Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: health – Page 3

Researchers have identified a type of chemical compound that, when applied to insecticide-treated bed nets, appears to kill the malaria-causing parasite in mosquitoes.

Published in the journal Nature, the multi-site collaborative study represents a breakthrough for a disease that continues to claim more than half a million lives worldwide every year. A lab at Oregon Health & Science University played a key role, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of the National Institutes of Health, supported the research.

Michael Riscoe, Ph.D., professor of molecular microbiology and immunology in the OHSU School of Medicine, designed and synthesized the anti-malarial drugs, termed ELQs, that were then screened in the lab of Flaminia Catteruccia, Ph.D., the study’s senior author and Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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Self-driving cars which eliminate traffic jams, getting a health care diagnosis instantly without leaving your home, or feeling the touch of loved ones based across the continent may sound like the stuff of science fiction.

But new research, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature Electronics, could make all this and more a step closer to reality thanks to a radical breakthrough in .

The futuristic concepts rely on the ability to communicate and transfer vast volumes of data much faster than existing networks. So physicists have developed an innovative way to accelerate this process between scores of users, potentially across the globe.

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DNA is the genetic code that provides the biological instructions for every living species, but not every bit of DNA helps the species survive. Some pieces of DNA are more like parasites, along for the ride and their own survival.

To translate DNA into proteins, the building blocks of life, many of these selfish DNA elements have to be removed from the . Doing so enables the body to produce the wide diversity of proteins that allow for complex life, but the process can also lead to , like some kinds of cancer.

University of California, Santa Cruz researchers are studying the ways that these genetic elements hide and make copies of themselves, so they can propagate within a species’ DNA, or even hop from one species to an unrelated one in a process called horizontal gene transfer.

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Kurzweil co-founded Beyond Imagination in 2018 with Harry Floor, a scientist and film producer, to develop autonomous A.I. systems capable of physical labor. The company is building humanoid robots aimed at addressing labor shortages in sectors such as health care and agriculture. Its advisory board includes motivational speaker Tony Robbins, former Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, and former Paramount Pictures CEO James Gianopulos.

Between 2018 and 2019, the startup raised $4.2 million in seed funding and was most recently valued at $25 million, per Crunchbase. Reuters reported that its upcoming valuation could reach $500 million, with Gauntlet Ventures—a Dallas-based venture capital firm—expected to be the sole investor in the new round.

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The indoor environment contains multiple sources of chemical compounds. These include continuous emissions from housing materials such as furniture, floors and furnishings, but also periodic intense emissions from human activities such as cooking, smoking, and cleaning.

Outdoor air chemicals can also enter indoor environments through infiltration and ventilation. Ozone (O3) from outdoors can react with compounds indoors to create a complex chemical cocktail within the indoor living space. Since people spend up to 90% of their time indoors, exposure to this diverse array of chemical compounds over extended periods is cause for concern, particularly as the human-health impacts of many such chemicals remain poorly understood.

On the basis of their findings in 2022, Jonathan Williams’s research group from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry took a closer look at how the human oxidation field might be influenced by . The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

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A broad systematic review has revealed that quantum computing applications in health care remain more theoretical than practical, despite growing excitement in the field.

The comprehensive study published in npj Digital Medicine, which analyzed 4,915 research papers published between 2015 and 2024, found little evidence that quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms currently offer any meaningful advantage over classical computing methods for health care applications.

“Despite in research claiming quantum benefits for health care, our analysis shows no consistent evidence that quantum algorithms outperform classical methods for clinical decision-making or health service delivery,” said Dr. Riddhi Gupta from the School of Mathematics and Physics and the Queensland Digital Health Center (QDHeC) at the University of Queensland.

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Sitting might be a comfortable and convenient way to spend much of your day, but a new study of older adults suggests it can lead to brain shrinkage and cognitive issues, irrespective of how much exercise you’re managing to fit in.

The research counters the idea that periods of sitting can be balanced out by periods of being active, at least when it comes to brain health in people aged 50 or above.

The study researchers, from Vanderbilt University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Seoul National University, think that too much sitting or lying down (known as sedentary behavior) can impact the brain and increase the risk of different types of dementia later in life, including Alzheimer’s disease.

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Scientists say they’ve put together a new kind of molecular toolkit that could eventually be used to treat a variety of brain diseases, possibly including epilepsy, sleep disorders and Huntington’s disease.

The kit currently contains more than 1,000 tools of a type known as enhancer AAV vectors, with AAV standing for “adeno-associated virus.” A consortium that included researchers from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science and the University of Washington combined harmless adeno-associated viruses with snippets of engineered DNA to create a gene-therapy package that could target specific neurons in the brain while having no effect on other cells.

Researchers laid out their findings in a set of eight studies published today in the Cell Press family of journals. The work is part of a project called the Armamentarium for Precision Brain Cell Access, funded through the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative.

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By 2030, there will still be over 1 billion of the world’s adolescents (aged 10–24 years) living in countries where preventable and treatable health problems like HIV/AIDS, early pregnancy, unsafe sex, depression, poor nutrition and injury collectively threaten the health and well-being of adolescents, suggests a new analysis from the second Lancet Commission on adolescent health and well-being.

Commission co-chair, Professor Sarah Baird, George Washington University (U.S.) says, The health and well-being of adolescents worldwide is at a tipping point, with mixed progress observed over the past three decades.

While tobacco and alcohol use has declined and participation in secondary and tertiary education has increased, overweight and obesity have risen by up to eight-fold in some countries in Africa and Asia over the past three decades, and there is a growing burden of poor adolescent mental health globally.

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