Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Iron accumulation in the brain may contribute to neurodegeneration

Neurodegenerative diseases affect tens of millions of people worldwide. Among these, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases are the most common; in the United States alone, the Alzheimer’s Disease Association and Parkinson’s Foundation report roughly 7 million people with Alzheimer’s and another million with Parkinson’s. An intriguing clue lies in the tangled mystery of neurodegeneration that scientists are working to solve: iron accumulation.

Scientists have noticed that iron can slowly build up inside neurons. Early in life, this iron accumulation appears to have little effect on neuronal function. However, later in life, it can contribute to a slow neuronal demise. Salk Institute researchers studied nerve cells to figure out whether and how this iron accumulation relates to neurodegenerative diseases. They found that the excess iron stuck in neurons lowers the cells’ defenses, making them more vulnerable to stressors and other cellular insults through a process they named chronoferroptosis.

The study, published in Cell Death Discovery on June 18, 2026, points to iron accumulation as a key target in the effort to predict, prevent and treat neurodegenerative diseases.

First 3D views of human cone opsins reveal how daylight vision reacts so fast

The retina of the human eye contains 6–7 million cone cells. These cells contain light-sensitive proteins known as cone opsins. They enable us to perceive our surroundings in detail in daylight. They allow us to see the world in thousands of colors: red strawberries, green leaves, the blue sky. They also enable us to see all the objects around us clearly. And they allow us to perceive fast movements, such as the rush of a train or the flight of a dragonfly.

Often, however, these all-rounders of daylight vision are also involved in retinal diseases. Impairment of cone receptor function, caused by genetic mutations or other degenerative processes, can lead to disorders such as color blindness and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a disease affecting the central retina and causing progressive vision loss.

In a new study, Polina Isaikina and Sarah L. Schmidt, two researchers from the Center for Life Sciences at PSI, have succeeded for the first time in determining the three-dimensional structure of human cone opsins in their dark state and showing how their molecular architecture enables their rapid activation by light.

Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers

The morphological homogeneity of the middle Pleistocene hominin Homo naledi is reflected in its dental proteome, with no evidence supporting confident identification of male individuals, and the detection of both derived and ancestral amino acid substitutions in Homo naledi.

Preventing the next pandemic using AI-designed vaccines

For most of human history, infectious diseases were the main causes of morbidity and mortality. Advances in sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, and public health dramatically shifted that balance, particularly in high-income countries, where life expectancy has increased by nearly 40 years over the past century. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic provided a stark reminder that infectious threats can still reshape societies almost overnight. Between 2019 and 2021 alone, life expectancy in the US fell by more than two years, and recent modelling suggests there is roughly a 50 percent chance of another COVID-scale pandemic occurring within the next 25 years.

Historically, the vaccine development model has been largely reactive and variant-driven, but the industry is now actively shifting toward proactive and universal vaccinology to get ahead of evolving pathogens. Recent results from a first-in-human clinical trial led by the University of Cambridge and its spin-out DIOSynVax, published in the Journal of Infection, provide early clinical evidence of this shift, demonstrating the safety of an AI-designed “super-antigen” intended to provide broad viral coverage.

Teaching AI to Invent Enzymes Nature Never Imagined

Evolution is an extraordinary engine for enzymatic diversity, yet the chemistry it has explored remains a narrow slice of what DNA can encode. Deep generative models can design new proteins that bind ligands, but none have created enzymes without pre-specifying catalytic residues.

In this webinar, Chenghao Liu and Jarrid Brooks from the Arnold Lab at Caltech will introduce DISCO (DIffusion for Sequence-structure CO-design). This multimodal model co-designs protein sequence and 3D structure around arbitrary biomolecules, as well as inference-time scaling methods that optimize objectives across both modalities. Conditioned solely on reactive intermediates, DISCO designs diverse heme enzymes with novel active-site geometries. These enzymes catalyze new-to-nature carbene-transfer reactions, including alkene cyclopropanation, spirocyclopropanation, B-H, and C(sp^3)-H insertions, with high activities exceeding those of engineered enzymes. Random mutagenesis of a selected design further confirmed that enzyme activity can be improved through directed evolution. By providing a scalable route to evolvable enzymes, DISCO broadens the potential scope of genetically encodable transformations.

Matlab-deep-learning/pose-estimation-3D-with-stereo-camera: This demo uses a deep neural network and two generic cameras to perform 3D pose estimation

This demo uses a deep neural network and two generic cameras to perform 3D pose estimation. — matlab-deep-learning/pose-estimation-3D-with-stereo-camera

/* */