Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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After a successful test flight of NASA’s Artemis-1 moon mission, the space agency now turns its attention to returning Americans to the moon within two to three years. But the U.S. is not the only country with lunar ambitions. China is aggressively pursuing it own plans to land astronauts on the moon and build out a permanent base. Both countries openly talk about the need to have a military presence in space to defend against the other. Already, a dangerous cold war cat-and-mouse game involving U.S., Russian and Chinese satellites plays out every day. NBC News goes in-depth to explore the challenges in a potential battlefield that is complex, congested and contested.

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During deliberation, as we quietly consider our options, the neural activities representing the decision variables that reflect the goodness of each option rise in various regions of the cerebral cortex.1,2,3,4,5,6,7 If the options are depicted visually, we make saccades, focusing gaze on each option. Do the kinematics of these saccades reflect the state of the decision variables? To test this idea, we engaged human participants in a decision-making task in which they considered two effortful options that required walking across various distances and inclines. As they deliberated, they made saccades between the symbolic representations of their options. These deliberation period saccades had no bearing on the effort they would later expend, yet saccade velocities increased gradually and differentially: the rate of rise was faster for saccades toward the option that they later indicated as their choice. Indeed, the rate of rise encoded the difference in the subjective value of the two options. Importantly, the participants did not reveal their choice at the conclusion of deliberation, but rather waited during a delay period, and finally expressed their choice by making another saccade. Remarkably, vigor for this saccade dropped to baseline and no longer encoded subjective value. Thus, saccade vigor appeared to provide a real-time window to the otherwise hidden process of option evaluation during deliberation.

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Throughout our lives, our skin goes through a lot. We get sunburns, we skin our knees, we bleed, we scar and we do it again. Our skin is our largest organ and, in many ways, serves as our protector. Beyond acting as a protective barrier between us and our environment, our skin regulates our body temperature, provides immune protection against harmful microbes and blocks out harmful sunlight in ways that benefit the whole body. And when skin is injured, blood brings healing substances to the site to promote healing as the body awaits new, replacement skin cells.

Regardless of scrapes and scratches, skin cells are constantly renewing themselves throughout our lives — a process reliant on skin stem cells. These skin stem cells turn over slowly, keeping our skin healthy and young. But as we age, these skin stem cells either numerically or functionally deplete, our skin thins and we are consequentially at higher risk for developing ulcers. The older the skin, the harder it is to heal these ulcers, meaning they can become chronic, open wounds that impact lifestyle and invite infection.

But what if we could activate a skin stem cell to be more responsive to injury? To get an 80-year-old’s skin to function like a 30-year-old’s skin? Could we reverse skin stem cell age-related deterioration and improve their turnover? What if we could do so in a way that healed wounds regeneratively, without any scarring? With these questions in mind, a collaborative team of researchers from the Mass General Brigham, Boston Children’s Hospital, and four additional Harvard institutions set off to study these powerful cells.

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