Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10794

TOKYO There is a new race to the moon, and it is the private sector — not governments — that is providing the runners. And unlike last time, Japan is in the thick of the action. If all goes as planned, a Japanese rover will soon be cruising across the lunar landscape for the first time ever.

The race is sponsored by the Google Lunar XPRIZE, a contest for privately funded teams to be the first to land a rover on the surface of the moon, have it travel 500 meters, and transmit high-definition video and images back to Earth. The winner receives $20 million — plus bragging rights. The contest aims to encourage the continuous exploration of the moon through privately led technologies and businesses.

Team Hakuto, as the Japanese effort is called, is a collaborative effort among more than 30 companies, including many startups as well as several established players. The team’s rover, dubbed the Sorato, represents a distillation of Japanese knowledge, with materials, technologies and know-how contributed by a diverse lineup of companies.

Read more

“Microglia play an important role in Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the central nervous system. Recent research has revealed that newly discovered Alzheimer’s-risk genes influence microglia behavior,” Jones said in an interview for a UCI press release. “Using these cells, we can understand the biology of these genes and test potential new therapies.”

A Renewable Method

The skin cells had been donated by patients from UCI’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. These were first subjected to a genetic process to convert them into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells — adult cells modified to behave as an embryonic stem cell, allowing them to become other kinds of cells. These iPS cells were then exposed to differentiation factors designed to imitate the environment of developing microglia, which transformed them into the brain cells.

Read more

One afternoon in February 2011, Kelly Dwyer strapped on a pair of snowshoes and set out to hike a beaver pond trail near her home in Hooksett, New Hampshire. When the sun dropped below the horizon hours later, the 46-year-old environmental educator still hadn’t returned home. Her husband, David, was worried. Grabbing his cellphone and a flashlight, he told their two daughters he was going to look for Mom. As he made his way toward the pond, sweeping his flashlight beam across the darkening winter landscape, he called out for Kelly. That’s when he heard the moans.

Running toward them, David phoned their daughter Laura, 14, and told her to call 911. His flashlight beam soon settled on Kelly, submerged up to her neck in a hole of dark water in the ice. As David clutched her from behind to keep her head above water, Kelly slumped into unconsciousness. By the time rescue crews arrived, her body temperature was in the 60s and her pulse was almost too faint to register. Before she could reach the ambulance, Kelly’s heart stopped. The EMTs attempted CPR—a process doctors continued for three hours at a hospital in nearby Manchester. They warmed her frigid body. Nothing. Even defibrillation wouldn’t restart her heart. Kelly’s core temperature hovered in the 70s. David assumed he’d lost her for good.

reanimators

Read more

In this video, co-author D. Fox Harrell discusses “Reimagining the Avatar Dream,” a Contributed Article in the July 2017 Communications of the ACM that argues for the need to reconsider the social and cultural impacts of creating social networks based on virtual identities.

http://ow.ly/B8LN30dw7O0

Read more

Scientists have developed an electronic sensor that is hypoallergenic, breathable and can be worn constantly for a week, enabling continuous, unobtrusive health monitoring.

The patch, developed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, is, according to its creators, so thin and light that the majority of users will forget they are even wearing it – a far cry from many of the weighty or uncomfortable health monitoring solutions currently available.

Designed to withstand repeated and continuous bending and stretching, the patch can be worn during a host of day-to-day activities, including sports. As a result its creators believe it could be used not only in healthcare settings, but also to monitor professional athletes.

Read more