Lifeboat Foundation

Thanks to directed evolution accelerating natural selection processes, scientists are generating mutants with beneficial properties and improving functionality.

Learn more about these reagents in the new Research Products.

Directed evolution approaches are creating new reagents to help a tried-and-true technique reach new heights.

Continue reading “Directing Superior Reagents for Better PCR Results” »

Patients with advanced/metastatic non–human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-positive gastric/gastroesophageal junction cancer (GC/GEJC) or esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) and treated with Opdivo (nivolumab) and chemotherapy maintained their health-related quality of life (HRQoL) “with a reduced risk of definitive deterioration in disease-related and overall health status and without increased treatment-related symptom burden” when compared with patients treated with standalone chemotherapy, according to recent study findings.

Those findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, “can be helpful when counseling patients with advanced or metastatic GE/GEJC or EAC, providing reassurance that the benefits of adding (Opdivo) to chemotherapy extend not only to improved survival, but also to preservation of their quality of life and prolonged symptom control,” wrote Journal of Clinical Oncology associate editor, Dr. Andrew H. Ko, in a contextual commentary published alongside the study.

Analyzing patient-reported outcomes (PROs) from the phase 3 CheckMate 649 trial, researchers assessed 1,581 participants’ HRQoL via the EQ-5D and Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Gastric (FACT-Ga) scales, including the FACT-General (FACT-G) and Gastric Cancer subscale (GaCS), with the FACT-G GP5 item used to assess treatment-related symptom burden, and studied longitudinal changes in HRQoL measured with mixed models for repeated measures in the PRO analysis population of 1,360 randomly assigned patients, researchers detailed, noting that they also conducted time to symptom or definitive deterioration analyses.

Google built an AI that monitors the amount of idling at intersections to help city planners cut congestion and reduce air pollution. Now it’s working in 70 intersections.

Some asteroids are dense. So dense in fact, that they may contain heavy elements outside of the periodic table, according to a new study on mass density.

The team of physicists from The University of Arizona say they were motivated by the possibility of Compact Ultradense Objects (CUDOs) with a mass density greater than Osmium, the densest naturally occurring, stable element, with its 76 protons.

“In particular, some observed asteroids surpass this mass density threshold. Especially noteworthy is the asteroid 33 Polyhymnia,” the team writes in their study, adding that “since the mass density of asteroid 33 Polyhymnia is far greater than the maximum mass density of familiar atomic matter, it can be classified as a CUDO with an unknown composition.”

🚨 Malicious NuGet package distributing SeroXen RAT targets. NET developers. The malicious user behind this package has released 6 other suspicious packages, with 2.1 million downloads.

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David Baillot.

Aiming to make the process more efficient and convenient, a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed electronic “stickers” that help to measure this phenomenon.

From unexplained tracks in a balloon-borne experiment to cosmic rays on Earth, the unstable muon was particle physics’ biggest surprise.

When it comes to human longevity, you might envision nanobots helping our bodies operate more efficiently. But our bodies are biological machines in their own right, evolved to handle any situation in the real world from illness to cold to hunger. Our bodies heal themselves, and they can be programmed to do so if we understood that language better.

This video talks about DNA and genes, and the epigenetic mechanisms that read that information. The epigenetic clock is one way to measure the age of cells, and this can be reversed with current technologies. We discuss experiments by David Sinclair, which made blind mice see again, and experiments by Greg Fahy, which regenerated the immune system of humans and reset their cellular age by 2 years.

Continue reading “Unlocking immortality: the science of reversing aging” »

For the first time, scientists have managed to deflect lightning, to the relief of anyone afraid of thunder and lightning storms but probably the chagrin of Zeus. They managed to show that lasers can act as virtual lightning rods, redirecting the direction in which bolts jump.

The Franklin lightning rod was a major scientific advance of its day, preventing millions of fires and electrocutions and demonstrating humanity’s capacity to control forces we had long feared as belonging to the gods. Nevertheless, it’s been 270 years, and it remains the basis of our lightning protection: maybe it’s time for an upgrade.

That is what Dr Aurélien Houard of ENSTA Paris and co-authors propose in a paper pubpished in Nature Photonics, demonstrating that laser pulses can change the direction of a lightning strike.