Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: health – Page 360

CFTC head to the UN: Cryptocoins aren’t going anywhere; “we are witnessing a technological revolution”

Introduction

Good evening. The United Nations has played a special role in my life. I grew up close by, about 20 miles away in northern New Jersey. More importantly, my Aunt is the founder and president of the International Health Awareness Network (IHAN), which works in consultative status with the Department of Public Information of the United Nations. Consequently, from the first days of that ambitious project back in 1987, she was often in these buildings advocating her vision, and seeking support for the organization, which aspires to “educate, empower and provide health care to socioeconomically underserved women and children.” My family would come to see her here. And occasionally, I had the great fortune of participating at IHAN events, listening to the speeches, and hearing about the organization’s vision to fulfill its mission. Those moments are themselves transformational, and foundational in setting my agenda for facilitating change in the future.

Additionally, in 2008, my sister’s wedding reception was held in the Delegates Dining Room of the United Nations. A spectacular night for my family, and another reason why this building and institution is so special to me.

Read more

MRSA bacterium captured by a hybrid cell membrane-coated nanorobot (colored scanning electron microscope image and black and white image below) (credit: Esteban-Fernández de Ávila/Science Robotics)

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed tiny ultrasound-powered nanorobots that can swim through blood, removing harmful bacteria and the toxins they produce.

These proof-of-concept nanorobots could one day offer a safe and efficient way to detoxify and decontaminate biological threat agents — providing an fast alternative to the multiple, broad-spectrum antibiotics currently used to treat life-threatening pathogens like MRSA bacteria (an antibiotic-resistant staph strain). MRSA is considered a serious worldwide threat to public health.

Read more

A journalist, a soup exec, and an imam walk into a room. There’s no joke here. It’s just another day at CrisprCon.

On Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of scientists, industry folk, and public health officials from all over the world filled the amphitheater at the Boston World Trade Center to reckon with the power of biology’s favorite new DNA-tinkering tool: Crispr. The topics were thorny—from the ethics of self-experimenting biohackers to the feasibility of pan-global governance structures. And more than once you could feel the air rush right out of the room. But that was kind of the point. CrisprCon is designed to make people uncomfortable.

“I’m going to talk about the monkey in the room,” said Antonio Cosme, an urban farmer and community organizer in Detroit who appeared on a panel at the second annual conference devoted to Crispr’s big ethical questions to talk about equitable access to gene editing technologies. He referred to the results of an audience poll that had appeared moments before in a word cloud behind him, with one bigger than all the others: “eugenics.”

Read more

Researchers at the US National Cancer Institute have reported in on an experimental breast cancer therapy that achieved remarkable results, rehabilitating Judy Perkins from the brink of death (she had been given two months to live, had tumors in her liver and throughout her body) to robust health two years later.

Read more

http://www.thepathmag.com/can-you-actually-hack-your-dna-to-slow-down-aging/

Many technologies / interventions progressing down the development pathways in the coming years — but there are a lot of free, common sense adjustments you can make today:

It was a good week for physics as a team with members from Australia and Switzerland invented a flux capacitor able to break time-reversal symmetry. They proposed a device based on quantum tunneling of magnetic flux around a capacitor. And another team with members from across the U.S. reported on a gravitational wave event that likely signaled the creation of a black hole—the merger of two neutron stars.

In biology news, a team of engineers led by Sinisa Vukelic invented a noninvasive technique to correct vision. Like LASIK, it uses lasers but is non-surgical and has few side-effects. And an international team of researchers found what they describe as the mother of all lizards in the Italian Alps, the oldest known lizard fossil, from approximately 240 million years ago. Also, a team at the University of Sydney found that walking faster could make you live longer. People do not even need to walk more, the team reported, they just need to pick up the pace of their normal stride to see an improvement in several health factors. And a team from Cal Poly Pomona discovered how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft—and it involved the cleaning agents themselves.

In other news, a team of researchers from the University of California and the University of Southern Queensland announced that they had identified 121 giant planets that may have habitable moons. And a team at Stanford University found that wars and clan structure might explain a strange biological event that occurred 7,000 years ago—male genetic diversity appeared to collapse for a time. Also, a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard University report the development of a 3D printer that can print data sets as physical objects—offering far more realistic, nearly true-color renderings.

Read more

It’s interesting to note that eastern Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas are experiencing much less soil moisture during the middle of May…

Data from the first NASA satellite mission dedicated to measuring the water content of soils is now being used operationally by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to monitor global croplands and make commodity forecasts.

The Soil Moisture Active Passive mission, or SMAP, launched in 2015 and has helped map the amount of water in soils worldwide. Now, with tools developed by a team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, SMAP soil moisture data are being incorporated into the Crop Explorer website of the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, which reports on regional droughts, floods and crop forecasts. Crop Explorer is a clearinghouse for global agricultural growing conditions, such as soil moisture, temperature, precipitation, vegetation health and more.

“There’s a lot of need for understanding, monitoring and forecasting crops globally,” said John Bolten, research scientist at Goddard. “SMAP is NASA’s first satellite mission devoted to soil moisture, and this is a very straightforward approach to applying that data.”

Continue reading “News: SMAP, the spacecraft I once worked on, is providing relative moisture data from the Earth’s surface” | >

Protection against many common pathogens and environmental stressors is written into our DNA. Our skin responds to sun exposure. Our immune system mounts defenses when we get the flu. Our bodies inherently work to mitigate the potential for harm caused by these health threats. However, these intrinsic responses are not always quick, robust, or appropriate enough to adequately defend us from harm, which is why many people experience sunburn after intense sun exposure or suffer severe symptoms, even death, following exposure to the flu.

Military service members, first responders, and civilian populations face threats far more severe than sunburn and respiratory infections. Pathogens with pandemic potential, toxic chemicals, and radioactive materials can all quickly and powerfully overwhelm the body’s innate defenses. And though significant public and private investment has been focused on the development of traditional medical countermeasures such as drugs, vaccines, and biologics to guard against the worst effects of these health threats, current countermeasures are often limited in their effectiveness and availability during emergencies.

DARPA is looking to make gains beyond the status quo. Inspired by recent advances in understanding of when and how genes express their traits, DARPA’s new PReemptive Expression of Protective Alleles and Response Elements (PREPARE) program will explore ways to better protect against biological, chemical, or radiological threats by temporarily and reversibly tuning gene expression to bolster the body’s defenses against – or directly neutralize – a given threat.

Read more