Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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More progress with gene therapy safety.

A Washington State University researcher has developed a way to reduce the development of cancer cells that are an infrequent but dangerous byproduct of gene therapy.

Grant Trobridge, an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences, has altered the way a virus carries a beneficial gene to its . The modified viral vectors reduce the risk of cancer and can be used for many blood diseases.

Trobridge and his team report their development in Scientific Reports, an online open-access journal produced by the Nature Publishing Group. The team is translating their findings into a stem cell gene therapy to target a life-threatening immunodeficiency in newborns called SCID-X1, also known as “Boy in the Bubble Syndrome.”

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2013 saw the release of one of the most important papers in aging research and one that saw renewed interest and support for the concept of SENS.

Aging is characterized by a progressive loss of physiological integrity, leading to impaired function and increased vulnerability to death. This deterioration is the primary risk factor for major human pathologies, including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases. Aging research has experienced an unprecedented advance over recent years, particularly with the discovery that the rate of aging is controlled, at least to some extent, by genetic pathways and biochemical processes conserved in evolution. This Review enumerates nine tentative hallmarks that represent common denominators of aging in different organisms, with special emphasis on mammalian aging. These hallmarks are: genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, deregulated nutrient sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and altered intercellular communication. A major challenge is to dissect the interconnectedness between the candidate hallmarks and their relative contributions to aging, with the final goal of identifying pharmaceutical targets to improve human health during aging, with minimal side effects.

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Everyone’s talking about private industry getting humans on Mars. Mars trips! Mars houses! Mars colonies! But no one’s going anywhere without the help of one brilliant, peculiar, fantastical space center—NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which is behind almost every amazing feat in the history of space travel. August 2012.

At 2:00 a.m. in the blond hills of La Cañada Flintridge, California, one house stands lit among the others—an open eye in a sleeping town. Bryn Oh, the woman who lives in the house, helps her son Devyn, eight, walk his bike to the parking lot of the high school across the street. Devyn, who just learned to ride, wobbles for a few minutes before pedaling furiously out into the darkness, letting off a whoop as he gets going. Bryn’s older children, Ashlyn, ten, and Braden, thirteen, watch as he goes. David Oh, Bryn’s husband and the reason they’re all up at this uncivilized hour, isn’t there to see it. He’ll arrive home around 3:00 a.m., when he gets off work. Tomorrow will probably be closer to 3:40. Bryn has it all worked out on a spreadsheet.

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Metallic hydrogen has been created in a diamond anvil in a Harvard lab.

Diamond anvil cells can use only vanishingly small sample sizes. A typical amount is about 160 cubic micrometers.

If metallic hydrogen is metastable then there are a lot of potential applications.

Metastable would mean that the phases could retain their high-pressure forms for an indefinite period once external forces are removed, much as diamonds formed by high temperatures and pressures deep inside Earth remain diamonds even after they reach the surface, instead of immediately reverting to carbon’s more stable form, graphite. Nellis and others have imagined a host of applications for metastable metallic hydrogen, ranging from.

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The newest NASA emdrive paper concludes a force generation of 1.2mn/kw after errors measurement is accounted for.

A low thrust pendulum at the NASA Johnson space center was used.

The best conventional Hall thruster can produce 60 millinewtons per kilowatt which is an order of magnitude more than the emdrive that was tested.

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A woman living on a dialysis machine is grown a new kidney using her own cells. A father struggling with age-related vision loss has his eyesight restored. A soldier suffers extensive burns and has his skin regenerated.

This is a glimpse of the holy grail of regenerative medicine. The ultimate goal of the field is to develop therapies that restore normal function to diseased tissues and organs. Advances in 3D bioprinting, the process of fabricating functional human tissue outside the body in a layer-by-layer fashion, have pushed the envelope on what is considered possible in the field.

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