Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11613

Nice read.

At the beginning of the movie 50/50, Adam Lerner is diagnosed with neurofibrosarcoma, a cancer of the spine’s nerve tissue. Adam sits in his doctor’s office while the doctor rattles off the word several times, but Adam has no idea what it means, or if there’s anything wrong with him at all. Eventually, his doctor uses the word “cancer,” and Adam’s perspective goes blurry, the doctor’s voice drowned out by a high-pitched ringing.

Many people have had real experiences like this one. Cancer is still one of the scariest words you can hear in a diagnosis. And chances are, you know someone who has heard it—almost 40 percent of adults are diagnosed with some form of it during their lifetime. Every patient’s story is different, and they don’t all have a happy ending. But because of decades of research into how cancer works, patients diagnosed with cancer today have a much better chance of survival than ever before.

Continue reading “How The Meaning Of Cancer Has Changed” | >

Interesting method in controlling energy sources and efficiencies via Quantum legos.

The chrome-plated bricks can conduct electricity, integrate active parts such as LED lights, motor blocks, and even sound, light and proximity sensors. The conductive bricks feature flexible side-arms that ensure electrical connection between two adjacent blocks, and the whole assemblies are powered by a Bluetooth-controlled 9V battery block. The built-in Bluetooth controller lets users change the current’s direction and voltage levels via a mobile application.

That means the Brixo bricks can not only be triggered by sound, light and touch, but also controlled by any Bluetooth connected device, taking the good old Lego bricks further into the IoT world (the Danish company has its entries in the cloud via its Mindstorms Lego series and the augmented reality-capable Nexo Knights toys.

The company is promising open 3D building instructions, an online library of models and hacks to its followers, encouraging a community of Brixo enthusiasts to share their models.

Read more

Gene expression is the process by which genetic information is used to produce proteins, which are essential for cells to function properly and fulfil their many purposes. It takes place in two distinctive steps: first the transcription, which takes place in the nucleus, then the translation, in the cytoplasm. Control of gene expression is vital for cells to produce the exact proteins that are needed at the right moment. Until now, gene transcription and translation into proteins were thought to be two independent processes. Today, microbiologists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg (Germany) provide additional evidence that these two processes are intrinsically related and show that a protein complex called Ccr4-Not plays a key role in gene expression by acting as a messenger between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Published in Cell Reports, these results shed light on the very mechanisms governing gene expression, a process that controls the life and death of our cells.

Gene expression refers to the biochemical processes through which the information that is stored in our genes is read like an instruction book to produce proteins that will make our cells function properly. Until now, gene expression was thought to take place in two distinctive steps: first transcription, which takes place in the nucleus, then translation, in the cytoplasm. Today, research led by UNIGE and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory shows that transcription and translation are intrinsically related and continuously influence one another. To do so, a very efficient communication within the cell, between the nucleus and the cytoplasm, is essential. This dialogue is made possible by a protein complex called Ccr4-Not, which globally determines the cell translational capacity.

Gene expression: a two-way street

Martine Collart and her team from the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine discovered in 2014 that the Ccr4-Not complex enables the cytoplasm to provide information to the nucleus during translation. Today, they prove that it is a two way-street communication as the nucleus also communicates information to the cytoplasm at all stages of gene expression, thanks to Ccr4-Not. This complex acts as a messenger between the nucleus and the cytoplasm to ensure that both transcription and translation levels are well adapted. It is also able to enhance translation to compensate for transcriptional stress, thus ensuring that gene expression remains well-balanced.

Read more

Nice and interesting Gene Mutation Discovery.

A single defect in a gene that codes for a histone — a “spool” that wraps idle DNA — is linked to pediatric cancers in a study published in the journal Science.

“Unlike most cancers that require multiple hits, we found that this particular mutation can form a tumor all by itself,” says Peter W. Lewis, an assistant professor of biomolecular chemistry in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Histones derive their pattern from the same genome that they help to pack up and organize. “A histone’s day job is compacting the genome,” says Lewis. “The histone takes six feet of DNA and packs it in something that is a few microns in diameter.”

Read more

I remember years ago when researchers identified that families with high rates for severe allergies also had high rates of cancer. Today, we talk about cancer and immunology as an intertwined dependency. Just means we’re still understanding cancer, genetic mutations, and the trigger/s in causing cancer among families and individual.

Scientists say the NLCR5 gene allows cancer cells to escape the immune system. A test for the biomarker may predict how long a cancer patient can survive.

Read more

Hope for HIV patients.

In 2014, a team of researchers in the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University became the first to successfully eliminate the HIV-1 virus from cultured human cells. Fewer than two years later, the team has made further strides in its research by eliminating the virus from the genome of human T-cells using the specialized gene editing system they designed.

In a new study published in Scientific Reports, the researchers show that the method can both effectively and safely eliminate the virus from the DNA of human cells grown in culture.

How this research differs In previous work, the team—led by Kamel Khalili, professor and chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Temple—had demonstrated the ability of their technology to snip out HIV-1 DNA from normal human cells. The newest findings used that same technology to snip out the virus from latently and productively infected CD4+ T-cells, which host the virus in persons infected with HIV.

Continue reading “Scientists prove effectiveness of gene editing system in eliminating HIV from DNA of CD4+ T-cells” | >

Another report on the Russian land give away from NY Daily News.

They’re Putin it all on the line.

Signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, a new deal offers every Russian citizen up to approximately 2.5 acres of land tax free for five years. The land would be located in Russia’s Far East, territory that stretches from the Artic to Japan and Siberia where just 4 percent of the country’s population lives.

Continue reading “What you can do with the free Russian land Putin is giving away” | >

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., May 12 (UPI) — Researchers say a faint blue galaxy 30 million light-years away may offer insights into the birth of the universe.

The galaxy, discovered by astronomers at Indiana University, is small, faint and relatively unassuming. Its chemical contents, however, make it quite unusual. Researchers found surprisingly few heavy chemical elements inside the galaxy, which they dubbed Leoncino, or “little lion.”

In fact, Leoncino boasts the fewest metals of any observed gravitationally bound star system.

Read more

Flick a switch on a dark winter day and your office is flooded with bright light, one of many everyday miracles to which we are all usually oblivious.

A physicist would probably describe what is happening in terms of the particle nature of light. An atom or molecule in the fluorescent tube that is in an excited state spontaneously decays to a lower energy state, releasing a particle called a . When the photon enters your eye, something similar happens but in reverse. The photon is absorbed by a molecule in the retina and its energy kicks that molecule into an excited state.

Light is both a particle and a wave, and this duality is fundamental to the physics that rule the Lilliputian world of atoms and . Yet it would seem that in this case the wave nature of light can be safely ignored.

Read more