Lifeboat Foundation

We really need to know more about the effects of fungi on human health in space.

A new and greatly improved version of an electronic tag, called Marine Skin, used for monitoring marine animals could revolutionize our ability to study sea life and its natural environment, say KAUST researchers.

Marine Skin is a thin, flexible, lightweight polymer-based material with integrated electronics which can track an animal’s movement and diving behavior and the health of the surrounding marine environment. Early versions of the sensors, reported previously, proved their worth when glued onto the swimming crab, Portunus pelagicus.

The latest and much more robust version can operate at unprecedented depths and can also be attached to an animal using a noninvasive bracelet or jacket. This can, when necessary, avoid the need for any glues that might harm an animal’s sensitive skin.

Continue reading “Marine Skin dives deeper for better monitoring” »

A malaria vaccine which is being called the first to give partial protection against the disease, is being rolled out in Malawi. It works by training the immune system to attack the malaria parasite which is spread by mosquito bites. In a few weeks it will be rolled out in Kenya and then Ghana. BBC Newsday’s Lawrence Pollard spoke to Dr David Schellenberg who has been working on the development of the vaccine with the World Health Organisation in Geneva.

(Photo: Malawians going through a medical checkup by a paramedic Credit: MAURICIO FERRETTI/AFP/Getty Images)

Continue reading “The ‘world’s first malaria vaccine’ is being rolled out in Malawi” »

The health benefits of raw, unprocessed honey are well known, but in Australia, scientists recently made a startling discovery – that one particular, obscure type of honey is capable of killing just about everything scientists throw at it, including some of the worst bacteria known to man.

The findings were published in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (June 2009 edition), and could hold special significance at a time when many of the world’s top antibiotics are failing, especially against resistant “superbugs”.

The honey in question is known as manuka honey, which is produced in New Zealand and also goes by the name of jelly bush honey.

Continue reading “Manuka Honey Is Killing Every Kind Of Bacteria Scientists Throw At It, Even The Super-Bugs” »

Almost one in ten heart attacks and strokes could be avoided if check-ups were targeted at high risk patients, new research has revealed.

People aged 40 and over in England and Wales are currently eligible to have their heart health assessed every five years.

Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood-sugar levels, smoker status, age and family history are factors considered by doctors when working out a person’s chance of having a heart attack or stroke.

Continue reading “Almost one in ten heart attacks could be prevented if high-risk patients were checked more” »

Regular infusions of an antibody that blocks the HIV binding site on human immune cells may have suppressed levels of HIV for up to four months in people undergoing a short-term pause in their antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimens, according to a report published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine. Results of the Phase 2, open-label study indicate the antibody, known as UB-421, was safe and did not induce the production of antibody-resistant HIV. The study was supported in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a component of the National Institutes of Health, and United Biopharma, Inc.

The study was conducted in Taiwan and led by Chang Yi Wang, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Chairperson of United BioPharma, Inc. Twenty-nine volunteers with well-controlled HIV discontinued their normal regimens of daily oral ART at the time of their first infusion or one week later, depending on their ART regimen. Fourteen study participants received eight regular weekly infusions of UB-421, while 15 received eight higher-dose infusions every other week. At the end of the 8- or 16-week treatment period, all volunteers restarted their previous ART regimen and were evaluated in follow-up visits up to eight weeks later. Apart from a single participant who discontinued the study because of a mild skin rash, volunteers in both groups maintained HIV suppression (plasma HIV RNA levels under 20 copies/mL) throughout the treatment period in the absence of ART.

Previous experimental infusions of broadly neutralizing antibodies, or bNAbs, have suppressed HIV for about two weeks by targeting proteins on the virus itself, but the rapid mutation rate of HIV induces antibody-resistant strains that render the treatment ineffective. UB-421 theoretically avoids this possibility by blocking a stable human protein that HIV uses to infect T cells. Indeed, resistance to UB-421 was not seen in this study. Because the small study did not include a comparator group receiving a placebo infusion, further studies have been planned in Taiwan and Thailand to evaluate the safety and efficacy of UB-421 as a treatment for HIV. In a related study, NIAID investigators currently are evaluating the safety of regular infusions of two highly potent bNAbs that may prevent the development of resistant HIV strains by targeting two distinct areas of the virus.

Continue reading “Novel antibody may suppress HIV for up to four months” »

A recent news topic that raised some eyebrows was the revelation that the human brain can literally reprogram itself. The brain is such a complex piece of hardware that there’s practically no way we’ll ever understand it without using a greater intelligence. This is one of the reasons why the emergence of artificial intelligence is so disruptive. Startups like Kernel are actually using AI to “read/write” long term memories directly from the brain. Amazing technological advances like these should adorn the front page of every news paper out there. Instead, we opt for mind-numbing “facts” like this:

As a nod to World Mental Health Day today, what we’d like to do is put together an exhaustive list of every single neurotech related company out there. To get this started, let’s turn towards an article published on the Crunchbase blog which lists 23 different neurotech companies (it’s actually 22 because one was an impostor). To that list, we then added 7 names from our own research. What we end up with is a list of 29 different neurotech companies (the companies we’ve already covered are linked to the relevant articles on this site below):

Continue reading “29 Neurotech Companies Interfacing With Your Brain” »

Pig Brains Partly Revived By Scientists Hours After Animals Died : Shots — Health News The cells regained a startling amount of function, but the brains didn’t have activity linked with consciousness. Ethicists see challenges to assumptions about the irreversible nature of brain death.