Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 991

In an effort to streamline the process of diagnosing patients with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, researchers used digital cameras to capture changes in gait—a symptom of these diseases—and developed a machine-learning algorithm that can differentiate those with MS and PD from people without those neurological conditions.

Their findings are reported in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

The goal of the research was to make the process of diagnosing these diseases more accessible, said Manuel Hernandez, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of kinesiology and who led the work with graduate student Rachneet Kaur and industrial and enterprise systems engineering and mathematics professor Richard Sowers.

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The use of drugs that boost athletic capabilities make sense in the grueling environment of Navy SEAL training. Viagra, though, the brand name of a drug called sildenafil which is typically prescribed as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, seems on its face to be much more unusual.

The NYT reports that other Navy SEAL candidates had convinced Mullen that the drug was an effective treatment for SIPE, the acronym that sailors gave swimming-induced pulmonary edema. There is some evidence that the sailors were onto something; several groups of researchers have found that sildenafil might be an effective treatment against the condition.

NYT article.

Continue reading “Navy SEALs Are Allegedly Taking Viagra for a Very Strange Reason” | >

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has extended the state of emergency declared in response to the spread of poliovirus after sewage tested positive in Brooklyn and Queens.

Hochul said the state disaster emergency will remain in place at least through Nov. 8 to support statewide efforts to boost the vaccination rate against polio.

The New York State Department of Health, in a statement Tuesday, said the sewage sample that tested positive in Brooklyn and Queens is genetically linked to the virus that paralyzed an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County over the summer.

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It’s unclear what “Blood-Wing” in the top-right corner refers to, but the drone itself is called Red Wing. According to the description, this small aerial vehicle could travel to a weak point behind the enemy lines and perform a “surprise attack” by deploying the robot dog. In one envisioned scenario, this four-legged machine “can be placed on the roof of the enemy to occupy the commanding heights to suppress firepower.”

Mounted on its back is what appears to be a Chinese QBB-97 (designated as Type 95 LGM in the United States). This 5.8 mm light support weapon can fire up to 650 rounds a minute.

No further specifications have been made available, but the drone and robodog pairing seems designed primarily for use in urban environments that are notoriously difficult for human foot soldiers to infiltrate. It could, for example, be used to scout ahead, take out hard-to-access targets or create a diversion. Kestrel Defence explains that ground troops, supported from above, could conduct “a three-dimensional pincer attack on the enemy in the building.”

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A new study shows which factor plays a bigger role as we age.

There are many elements that determine how we age. This includes our genetics, the environment, and our age itself. But what key component has the most profound impact on aging?

According to a new study by researchers at the University of California — Berkeley, aging and the environment play more of a key role in determining our health in later years, than genetics. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Aging affects health more than genes.

Continue reading “Genetics plays less of a role than age in our health as we get older” | >

Maybe the science is finally catching up with BioViva CEO Elizabeth Parrish.

As a therapeutic approach, however, gene therapy suffers somewhat from the undue weight of exuberant expectations. For years people have speculated about applications going beyond restoration of lost body function and into biological enhancement, such as longevity. Some now categorize gene therapy as belonging to the realm of transhumanism—the use of medical and surgical interventions to enhance the body, or give it extra capabilities, as opposed to treating things that go wrong.

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People often need to adapt to unexpected and sudden events, such as a road construction or a road accident while driving, a broken automatic payment or ATM machine, and changes in weather. To effectively deal with these events, they must possess what is known as behavioral flexibility, or the ability to deviate from routine and well-establish behavioral patterns.

To adapt their behavior based on unforeseen events, humans need to encode and retrieve reward-related memories and use them to inform their present or future choices. This process entails the integration of different cognitive abilities that are supported by different regions of the .

Past studies found that patients with different neuropsychiatric disorders and those suffering from an addiction tend to have a scarce behavioral flexibility. This often adversely affects their quality of living, as it makes dealing with the uncertainty of daily life particularly challenging.

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Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists working on CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing technology have developed a method to increase efficiency of editing while minimizing DNA deletion sizes, a key step toward developing gene editing therapies to treat genetic diseases.

CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology is used to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR/Cas9 is an enzyme that is used like a pair of scissors to cut two strands of DNA at a specific location to add, remove or repair bits of DNA. By modifying gene function, scientists hope to treat by halting a diseased cell’s ability to continue replicating the defective DNA. CRISPR/Cas9 is the most versatile genetic manipulation available and has a wide range of potential applications. While CRISPR/Cas9 mainly generates short insertions or deletions at the target site, it may also make large DNA deletions around the specific target site. These large deletions cause safety concerns and may decrease functional editing efficiency.

The WFIRM team is looking for ways to reduce the chances of this happening. The research described in their recent paper, published recently in Nucleic Acids Research, sought to address the generation of unpredictable on-target long DNA deletions and find a way to guard against them, said lead author Baisong Lu, Ph.D., of WFIRM.

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What drew his attention was that the cells seemed to change much faster than expected—they arranged themselves rapidly over a few days into a lopsided circle.

What was it? Shao startled Googling to see if he could identify the structure. That’s when he landed on a website called The Virtual Human Embryo and found some microscope photos of ten-day old human embryos shortly after implantation, fused to the uterine wall. There was the beginning of the amniotic sac and, inside it, the embryonic disc, or future body. They matched what he was seeing.

Shao informed his coworkers, a mixed team of biologists and engineers, at the University of Michigan. “When I showed the image to the team, everyone said, ” Wow, we need to figure out what to do,” says Shao. Had they somehow made a real human embryo from stem cells? ” At that point, we started to be more cautious.”

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