Lifeboat Foundation

The risk of complications in assisted reproduction is higher when two embryos are transferred, instead of one embryo. This has been shown in a study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, which included all births in Sweden 2007–2017.

Fertility treatments using assisted reproduction in Sweden are among the safest in the world regarding risks for the mother and children. A national recommendation to only transfer one embryo in assisted reproduction was introduced in 2003, aiming to decrease the risk of multiple pregnancies and their related complications during pregnancy and delivery.

In certain cases, two embryos are still transferred in order to increase the chance of pregnancy while the risk of multiple pregnancy remains low. Thus, many of the treatments with double embryo transfer result in single pregnancies. Many patients wish to have two embryos transferred to increase their chances of pregnancy, but there is a lack of data on potential risks with transferring two embryos when the treatment results in the birth of a single child.

Cancer, caused by abnormal overgrowth of cells, is the second-leading cause of death in the world. Researchers from the Salk Institute have zeroed in on specific mechanisms that activate oncogenes, which are altered genes that can cause normal cells to become cancer cells.

Cancer can be caused by genetic mutations, yet the impact of specific types such as structural variants that break and rejoin DNA, can vary widely. The findings, published in Nature on December 7, 2022, show that the activity of those mutations depends on the distance between a particular gene and the sequences that regulate the gene, as well as on the level of activity of the regulatory sequences involved.

Continue reading “Flipping the switch: Scientists shed new light on genetic changes that turn ‘on’ cancer genes” »

Combustion engines, propellers, and hydraulic pumps are examples of fluidic devices—instruments that utilize fluids to perform certain functions, such as generating power or transporting water.

Because fluidic devices are so complex, they are typically developed by experienced engineers who manually design, prototype, and test each apparatus through an iterative process that is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. But with a new system, users only need to specify the locations and speeds at which fluid enters and exits the device. The computational pipeline then automatically generates an optimal design that achieves those objectives.

The system could make it faster and cheaper to design fluidic devices for all sorts of applications, such as microfluidic labs-on-a-chip that can diagnose disease from a few drops of blood or artificial hearts that could save the lives of transplant patients.

Latent diffusion models (LDMs), a subclass of denoising diffusion models, have recently acquired prominence because they make generating images with high fidelity, diversity, and resolution possible. These models enable fine-grained control of the image production process at inference time (e.g., by utilizing text prompts) when combined with a conditioning mechanism. Large, multi-modal datasets like LAION5B, which contain billions of real image-text pairs, are frequently used to train such models. Given the proper pre-training, LDMs can be used for many downstream activities and are sometimes referred to as foundation models (FM).

LDMs can be deployed to end users more easily because their denoising process operates in a relatively low-dimensional latent space and requires only modest hardware resources. As a result of these models’ exceptional generating capabilities, high-fidelity synthetic datasets can be produced and added to conventional supervised machine learning pipelines in situations where training data is scarce. This offers a potential solution to the shortage of carefully curated, highly annotated medical imaging datasets. Such datasets require disciplined preparation and considerable work from skilled medical professionals who can decipher minor but semantically significant visual elements.

Despite the shortage of sizable, carefully maintained, publicly accessible medical imaging datasets, a text-based radiology report often thoroughly explains the pertinent medical data contained in the imaging tests. This “byproduct” of medical decision-making can be used to extract labels that can be used for downstream activities automatically. However, it still demands a more limited problem formulation than might otherwise be possible to describe in natural human language. By prompting pertinent medical terms or concepts of interest, pre-trained text conditional LDMs could be used to synthesize synthetic medical imaging data intuitively.

Mitochondria, bioenergetics, information and electric fields: implications for repair and regeneration.
Professor Michael Levin, Allen Discovery Centre, Tufts University.
Professor Wayne Frasch, Biomedicine and Biotechnology faculty group, Arizona State University.
The Guy Foundation Autumn Series 2022.

Visit our website: www.theguyfoundation.org.

The symptoms of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD as it is more popularly known, may be reduced by half with deep brain stimulation, according to a pooled data analysis of the available data, which was recently published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, & Psychiatry.

According to the research, two-thirds of individuals who were affected saw a significant improvement after two years.

OCD is characterized by intrusive and persistent obsessive thoughts, as well as dysfunctional and ritualized behaviors. It is estimated that up to 3% of the population is affected by it.

He suffered both physical and mental long-term side effects.

In April of 2006, doctors from London University revealed a case study of what they believed at the time was the largest amount of ecstasy ever consumed by a single person. They published a case report of a British man named only Mr. A estimated to have taken around 40,000 pills of MDMA over nine years, the most amount known to anyone.

They reported that the man then suffered from prominent physical and mental health side effects, such as extreme memory problems, paranoia, hallucinations and depression, as well as painful muscle rigidity around his neck and jaw, which often prevented him from opening his mouth.

Continue reading “The story of the man who took over 40,000 ecstasy pills over 9 years” »

Researchers use the device to study heart attacks and hope to test new heart medications.

Researchers have developed a device that can mimic aspects of a heart attack with hopes of using the device to test and develop novel heart medications. The research team, from the University of Southern California Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering in the U.S., created the tool, which they call a “heart attack on a chip.”

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

Continue reading “A ‘heart attack on a chip’ device could lead to treatments for cardiovascular disease” »

Massachusetts General Hospital clinician-researchers work to define which patients can benefit most from advanced proton therapy for cancer.