Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10193

With the ability to be coaxed into different kinds of mature cell types, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) hold all kinds of potential in the world of regenerative medicine. One of the many possibilities could be repairing damaged hearts, something that will soon be put to the test for the first time ever in newly approved clinical trials in Japan.

Since emerging from the laboratory of researcher Shinya Yamanaka in Japan in 2006, the potential of iPSCs has been explored in all kinds of promising research efforts. We have seen them implanted into rabbits to restore their vision, become brain tumor predators, and turned into precursor cells for human organs.

IPSCs are created by first harvesting cells from body tissues and then infecting them with a virus, in turn introducing them to carefully selected genes that return them to their immature state. From there they can develop into any cell in the body, a capability so powerful it earned Yamanaka a Nobel Prize in 2012.

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Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have developed a new way to grow mineralised materials which could regenerate hard tissues such as dental enamel and bone.

Enamel, located on the outer part of our teeth, is the hardest in the body and enables our teeth to function for a large part of our lifetime despite biting forces, exposure to acidic foods and drinks and extreme temperatures. This remarkable performance results from its highly organised structure.

However, unlike other tissues of the body, cannot regenerate once it is lost, which can lead to pain and tooth loss. These problems affect more than 50 per cent of the world’s population and so finding ways to recreate enamel has long been a major need in dentistry.

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Forget zombies or killer robots – the most likely doomsday scenario in the near future is the threat of superbugs. Bacteria are evolving resistance to our best antibiotics at an alarming rate, so developing new ones is a crucial area of study. Now, inspired by a natural molecule produced by marine microorganisms, researchers at North Carolina State University have synthesized a new compound that shows promising antibacterial properties against resistant bugs.

Decades of overuse and overprescription of antibiotics has led to more and more bacteria becoming resistant to them, and the situation is so dire that a recent report warned that they could be killing up to 10 million people a year by 2050. Worse still, the bugs seem to be on schedule, with the ECDC reporting that our last line of defense has already begun to fail in large numbers.

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Next week’s proposals are unlikely to contain major surprises, because the commission has unveiled its main ideas over the past months, in particular its overall 7-year budget plan, issued on 2 May. Although Horizon Europe will keep Horizon 2020’s main features, the commission has laid the groundwork for several novelties, including a new agency to tackle the continent’s perennial innovation problem and a big, separate push on collaborative defense research. But contentious negotiations lie ahead. The United Kingdom is negotiating the terms of its impending exit from the European Union, and some member states want to tighten budgets. Meanwhile, research advocates want more generous spending, noting the low application success rates in Horizon 2020—a frustrating 11.9% so far.

Commission seeks €97.6 billion for “Horizon Europe”.

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TIME magazine’s latest issue is a special report on the rapid explosion of drones in our culture. For the cover photo, TIME recreated its iconic logo and red border using 958 illuminated drones hovering in the sky. It’s the first-ever TIME cover captured with a camera drone.

To create the photo, TIME partnered with Intel’s Drone Light Show team (which creates beautiful sky displays using hundreds of drones at a time) and Astraeus Aerial Cinema Systems to fly and capture (respectively) the 958 drones above Folsom, California (where Intel has a campus).

The project was one of the biggest drone shows ever done in the United States — it’s a display measuring 100 meters (~328 feet) tall:

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