Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: health – Page 347

From smog-sucking bikes to electric taxis and paint made of car exhaust, designers and architects are stepping up to address air pollution—the world’s single largest health risk. But a new air filter making the rounds in Oslo, Paris, Brussels, and Hong Kong shows that nature may be our best ally in this battle.

Essentially a moss-covered wall, each CityTree removes CO2, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter from the air while also producing oxygen. A single tree is able to absorb 250 grams of particulate matter a day and remove 240 metric tons of CO2 each year—a level roughly on par with the air purification impact of 275 urban trees. Thirteen feet tall, with a metal frame, the CityTrees are easily installed in a public space, and they even have built-in seating at their base.

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Scientists say they’ve developed a new “quantum material” that could one day transfer information directly from human brains to a computer.

The research is in early stages, but it invokes ideas like uploading brains to the cloud or hooking people up to a computer to track deep health metrics — concepts that until now existed solely in science fiction.

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New York City on Tuesday ramped up the battle against the spread of a measles outbreak in a Brooklyn hot spot, declaring a public health emergency and calling for mandatory vaccinations.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said the emergency covers four Brooklyn ZIP codes, including most of Williamsburg and Borough Park, which have seen more than 285 cases of the measles since October.

“We cannot allow this dangerous disease to make a comeback here in New York City. We have to stop it now,” de Blasio said at a news conference. “We have a situation now where children are in danger. We have to take this seriously,” he added.

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It’s the first-ever quantification of the damage caused by plastic pollution on a global scale.

Global plastic pollution and the damage it causes to marine ecosystems now has a price tag attached to it. A team of researchers from the UK and Norway analyzed the many ways in which plastic pollution damages or destroys natural resources, and came up with a staggering figure – $2.5 billion – as the annual cost to society.

Much of our current understanding about plastic pollution is on a local level that cannot be interpreted easily on a global scale; and yet, this is a global threat. An estimated 8 million tons of plastic enter the oceans annually, and because of its material persistence and ability to disperse widely, must be viewed from a broader perspective if we hope to tackle it effectively. The researchers, whose study was just published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, looked at the many ways in which marine ecosystems benefit the planet, including food provision for billions of people, carbon storage, waste detoxification, and cultural benefits (recreational and spiritual). When these benefits are threatened by the presence of plastic, it “has the potential to significantly impact the wellbeing of humans across the globe, owing to the loss of food security, livelihoods, income and good health.”

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Happy to announce the public release of the Forever Healthy Compounds library.

Targeted supplementation is one of the building blocks of our Maximizing Health initiative.

However, when building and documenting our individual supplement stacks, we found it quite inconvenient that no single website could be used as a reference for all the compounds that we are using.

Thus we created the Forever Healthy Compounds library as a stable and complete reference for those compounds.


A common species of freshwater green algae is capable of removing certain endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) from wastewater, according to new research from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Las Vegas.

EDCs are natural hormones and can also be found in many plastics and pharmaceuticals. They are known to be harmful to wildlife, and to humans in large concentrations, resulting in such as lowered fertility and increased incidence of certain cancers. They have been found in trace amounts (parts per trillion to parts per billion) in treated wastewater, and also have been detected in collected from Lake Mead.

In a new study published in the journal Environmental Pollution, DRI researchers Xuelian Bai, Ph.D., and Kumud Acharya, Ph.D., explore the potential for use of a species of freshwater green called Nannochloris to remove EDCs from treated wastewater.

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I do think that due to the many problems of super fungus that are basically very damaging to human health I think there are other fungi that can basically stop this with like mosses and other symbiotic fungis that can basically boost the defenses of nature itself and the human populations aswell. Usually you have a super fungus because there is not a natural fungis that can shoulder the defense against malignant destruction fungus. There is always a natural defense against large scale destruction fungus that can just eat this fungi and also give food to people. But it is because the basically natural defenses against fungi that are poisonous makes it so that the super fungus are evolving too quickly. A simple basically moss that spread and be a defensive measure eating the poisonous fungi then creating a better environment.

Every year, an estimated 23,000 Americans die from antibiotic-resistant superbugs – germs that evolve so quickly, existing treatment options can’t eradicate them.

But it’s not just deadly drug-resistant bacterial infections that are spreading. We also have to worry about drug-resistant fungal infections, too.

A deadly, drug-resistant fungus called Candida auris is spreading on a global scale and causing what the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls “urgent threats.”

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For the association between nutrient intake and the risk of death, the researchers found:

Adequate intake of certain nutrients is associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality when the nutrient source is foods, but not supplements, according to a new study. There was no association between dietary supplement use and a lower risk of death.

In addition, excess calcium intake was linked to an increased risk of cancer death, which the researchers found was associated with supplemental doses of calcium exceeding 1,000 mg/day. The study was published on April 9 in Annals of Internal Medicine.

“As potential benefits and harms of supplement use continue to be studied, some studies have found associations between excess nutrient intake and , including increased risk of certain cancers,” said Fang Fang Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and senior and corresponding author on the study. “It is important to understand the role that the nutrient and its source might play in , particularly if the effect might not be beneficial.”

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has successfully completed its second close approach to the Sun.

At 6:40 p.m. EST on April 4, the spacecraft—traveling at 213,200 mph—passed within 15 million miles of our star, tying its own distance record as the closest-ever ship to the Sun.

The mission team at John’s Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., kept a close eye on the spacecraft via the Deep Space Network: They were tuned in for four hours before, during, and after approach, monitoring the probe’s health during the critical moments.

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“Why are we impatient? It’s a heritage from our evolution,” says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Impatience made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act.

Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain friend who is a slow walker. Last month, as we sashayed our way to dinner, I found myself biting my tongue, thinking, I have to stop going places with her if I ever want to … get there!

You too can measure yourself on the “Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale,” a tool developed by University of Hawaii psychologist Leon James. While walking in a crowd, do you find yourself “acting in a hostile manner (staring, presenting a mean face, moving closer or faster than expected)” and “enjoying thoughts of violence?”

Slowness rage is not confined to the sidewalk, of course. Slow drivers, slow Internet, slow grocery lines—they all drive us crazy. Even the opening of this article may be going on a little too long for you. So I’ll get to the point. Slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of society has warped our sense of timing. Things that our great-great-grandparents would have found miraculously efficient now drive us around the bend. Patience is a virtue that’s been vanquished in the Twitter age.

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