Lifeboat Foundation

It’s not often that a failed clinical trial leads to a scientific breakthrough.

When patients in the UK started showing adverse side effects during a cancer immunotherapy trial, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Center for Cancer Immunotherapy and University of Liverpool went back through the data and worked with patient samples to see what went wrong.

Their findings, published recently in Nature, provide critical clues to why many immunotherapies trigger dangerous side effects—and point to a better strategy for treating patients with solid tumors.

Pilot tests of ‘game-changing’ salt batteries are set to take place in homes in France, Poland and the Netherlands this year.

“It is not yet a product, but everything is now ready to be tested for the first time in a real-world situation,” said Olaf Adan, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology.

“While the potential is great, we have also seen many great potential technologies that have not made it. So we’re going to keep our feet on the ground and take this one step at a time.”

Continue reading “Battery breakthrough will make ‘millions of homes gas-free’” »

A UK study has discovered five types of bacteria linked to aggressive prostate cancer. The breakthrough could help doctors identify who needs urgent treatment.

Every year, around 12,000 men in the UK die from prostate cancer, but many more die with prostate cancer than from it. So knowing whether the disease is going to advance rapidly or not is important for knowing who to treat.

Our latest study, published in European Urology Oncology, sheds some light on understanding which cancers will progress rapidly and aggressively and which won’t. Part of the answer lies with five types of bacteria.

Continue reading “Prostate cancer linked to bacteria, raising hope of new test and treatment” »

At the Max Rady College of Medicine, University of Manitoba, in Canada, researchers have developed a stem-cell-based therapy that is regenerating spinal cords in laboratory animals and may become available for human clinical trials.

Blocking inhibitory molecules that cause neuronal cells to degenerate, and inhibit stem cell transplants may prove a breakthrough therapy.

Glowing spider fossils prompt breakthrough study of how they were preserved at Aix-en-Provence.

A geologic formation near Aix-en-Provence, France, is renowned as one of the world’s most important treasure troves of Cenozoic Era fossil species. Scientists have been uncovering exceptionally well-preserved fossilized plants and animals there since the late 1700s.

“Most life doesn’t become a fossil.” —

High-amplitude ultrasound pulses have been used to partially destroy liver tumors in rats, triggering the rodents’ immune systems to clear the remaining cancerous cells and prevent the disease from spreading or returning. Presenting their findings in the journal Cancers, the researchers behind this breakthrough say their technique could lead to effective, non-invasive treatments for some of the most intractable cancers in human patients.

Liver cancer certainly falls into that category, and is associated with a five-year survival rate of just 18 percent in the US. Though many treatment options are available, liver tumors have a tendency to metastasize or recur after these interventions.

In their study, the authors explain that conventional cancer treatments like chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and thermal ablation are effective at destroying tumors, yet also trigger a somewhat unpredictable immune reaction which can be anti-tumor or pro-tumor. Furthermore, they note that the size, location, and stage of a tumor can sometimes make it impossible to target the entire tissue mass with existing treatments.

To understand the nature of our galaxy, astronomers had to look to distant island universes.

Turn your eyes toward the night sky and you will see a bright, hazy band of light cutting across the sky.

For millennia, observers speculated about the Milky Way’s true nature. The Greeks said the streak of haze in the sky was milk spurting from the breast of the goddess, Hera, Egyptians thought it was cows’ milk, and some Aboriginal Australians thought it was a river flowing through the sky.

Continue reading “The shape of the Milky Way” »

CUORE Team Places New Limits on the Bizarre Behavior of Neutrinos Physicists are closing in on the true nature of the neutrino — and might be closer to answering a fundamental question about our own existence. In a Laboratory under a mountain, physicists are using crystals far colder than frozen air to study ghostly particles, hoping to learn secrets from the beginning of the universe. Researchers at the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) announced this week that they had placed some of the most stringent limits yet on the strange possibility that the neutrino is its own antiparticle. Neutrinos are deeply unusual particles, so ethereal and so ubiquitous that they regularly pass through our bodies without us noticing. CUORE has spent the last three years patiently waiting to see evidence of a distinctive nuclear decay process, only possible if neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same particle. CUORE’s new data shows that this decay doesn’t happen for trillions of trillions of years, if it happens at all. CUORE’s limits on the behavior of these tiny phantoms are a crucial part of the search for the next breakthrough in particle and nuclear physics – and the search for our own origins.

From self-replicating molecules in Archean seas, to eyeless fish in the Cambrian deep, to mammals scurrying from dinosaurs in the dark, and then, finally, improbably, ourselves – evolution shaped us.

Organisms reproduced imperfectly. Mistakes made when copying genes sometimes made them better fit to their environments, so those genes tended to get passed on. More reproduction followed, and more mistakes, the process repeating over billions of generations. Finally, Homo sapiens appeared. But we aren’t the end of that story. Evolution won’t stop with us, and we might even be evolving faster than ever.

It’s hard to predict the future. The world will probably change in ways we can’t imagine. But we can make educated guesses. Paradoxically, the best way to predict the future is probably looking back at the past, and assuming past trends will continue going forward. This suggests some surprising things about our future.