Lifeboat Foundation

Prof. Yossi Buganim and his research team at the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have achieved a groundbreaking milestone in the field of cell reprogramming. Their latest study, published in Nature Communications, reveals a remarkable breakthrough in converting skin samples into functional human placenta cells. This achievement has significant implications for understanding pregnancy development, studying pregnancy-related diseases, and advancing cell therapies.

The research opens new avenues for investigating the causes of infertility, complications during pregnancy, and long-term health implications for both mothers and babies.

Reprogramming cells to assume new identities has been a focus of Prof. Buganim’s lab, which utilizes specialized proteins to modify gene expression. By transforming skin cells into other cell types, the team enables the study of specific diseases and the potential development of cell-based therapies. However, accessing cells from the placenta, a critical organ in pregnancy, has long been a challenge due to technical and ethical constraints.

Australian startup Synchron, backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, looks set to beat Elon Musk’s Neuralink to market with a safe, reliable brain-computer interface that any hospital can quickly install – without cutting a hole in your skull.

Volvo Cars is another automaker that officially announced a switch from the Combined Charging System (CCS1) to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) charging connector in North America (United States, Canada, and Mexico).

Volvo entered into an agreement with Tesla to use the NACS charging connector, as the first European brand. Previously, a similar move was announced by Ford, General Motors, and Rivian, not forgetting about Aptera (an EV start-up).

According to Volvo, the deal with Tesla will open the Tesla Supercharging network (more than 12,000 stalls in more than 2,000 locations) for all existing Volvo BEVs from the first half of 2024. However, the CCS1-compatible Volvo cars (XC40, C40 Recharge, and the upcoming XC30 and XC90) will have to use a NACS to CCS1 adapter.

Andreessen argues that thanks to A.I., “productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet.”

This week, on the Lex Fridman Podcast, he offered advice to young people who want to stand out in what he describes in this “freeze-frame moment” with A.I.—where tools like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are suddenly available and “everybody is kind of staring at them wondering what to do.”

Continue reading “Marc Andreessen says we’re in a ‘freeze-frame moment’ with A.I.—and has advice for young people” »

ALBION, MI — Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan was the last person to step foot on the Moon more than five decades ago. In 2025, someone new will take his place.

The NASA Artemis mission aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, as well as explore more of the lunar surface.

A pair of Albion College professors are participating in the mission’s research into the origins and evolution of the Moon, college officials said.

A two-faced protein in a chain that regulates iron and other elements in cells could provide a new target to treat cancer, diabetes and other diseases.

A team of researchers at Rice University, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of North Texas detailed the structure of a protein called mitochondrial inner NEET (MiNT), part of a pathway that stabilizes mitochondria, the organelles that produce energy for cells.

Their report appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Huge libraries of drug compounds may hold potential treatments for a variety of diseases, such as cancer or heart disease. Ideally, scientists would like to experimentally test each of these compounds against all possible targets, but doing that kind of screen is prohibitively time-consuming.

In recent years, researchers have begun using computational methods to screen those libraries in hopes of speeding up drug discovery. However, many of those methods also take a long time, as most of them calculate each target protein’s three-dimensional structure from its amino-acid.

Researchers in Japan and Australia have developed a new multicore optic fiber able to transmit a record-breaking 1.7 petabits per second, while maintaining compatibility with existing fiber infrastructure. The team–from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia—achieved the feat using a fiber with 19 cores. That’s the largest number of cores packed into a cable with a standard cladding diameter of 0.125 micrometers.

“We believe 19 cores is the highest practical number of cores or spatial channels you can have in standard cladding diameter fiber and still maintain good quality transmission,” says Georg Rademacher, who previously headed the project for NICT but who has recently returned to Germany to take up a directorship in optical communications at the University of Stuttgart.

Most fiber cables for long-distance transmission in use today are single core, single-mode glass fibers (SMF). But SMF is approaching its practical limit as network traffic rapidly increases because of AI, cloud computing, and IoT applications. Many researchers are therefore taking an interest in multicore fiber in conjunction with space-division multiplexing (SDM), a transmission technique for using multiple spatial channels in a cable.

Recent advances in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and management have resulted in a growing number of cancer survivors. Researchers constantly strive to understand new ways to support cancer survivors and help them lead a healthy and happy life post-treatment. This has led to our understanding that cancer survivors have different healthcare needs than their counterparts with no history of cancer.

One concern facing cancer survivors involves cardiovascular disease (CVD), a general term including conditions that inflict the heart or blood vessels. Many cancer survivors face a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD) than from cancer itself.

Despite the well-known adverse effects of tobacco use associated with both cancer and CVD, about 20% of cancer survivors continue smoking after diagnosis. How smoking cessation impacts CVD risk after cancer diagnosis remains poorly understood. To address this, a team of researchers recently published their study investigating the cardiovascular consequences of quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis in the European Heart Journal.