Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 1842

A blood test for colon cancer performed well in a study published Wednesday, offering a new kind of screening for a leading cause of cancer deaths.

The test looks for DNA fragments shed by tumor cells and precancerous growths. It’s already for sale in the U.S. for $895, but has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and most insurers do not cover it. The maker of the test, Guardant Health, anticipates an FDA decision this year.

In the study, the test caught 83% of the cancers but very few of the precancerous growths found by colonoscopy, the gold standard for colon cancer screening. Besides spotting tumors, colonoscopies can prevent the disease by removing precancerous growths called polyps.

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A newly developed “GPS nanoparticle” injected intravenously can home in on cancer cells to deliver a genetic punch to the protein implicated in tumor growth and spread, according to researchers from Penn State. They tested their approach in human cell lines and in mice to effectively knock down a cancer-causing gene, reporting that the technique may potentially offer a more precise and effective treatment for notoriously hard-to-treat basal-like breast cancers.

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An international team of researchers has succeeded in “filming” the activation of an important receptor. They froze the involved molecules at different points in time and photographed them under the electron microscope. They were then able to place these still images in sequence. This sequence shows step by step which spatial changes the receptor undergoes when it is activated.

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To combine two low-energy photons into one high-energy photon efficiently, the energy must be able to hop freely, but not too quickly, between randomly oriented molecules of a solid. This Kobe University discovery provides a much-needed design guideline for developing materials for more efficient PV cells, displays, or even anti-cancer therapies.

Light of different colors has different energies and is therefore useful for very different things. For the development of more efficient PV cells, OLED displays, or anti-cancer therapies, it is desirable to be able to upcycle two low-energy photons into a high-energy , and many researchers worldwide are working on materials for this up-conversion.

During this process, light is absorbed by the material, and its energy is handed around among the material’s as a so-called “triplet exciton.” However, it was unclear what allows two triplet excitons to efficiently combine their energies into a different excited state of a single molecule that then emits a high-energy photon, and this knowledge gap has been a serious bottleneck in the development of such materials.

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A critical molecule for the metabolism of living organisms has been synthesized for the first time by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers at low temperatures (10 K) on ice coated nanoparticles mimicking conditions in deep space, marking a “cool” step in advancing our understanding of the origins of life.

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