Lifeboat Foundation

A decent chunk of energy usage goes towards lighting, so scientists at MIT are developing a new kind of passive lighting – glow-in-the-dark plants. In the latest experiment, the team has made them glow much brighter than the first generation plants, without harming their health.

The emerging field of “plant nanobionics” involves embedding nanoparticles into plants to give them new abilities. Past work by the MIT team has created plants that can send electrical signals when they need water, spinach that could be used to detect explosives, and watercress that glows in the dark.

As interesting as that last one was, the glow wasn’t particularly bright – about on par with those plastic glowing stars many of us stuck to our ceilings as kids. That’s a cool novelty but not much help for the ultimate use case of passive lighting.

What if you could become invisible to mosquitoes?

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Amit Awasthi, an immunologist with the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in India and corresponding author of the study, says he and his colleagues pursued this line of inquiry because previous research had linked high salt intake with autoimmune diseases, suggesting that increased salt stimulates immune cells. Meanwhile, tumors are well known to grow in immune-suppressive environments.

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In mice, a diet high in salt suppresses tumor growth—but only when gut microbes are there to stimulate immune cells, a September 10 study in Science Advances reports. The findings raise tantalizing questions about the role of diet and gut microbes in human cancers, and may point to new avenues for therapeutic development.

Continue reading “Salty Diet Helps Gut Bugs Fight Cancer in Mice: Study” »

This is for all who like coffee:

“To our knowledge, this is the largest study to systematically assess the cardiovascular effects of regular coffee consumption in a population without diagnosed heart disease,” said study author Dr. Judit Simon, of the Heart and Vascular Centre, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary.

Our results suggest that regular coffee consumption is safe, as even high daily intake was not associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes and all-cause… See More.

Continue reading “Light-to-moderate coffee drinking associated with health benefits” »

The selected companies will develop lander design concepts, evaluating their performance, design, construction standards, mission assurance requirements, interfaces, safety, crew health accommodations, and medical capabilities. The companies will also mitigate lunar lander risks by conducting critical component tests and advancing the maturity of key technologies.

The work from these companies will ultimately help shape the strategy and requirements for a future NASA’s solicitation to provide regular astronaut transportation from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon.

The existential threat of COVID-19 has highlighted an acute need to develop working therapeutics against emerging health threats. One of the luxuries deep learning has afforded us is the ability to modify the landscape as it unfolds — so long as we can keep up with the viral threat, and access the right data.

As with all new medical maladies, oftentimes the data needs time to catch up, and the virus takes no time to slow down, posing a difficult challenge as it can quickly mutate and become resistant to existing drugs. This led scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to ask: how can we identify the right synergistic drug combinations for the rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2?

Typically, data scientists use deep learning to pick out drug combinations with large existing datasets for things like cancer and cardiovascular disease, but, understandably, they can’t be used for new illnesses with limited data.

Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work begins now!

Newsletter 17.09.2021 by Bernard Foing & Adriano V. Autino

During the last months we have seen the first civilian passengers fly to space, onboard Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic vehicles. September 15th, four civilian astronauts, onboard a Space X Dragon capsule, passed the 500 km orbit, more than 100 km higher than the ISS.In 2016 we started to publicly talk about and promote Civilian Space Development, while the whole space community kept on talking only about space exploration. Earlier, in 2,008 we founded the Space Renaissance movement, and a couple of years later the Space Renaissance International, as a philosophical association targeted to complete the Kopernican Revolution, supporting the Civilization expansion into space. Nowadays the concept of civilian space flight is everywhere on the media, and many people in the space community talk about a space renaissance. Of course the Coronavirus pandemics accelerated the awareness of the urgency to expand humanity into outer space. And space tourism — the first stage of civilian space settlement — is now a reality, in its first steps.

Of course nobody could be more happy than ourselves, for the above development, and of course**2 we want to congratulate with Elon, Richard and Jeff, for such a great achievement!

Continue reading “Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work starts now!” »

Common side effects of covid-19 vaccination listed by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) include a sore arm, fever, fatigue, and myalgia.1 Changes to periods and unexpected vaginal bleeding are not listed, but primary care clinicians and those working in reproductive health are increasingly approached by people who have experienced these events shortly after vaccination. More than 30 000 reports of these events had been made to MHRA’s yellow card surveillance scheme for adverse drug reactions by 2 September 2,021 across all covid-19 vaccines currently offered.

Most people who report a change to their period after vaccination find that it returns to normal the following cycle and, importantly, there is no evidence that covid-19 vaccination adversely affects fertility. In clinical trials, unintended pregnancies occurred at similar rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.2 In assisted reproduction clinics, fertility measures and pregnancy rates are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients.

Read related article.

In contrast to the energy balance model, the carbohydrate-insulin model makes a bold claim: overeating isn’t the main cause of obesity. Instead, the carbohydrate-insulin model lays much of the blame for the current obesity epidemic on modern dietary patterns characterized by excessive consumption of foods with a high glycemic load: in particular, processed, rapidly digestible carbohydrates. These foods cause hormonal responses that fundamentally change our metabolism, driving fat storage, weight gain, and obesity.

Perspective published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition argues the root causes of the obesity epidemic are more related to what we eat rather than how much we eat.

Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that obesity affects more than 40% of American adults, placing them at higher risk for heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer. The USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020 – 2025 further tells us that losing weight “requires adults to reduce the number of calories they get from foods and beverages and increase the amount expended through physical activity.”

Continue reading “Scientists Claim Overeating Is Not the Primary Cause of Obesity — Point to More Effective Weight Loss Strategies” »