Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Nice.

Renowned physicist, author and broadcaster, Professor Jim Al-Khalili OBE, has been awarded the inaugural Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili is the first person to be honoured for his contribution to science with this, first medal of its kind, at STARMUS International Science and Arts Festival in Tenerife on 29 June 2016.

Stephen Hawking Medal recognizes the work of those helping to promote the public awareness of science through different disciplines such as science communication, music, arts and cinema.

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Government GPS now has a new backup approach.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency plans to demonstrate a positioning, navigation and timing system that will use very low frequency band signals as backup in case military forces lose access to GPS networks.

Lin Haas, DARPA strategic technology officer, discussed the Spatial, Temporal and Orientation Information in Contested Environments project at DARPA Demo Day, the U.S. Army said May 19.

DARPA plans to demonstrate the STOIC system by fiscal year 2018 or 2019 while an at-sea demo will be conducted this year.

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Interesting.

A team of Melbourne researchers believe they have discovered a new immune cell which is able to fight the infectious and potentially lethal bacteria, Legionella.

A team of specialist immunologists and microbiologists from the University of Melbourne and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity conducted a study which was able to determine a new cell type responsible for combating the attack of the bacteria.

The team was able to break down the impact of the legion of immune cells in the lung, which communicate to destroy the legionella bacteria.

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When cancer hits, your immune system shuts down. Over the past 5–10 years, research into cancer has therefore increasingly focused on helping the immune system start up again. Because if we succeed in that, there is much to indicate that this approach will prove significantly more effective than the aggressive, all encompassing chemotherapy treatments we currently use.

One of the initiatives in this area is the work of Professor Thomas Andresen from DTU Nanotech. He has recently been awarded a grant from Innovation Fund Denmark for a project in which biological nano-drones are used to train the immune system to recognize cancer cells; and kill them.

This is something it cannot do on its own, because cancer cells are adept at concealing themselves. It is true that when chemotherapy or radiotherapy is used to kill cancer cells today, the immune system steps in afterwards to clear away the dead cells, but it doesn’t learn anything from the process. This is what Thomas Andresen is looking to change.

“The strategy is for us to start by using radiation therapy to kill a small number of cancer cells. While the immune system is working to clear up after the attack, we send in our drones, which emit substances that place the immune system in ‘emergency response mode’. It then orders the body’s T-cells to attack the cancer cells. And because cancer cells are slightly different to other cells in the body, we can make them react to specific proteins on the surface of these cells, so only the hazardous cells are targeted,” explains Thomas Andersen.

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