Lifeboat Foundation

Electricity harvested from the sun or wind can be used interchangeably with power from coal or petroleum sources. Or sustainably produced electricity can be turned into something physical and useful. Researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis have figured out how to feed electricity to microbes to grow truly green, biodegradable plastic, as reported in the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology.

“As our planet grapples with rampant, petroleum-based plastic use and plastic waste, finding sustainable ways to make bioplastics is becoming more and more important. We have to find new solutions,” said Arpita Bose, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences.

Renewable energy currently accounts for about 11% of total U.S. energy consumption and about 17% of electricity generation.

Continue reading “Creating sustainable bioplastics from electricity-eating microbes” »

A team of researchers at York University has warned that the American bumblebee is facing imminent extinction from Canada, and this could lead to “cascading impacts” throughout the country.

The imminent extinction classification is considered the highest and most at-risk classification before extinction.

About 42 of the more than 850 species of bees in Canada are bumblebees — important pollinators needed to grow crops, including apples, tomatoes, blueberries and legumes, as well as trees, shrubs and wildflowers.

Continue reading “Canadian researchers warn of ‘cascading impacts’ as bumblebee species decline” »

In a proof-of-principle study in mice, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report the creation of a specialized gel that acts like a lymph node to successfully activate and multiply cancer-fighting immune system T-cells. The work puts scientists a step closer, they say, to injecting such artificial lymph nodes into people and sparking T-cells to fight disease.

In the past few years, a wave of discoveries has advanced new techniques to use T-cells – a type of white blood cell – in cancer treatment. To be successful, the cells must be primed, or taught, to spot and react to molecular flags that dot the surfaces of cancer cells. The job of educating T-cells this way typically happens in lymph nodes, small, bean-shaped glands found all over the body that house T-cells. But in patients with cancer and immune system disorders, that learning process is faulty, or doesn’t happen.

To address such defects, current T-cell booster therapy requires physicians to remove T-cells from the blood of a patient with cancer and inject the cells back into the patient after either genetically engineering or activating the cells in a laboratory so they recognize cancer-linked molecular flags.

Continue reading “Scientists advance Creation of ‘Artificial Lymph node’ to fight Cancer, other diseases” »

A UC Berkeley geneticist who helped invent the gene-editing tool Crispr told Business Insider its most profound impacts will be on agriculture.

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Dandelion root is a super nutritious food that fights cancer. You’ll never look at this weed the same way again!

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We usually think of microwaves as waves that heat things up, usually leftover food, but did you know that they can also cool things down? For example, physicists recently decided to use them to freeze atoms, and attempts have been very successful: They managed to cool them down to within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero (–273.15°C or −459.67°F).

The University of Sussex team, led by Winifried Hensinger, had their results published in Physical Review Letters.

Continue reading “Scientists Freeze Atoms to Near Absolute Zero” »

We’ve seen autonomous aircraft doing everything from spraying crops to surveying wildlife, and now the Swiss air rescue organization Rega has announced a drone that’s capable of searching for and finding missing people all on its own.

This is an old study with new data from UK Biobank.

People more or less keeping to NHS guidelines at higher risk than those who eat little.