Lifeboat Foundation

Infections and other diseases can cause red blood cells to rupture, releasing the oxygen-binding molecule hemoglobin, which breaks down into heme. Free heme can cause significant inflammation and organ damage, leading to morbidity and mortality.

Researchers from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital discovered NLRP12, an innate immune pattern recognition receptor, to be the key molecule responsible for inducing inflammatory cell death and pathology in response to heme combined with other cellular damage or infection. The finding provides a new potential drug target to prevent morbidity in certain illnesses. The research was published today in Cell.

Many infectious and inflammatory diseases, including malaria or SARS-CoV-2 virus infections and sickle cell disease, cause red blood cells to break apart and spill their contents. The process, hemolysis, releases the hemoglobin. In the bloodstream, hemoglobin then breaks down into a substance called heme.

Sightful, a startup based in Tel Aviv, is rolling out what it calls the world’s first augmented reality (AR) laptop following nearly three years of under-the-radar development.

Designed for the “work from anywhere” movement, the 13-inch Spacetop takes full advantage of AR to transform the area around users into 100 inches of virtual screen space.

Continue reading “New AR laptop with a virtual screen could revolutionize remote work” »

Severe brain injuries or head traumas in humans can lead to various stages of so-called disorders of consciousness (DoC). These are states in which consciousness is either partly or entirely absent, such as a coma; unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, also known as a vegetative state; and minimally conscious state.

Accurately evaluating patients who have lost consciousness is of crucial importance, as it allows doctors to determine what treatments to administer and how to facilitate the re-emergence of consciousness. Typically, to clinically evaluate consciousness, doctors observe the behavior of patients in response to sensory stimuli, such as sounds or images.

For instance, while patients in a vegetative state are awake but continue to be unresponsive to external stimuli, patients with MCS exhibit some behaviors that indicate that they are conscious. So far, most methods to assess the consciousness level of patients rely on sounds or visual stimuli, yet olfactory stimuli could potentially prove useful too.

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Making homes for more than a decade, Joseph Mathew accumulated a host of ideas but most important of all, he wanted his house to be sustainable. Here are some pictures of his dream house.

In a new landmark study, University of Minnesota research shows surprising links between human cognition and personality—pillars of human individuality that shape who we are and how we interact with the world. Personality influences our actions, emotions and thoughts, defining whether we are extroverted, polite, persistent, curious or anxious.

On the other hand, cognitive ability is the umbrella that reflects our capability for navigating complexity, such as articulating language, grasping intricate mathematics and drawing logical conclusions. Despite the prevailing belief that certain connections exist—for instance, introverted individuals are often perceived as more intelligent—scientists lacked a comprehensive understanding of these intricate connections.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, synthesizes data from over 1,300 studies from the past century, representing more than 2 million participants from 50 countries and integrating data from academic journals, test manuals, military databases, previously unpublished datasets and even proprietary databases of private companies.

Researchers have synthesized a chalcogenide compound that has the electronic structure of an ideal Dirac semimetal—which could facilitate the study of this exotic class of materials.

Experiments show that the sticky behavior of so-called associative polymers is controlled by the density of bonding structures, contradicting theoretical predictions.

A new demonstration involving hundreds of entangled atoms tests Schrödinger’s interpretation of Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky’s classic thought experiment.

In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) presented an argument that they claimed implies that quantum mechanics provides an incomplete description of reality [1]. The argument rests on two assumptions. First, if the value of a physical property of a system can be predicted with certainty, without disturbance to the system, then there is an “element of reality” to that property, meaning it has a value even if it isn’t measured. Second, physical processes have effects that act locally rather than instantaneously over a distance. John Bell subsequently proposed a way to experimentally test these “local realism” assumptions [2], and so-called Bell tests have since invalidated them for systems of a few small particles, such as electrons or photons [3].