Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 2311

As if space travel didn’t present enough challenges — from bone thinning and an elevated risk of cancer to the sheer tedium of spending months confined to a small capsule — scientists have now warned that prolonged exposure to microgravity and cosmic radiation could lead to erectile dysfunction.

For a NASA-funded study, published in The Faseb Journal, researchers exposed rats to doses of radiation equivalent to that found in deep space, and suspended them in harnesses to simulate weightlessness for four weeks. A year later the blood supply to the rats’ erectile tissue was found to be impaired, apparently mainly as a result of the radiation. The scientists described it as “a new health risk to consider with deep space exploration”, but said that there were signs it could be treatable. When astronauts are in orbit, such as on the International Space Station, they are protected from cosmic radiation by Earth’s magnetic field, which deflects the rays. Further out, they’re fully exposed, and transporting the material needed to shield them is difficult and expensive.

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Imagine brain scanning technology improves greatly in the coming decades, to the point that we can observe how each individual neuron talks to other neurons.

Then, imagine we can record all this information to create a simulation of someone’s brain on a computer.

This is the concept behind mind uploading – the idea that we may one day be able to transition a person from their biological body to a synthetic hardware.

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A team of engineers at Duke University have developed a method to broaden the reach of CRISPR technologies. While the original CRISPR system could only target 12.5% of the human genome, the new method expands access to nearly every gene to potentially target and treat a broader range of diseases through genome engineering.

The research involved collaborators at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts Medical School, University of Zurich and McMaster University.

This work was published on October 4 in the journal Nature Communications.

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A new technique using deep brain stimulation tailored to each patient exceeded researchers’ expectations in treating the cognitive impairments from moderate to severe traumatic brain injury.

In 2001, Gina Arata was in her final semester of college, planning to apply to law school, when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. The injury so compromised her ability to focus she struggled in a job sorting mail.

“I couldn’t remember anything,” said Arata, who lives in Modesto with her parents. “My left foot dropped, so I’d trip over things all the time. I was always in car accidents. And I had no filter — I’d get pissed off really easily.”

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So our experiences or how we handle those experiences may have an effect on the expression of genes in our body.

A surprising thing happened when researchers began exploring whether early-life stress compounds the effects of a childhood head injury on health and behavior later in life: In an animal study, stress changed the activation level of many more genes in the brain than were changed by a bump to the head.

It’s already known that head injuries are common in young kids, especially from falling, and can be linked to mood disorders and social difficulties that emerge later in life. Adverse childhood experiences are also very common, and can raise risk for disease, mental illness and substance misuse in adulthood.

“But we don’t know how those two things can interact,” said senior study author Kathryn Lenz, associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. “We wanted to understand whether experiencing a traumatic brain injury in the context of early life stress circumstances could modulate the response to the brain injury. And using an animal model allows us to really get into the mechanisms through which these two things might be impacting brain development as it’s occurring.”

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Languages are a key factor in human societies. They connect people, serve as a vehicle to pass on knowledge and ideas, but they also distinguish between different groups of people. Languages can therefore tell us a lot about the societies that use them. As languages are constantly changing, it is important to know the factors that play a role in this. Scientists can then reconstruct past processes on the basis of languages.

In a study published today (Dec. 5) in the online journal PNAS Nexus, Kiel linguist Dr. Søren Wichmann, together with colleagues from China, demonstrates that average ambient temperatures influence the loudness of certain speech sounds. “Generally speaking, languages in warmer regions are louder than those in colder regions,” says Dr. Wichmann.

The basic idea behind the study is that we are surrounded by air when we speak and listen. Spoken words are transmitted through the air as . The physical properties of air therefore influence how easy it is to produce and hear speech.

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Using lasers rather than scalpels and saws has many benefits in surgery. Yet they are only used in isolated cases. But that could be about to change: laser systems are getting smarter and better all the time, as a research team from the University of Basel demonstrates.

Even back in 1957, when Gordon Gould coined the term “” (short for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”), he was already imagining the possibilities for its use in medicine. Surgeons would be able to make precise incisions without even touching the patient.

Before that could happen, however, there were—and still are—many hurdles to overcome. Manually controlled light sources have been superseded by mechanical and computer-controlled systems to reduce injuries caused by clumsy handling. Switching from continuous beams to pulsed lasers, which turn themselves rapidly on and off, has reduced the heat they produce. Technical advances allowed lasers to enter the world of ophthalmology in the early 1990s. Since then, the technology has moved on in other areas of medicine, too, but only in relatively few applications has it replaced the scalpel and the bone saw.

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Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a portable, self-powered ultraviolet-C device called the Tribo-sanitizer that can inactivate two of the bacteria responsible for many foodborne illnesses and deaths.

The Tribo-sanitizer’s UVC lamp is powered using the —electricity that is generated when two dissimilar materials come into contact. In tests, the Tribo-sanitizer successfully inactivated two potentially deadly foodborne bacteria, Escherichia coli O157:H7, and Listeria monocytogenes, mainly by damaging their DNA, according to findings published in the journal Nano Energy.

The bacteria selected as testing targets are two of the most common causes of serious foodborne illness outbreaks in the U.S. Escherichia coli produces toxins that can cause severe abdominal cramps, fever, bloody diarrhea, and kidney failure, and Listeria monocytogenes can cause listeriosis, which has the highest rates of hospitalization and mortality of any foodborne illness.

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While Santa Claus may have a magical sleigh and nine plucky reindeer to help him deliver presents, for companies like FedEx, the optimization problem of efficiently routing holiday packages is so complicated that they often employ specialized software to find a solution.

This software, called a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) solver, splits a massive optimization problem into and uses generic algorithms to try and find the best solution. However, the solver could take hours—or even days—to arrive at a solution.

The process is so onerous that a company often must stop the software partway through, accepting a solution that is not ideal but the best that could be generated in a set amount of time.

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