »

Sending a jolt of electricity through a person’s brain can do remarkable things. You only have to watch the videos of people with Parkinson’s disease who have electrodes implanted in their brains. They can go from struggling to walk to confidently striding across a room literally at the flick of a switch.

Stimulating certain parts of the brain can bring people in and out of consciousness. Even handheld devices that deliver gentle pulses to the brain can help older people remember things.

Continue reading “Here’s how personalized brain stimulation could treat depression” »

The University of Tennessee’s physicists have led a scientific team that found silicon—a mainstay of the soon-to-be trillion-dollar electronics industry—can host a novel form of superconductivity that could bring rapidly emerging quantum technologies closer to industrial scale production.

The findings are reported in Nature Physics and involve electron theft, time reversal, and a little electronic ambidexterity.

Superconductors conduct electric current without resistance or energy dissipation. Their uses range from powerful electromagnets for particle accelerators and medical MRI devices to ultrasensitive magnetic sensors to quantum computers. Superconductivity is a spectacular display of quantum mechanics in action on a macroscopic scale. It all comes down to the electrons.

When Srikanth Singamaneni and Guy Genin, both professors of mechanical engineering and materials science at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, established a new collaboration with researchers from the School of Medicine in late 2019, they didn’t know the landscape of infectious disease research was about to shift dramatically. In a conference room overlooking Forest Park on a beautiful fall day, the team had one goal in mind: tackle the biggest infectious disease problem facing the world right then.

“Srikanth and I had a vision of a simple, quantitative diagnostic tool, so we connected with infectious disease physicians here at WashU and asked them, ‘What are the most important questions that could be answered if you could get really detailed information cheaply at the point of care?’” said Genin, the Harold and Kathleen Faught Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

“Greg Storch told us that one of the most important challenges facing the field of infectious disease is finding a way to figure out quickly if a patient has a bacterial infection and should get antibiotics or has a viral infection, for which antibiotics will not be effective.”

If your image of nuclear power is giant, cylindrical concrete cooling towers pouring out steam on a site that takes up hundreds of acres of land, soon there will be an alternative: tiny nuclear reactors that produce only one-hundredth the electricity and can even be delivered on a truck.

Small but meaningful amounts of electricity — nearly enough to run a small campus, a hospital or a military complex, for example — will pulse from a new generation of micronuclear reactors. Now, some universities are taking interest.

“What we see is these advanced reactor technologies having a real future in decarbonizing the energy landscape in the U.S. and around the world,” said Caleb Brooks, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“We interacted with ChatGPT much like a colleague, asking it to synthesize, simplify and offer counterpoints,” the researchers wrote.

The results from Katcher’s latest study will be written up when Sima dies, but data gathered so far suggests that eight rats that received placebo infusions of saline lived for 34 to 38 months, while eight that received a purified and concentrated form of blood plasma, called E5, lived for 38 to 47 months. They also had improved grip strength. Rats normally live for two to three years, though a contender for the oldest ever is a brown rat that survived on a restricted calorie diet for 4.6 years.

“The real point of our experiments is not so much to extend lifespan, but to extend youthspan, to rejuvenate people, to make their golden years really potentially golden years, instead of years of pain and decrepitude,” Katcher said. “But the fact is, if you manage to do that, you also manage to lengthen life and that’s not a bad side-effect.”

Results from such small studies are tentative at best, but some scientists believe the work, and similar efforts by others, has potential. A preliminary study from a collaboration between Katcher and experts at the University of California in Los Angeles found that infusions of young blood plasma wound back the biological clock on rat liver, blood, heart and a brain region called the hypothalamus. Commenting on the work in 2020, Prof David Sinclair, a leading expert on ageing at Harvard medical school, said if the finding held up, “rejuvenation of the body may become commonplace within our lifetimes”.

EXCLUSIVE: Clones are the next step in extending human life, scientist believes The technique has proved successful in animals but not yet worked in people Dr Alex Zhavoronkov believes it will offer ‘spare’ organs for people as they age Regardless of the huge strides scientists have made towards reaching the elusive goal, immortality remains a pipedream.