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

This amino acid may help the body fight tumors and viral infections

The amino acid arginine helps keep the human body humming, most notably by synthesizing proteins that carry out a range of cellular processes. It’s produced by our bodies and found in common high-protein foods. Low levels of arginine are associated with a number of diseases, including colon cancer.

Sohail Tavazoie, head of Rockefeller University’s Elizabeth and Vincent Meyer Laboratory of Systems Cancer Biology, has been investigating that connection for years. In 2023, Tavazoie’s team found that starving colon cancer cells of arginine increases the number of mutations they accumulate. Now they’ve discovered that an arginine-deficient diet also affects the immune system by stalling the production of the MHC-I protein, which alerts the immune system to dangers such as a mutating cell or an invading virus.

Intriguingly, they also found that a moderate dose of arginine—about as much as is found in a couple of over-the-counter tablets—could potentially restore expression of the genes responsible for MHC-I production. They published the results in the journal Cell.

Quantum randomness helps neural network recognize troublesome handwritten digits

Quantum computing and AI are among the most rapidly developing modern technologies. AI, in the form of machine learning, has been deployed for decades to recommend movies and TV shows and make it easier to search for images. Over the past several years, large language models have permeated even more facets of daily life, from writing emails to producing images, videos and songs in response to requests expressed in a few written lines.

Quantum computers, on the other hand, have remained almost exclusively in labs at universities and a handful of companies. Nevertheless, many researchers and engineers developing them are already looking for the earliest applications and predict a bright future in which quantum computers excel at certain tasks, like drug development and enabling new cryptographic techniques.

Despite machine learning and quantum computing both being heralded as revolutionary technologies, neither is a magic solution to every problem. They are each the products of a long line of research advances and are both still under active study.

How the heart’s ‘little brain’ helps it function and protects it against stress

For years, scientists have known that the heart has its own network of nerves, the intrinsic cardiac nervous system (ICNS), sometimes called its “little brain.” Exactly how it functions has remained something of a mystery, but a new paper published in the journal Cell sheds light on how these heart nerves work to keep the heart beating steadily.

The heart’s nerve cells fine-tune signals coming from the brain to control heart function, including heart rate. But because they are so few, doctors have struggled to determine exactly what they do. To solve this, researchers from Yale University School of Medicine genetically engineered adult mice so their heart nerves would glow, making them much easier to study.

After locating the nerves, the team analyzed which genes were active in them. They discovered that the nerves fell into two categories, which they called Npy neurons and Ddah1 neurons.

Inverting the seminar to recover what scientific papers leave out

A scientific paper reads as a clean progression from question to result. And yet, research almost never happens that way. Experiments fail, conversations redirect projects, and none of it survives into print. When the founders of a field retire, their tacit knowledge goes with them, and nothing records that it existed.

Writing in Nature Physics, a team led by the University of Pittsburgh’s Jeremy Levy and Chandralekha Singh describes the inverse seminar, or “inverseminar,” a format designed to recover some of the hidden knowledge and decisions that result in polished papers.

New ultrasound technique breaches blood brain barrier to treat gliomas

In a promising sign for the potential of focused sound waves to improve care for brain tumors, UVA Health researchers have determined that tumors called gliomas may be even more receptive to targeted drug delivery than normal brain tissue.

While the research is still in its early stages, the findings help allay concerns that brain tumors might have properties that would make them stubbornly resistant to the cutting-edge approach. The UVA scientists are using tiny “microbubbles” that are activated by sound waves to open the brain’s natural protective barrier, known as the “blood-brain barrier,” so that drugs can enter exactly where needed.

Inside brain tumors, cancer cells mutate the structure of the blood-brain barrier and its function becomes unpredictable. In turn, this raises questions about how effectively focused ultrasound can deliver therapies in the brain tumor environment and what sizes of drug molecules can be delivered most effectively. The new research from UVA Health’s Focused Ultrasound Cancer Immunotherapy Center provides important insights on both fronts.

Resetting autoimmune disease with CAR cell therapies

Pathogenic B cell activation underlies many autoimmune diseases (AIDs), and their depletion is an attractive therapeutic approach. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-expressing cells-initially developed and successfully used to treat certain cancers-are increasingly being developed to selectively deplete B cells and ‘reset’ the immune system in AIDs. In this Review, we survey this fast-developing field, providing insights on the current unmet needs in the treatment of AIDs and how CAR T cells could address these needs. In particular, we explore the concept of deep B cell depletion, discuss the currently available technologies and review the key targets (CD19 and B cell maturation antigen) relevant for the treatment of AIDs. We summarize current evidence on the efficacy, safety, risks and limitations of autologous and allogeneic CAR T cells in this setting. Finally, we discuss the future outlook-from a technological and clinical standpoint-for development of engineered CAR-expressing cell therapies for AIDs.

© 2026. Springer Nature America, Inc.

PubMed Disclaimer

Barry Ptolemy on “Transcendent Man”

In August 2010, I got on the phone with a filmmaker who had spent three years following Ray Kurzweil around the world with a camera.

Barry Ptolemy was twelve years old when he stood on the set of E.T. next to Spielberg. Decades later, he read The Singularity is Near and decided his first feature film would not be fiction.

Transcendent Man had not opened in theaters yet when we spoke. Back then the claims in it sounded like a pitch meeting nobody would greenlight: intelligence that stops being biological, no clean line left between human and machine, aging reversed, world hunger solved, death itself treated as an engineering problem.

Read that list again in 2026 and tell me which line you want to laugh at.

Some of it looks naive now. Some of it looks early. What stayed with me is what Barry said about the man behind the predictions, because the film is not really a documentary about #ArtificialIntelligence. It is a documentary about a son and his father, and about what grief will build if you give it enough compute.

I asked him whether he believed Ray. Sixteen years on, his answer is still the part I turn over in my head when people tell me the #Singularity is finally here.

Continue reading “Barry Ptolemy on “Transcendent Man”” | >

Advances in Clinical Oncology Research on 99mTc3PRGD2 SPECT Imaging

Cancer is currently the leading cause of death worldwide, with a global estimated 19.3 million new cancer cases and almost 10.0 million cancer deaths recorded in 2020 (). Early detection, diagnosis, and treatment are key measures for reducing mortality attributed to malignant tumors and prolonging survival time. The integrin alpha(α)v beta(β)3 receptor is frequently involved in the occurrence and development of malignant tumors (, ); it mediates cell–cell and cell–extracellular matrix adhesion (, ) and is related to tumor angiogenesis and metastasis (, – ). The integrin αvβ3 receptor is highly expressed in activated endothelial cells and proliferating tumor cells; however, it is either not expressed or expressed at very low levels in normal endothelial cells, dormant vascular cells, and other normal cells (, ) and has a certain level of specificity. Therefore, the integrin αvβ3 receptor is a valuable target for diagnosing and treating malignant tumors.

Polypeptides containing the arginine-glycine-aspartate (Arg-Gly-Asp [RGD]) sequence can bind specifically to the integrin αvβ3 receptor with high selectivity and strong affinity (). Hence, these polypeptides can specifically demarcate lesions and their angiogenesis for tumor detection and have promising prospects for tumor diagnosis and treatment. Radiolabeled RGD peptides and their analogs have been intensively studied for their application in the non-invasive imaging of integrin αvβ3 receptor expression (– ).

The technetium-99m hydrazinonicotinamide-dimeric cyclic RGD peptide with three polyethylene glycol spacers (99m Tc-3PRGD2) is a 99m Tc-labeled molecular probe used in nuclear medicine for single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). Its core ligand, hydrazinonicotinamide-3PRGD2, is a new type of RGD dimer that can bind specifically to the integrin αvβ3 receptor with high selectivity and affinity. In addition, 99m Tc-3PRGD2 has rapid blood clearance and a high level of safety with no adverse reactions having been observed in animal models and humans to date (, ). 99m Tc-3PRGD2 SPECT imaging is widely used in clinical research because of its high diagnostic performance and excellent cost-effectiveness, which further highlight its potential for clinical applications. Herein, we review the advances in clinical research on 99m Tc-3PRGD2 SPECT imaging for tumor lesions over the past decade.

/* */