Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that the safe operation of a negative pressure room—a space in a hospital or biological research laboratory designed to protect outside areas from exposure to deadly pathogens—can be disrupted by an attacker armed with little more than a smartphone.

According to UCI cyber-physical systems security experts, who shared their findings with attendees at the Association for Computing Machinery’s recent Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Los Angeles, mechanisms that control airflow in and out of biocontainment facilities can be tricked into functioning irregularly by a sound of a particular frequency, possibly tucked surreptitiously into a popular song.

“Someone could play a piece of music loaded on their smartphone or get it to transmit from a television or other audio device in or near a negative pressure room,” said senior co-author Mohammad Al Faruque, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “If that music is embedded with a tone that matches the resonant frequency of the pressure controls of one of these spaces, it could cause a malfunction and a leak of deadly microbes.”

Scientists from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Osaka University introduced a method for manufacturing complex microrobots driven by chemical energy using in situ integration. By 3D-printing and assembling the mechanical structures and actuators of microrobots inside a microfluidic chip, the resulting microrobots were able to perform desired functions, like moving or grasping. This work may help realize the vision of microsurgery performed by autonomous robots.

As medical technology advances, increasingly complicated surgeries that were once considered impossible have become reality. However, we are still far away from a promised future in which microrobots coursing through a patient’s body can perform procedures, such as microsurgery or cancer cell elimination.

Continue reading “3D-printing microrobots with multiple component modules inside a microfluidic chip” »

We still don’t entirely understand how microbiomes shift on Earth.

Scientists are still figuring out how space will change astronauts’ microbiome, and it isn’t even clear how our guts shift on Earth.

It’s been seven years since Nigel French was woken up in the middle of the night by his wife after having a seizure, which came out of the blue after experiencing a mild headache – something he had simply put down to blocked sinuses.

“She told me that the ambulance had arrived and I was like: ‘what ambulance?’” recalls French, 53, a mechanic who was diagnosed with glioblastoma that required urgent surgery, without which he would have had only months to live.

In a different scenario, the impact of one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer would have taken its toll by now, but thanks to a revolutionary vaccine, he is not only still alive but continuing to work and enjoy all that life has to offer.

Fungi in the soil cause a significant number of serious lung infections in 48 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, including many areas long thought to be free of deadly environmental fungi, according to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Studies from the 1950s and 60s indicated that fungal lung infections were a problem only in certain parts of the country. The new study, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, shows that is no longer the case. Doctors who rely on outdated maps of disease-causing fungi may miss the signs of a fungal lung infection, resulting in delayed or incorrect diagnoses, the researchers said.

“Every few weeks I get a call from a doctor in the Boston area—a different doctor every time—about a case they can’t solve,” said senior author Andrej Spec, MD, an associate professor of medicine and a specialist in fungal infections. “They always start by saying, ‘We don’t have histo here, but it really kind of looks like histo.’ I say, ‘You guys call me all the time about this. You do have histo.’”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a warning for parents after the discovery of fentanyl disguised as children’s chewable vitamins. LiveNOW from FOX’s Josh Breslow spoke with FOX 5 DC’s Bob Barnard about that warning.

The findings, published late last month in the journal Pharmaceutics, have been described as a potential game changer in addressing an epidemic that has claimed thousands of American lives.

About 30 per cent of tears in the anterior cruciate ligament that supports the knee heal within two years with strengthening exercises, challenging the common assumption that surgery is always needed.

New studies of GRP78, a protein implicated in both COVID-19 and multiple types of cancer, uncover a drug that interferes with its effects.

The liver’s ability to regenerate itself is legendary. Even if more than 70% of the organ is removed, the remaining tissue can regrow an entire new liver.

Kristin Knouse, an MIT assistant professor of biology, wants to find out how the liver is able to achieve this kind of regeneration, in hopes of learning how to induce other organs to do the same thing. To that end, her lab has developed a new way to perform genome-wide studies of the liver in mice, using the gene-editing system CRISPR.

With this new technique, researchers can study how each of the genes in the mouse genome affects a particular disease or behavior. In a paper describing the technique, the researchers uncovered several genes important for liver cell survival and proliferation that had not been seen before in studies of cells grown in a lab dish.