Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceXs brand-new Dragon spacecraft – named “Freedom” by the Crew-4 astronauts – arrived at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on April 16, 2022, after making the journey from SpaceX’s processing facility at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. After Dragon is mated to the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the launch vehicle will roll out to the pad and be raised to the vertical launch position.

Liftoff is scheduled for 5:26 a.m. EDT on Saturday, April 23. NASA’s Crew-4 mission is the fourth crew rotation flight on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket. NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines will serve as mission commander and pilot, respectively, and NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, will join as mission specialists.

If all goes according to plan, Jessica Watkins will become the first African-American woman to make a prolonged ISS stay.

Experiments on how anaesthetics alter the behaviour of tiny structures found in brain cells bolster the controversial idea that quantum effects in the brain might explain consciousness.

A story of remaking the land and taking the water until there was nothing left.

Deep learning–based language models, such as BERT, T5, XLNet and GPT, are promising for analyzing speech and texts. In recent years, however, they have also been applied in the fields of biomedicine and biotechnology to study genetic codes and proteins.

Circa 2021

As described above, molecular therapeutics enabling expression of a truncated dystrophin have been far developed. However, an unprecedented opportunity to correct the disease-causing mutation has arisen with the advent of Crispr-Cas9 technology (Fig. 1).

Since the generation of a Cas9-transgenic mouse [28], which allowed for pinpoint gene alterations specifically in organs targeted by AAVs encoding for the corresponding guide RNAs (gRNAs), it became clear that the inevitable course of inherited diseases might be altered by Cas9-mediated correction. Although certain limitations were unmasked early on, such as the preference of non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) over homology-directed repair (HDR) upon enzymatic cleavage of the double stranded DNA by Cas9, or the packaging capacity of AAVs, muscular dystrophies seemed an ideal target for genome editing. DMD mutations inducing Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) seemed particularly well suited, since internal truncations of the protein may lead to a shortened but stable protein with partial functional restitution and a milder disease progression, as seen in the allelic Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD).

Continue reading “Genome editing for Duchenne muscular dystrophy: a glimpse of the future?” »

Death Valley brings the heat, but there are other hot spots on this sweltering planet.

Summers can be hot in Death Valley, California. In fact, it is likely the hottest place on Earth—ever. Especially on Sunday, August 16 and—again—on June 17, 2021. The mercury spiked to a sweltering 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the national park, drawing crowds of tourists who flocked to take pictures with the park’s digital thermometer.

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes » IAI TV.

The hard problem of consciousness is the most pressing unsolved mystery in both philosophy and science. To solve such a problem, we are going to need revolutionary ways of thinking. Philosopher of mind, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, argues higher spatial dimensions might hold the key to the hard problem.

The brain is inarguably the single most important organ in the human body. It controls how we move, react, think and feel, and enables us to have complex emotions and memories. The brain is composed of approximately 86 billion neurons that form a complex network. These neurons receive, process, and transfer information using chemical and electrical signals.

Learning how neurons respond to different signals can further the understanding of cognition and development and improve the management of disorders of the brain. But experimentally studying neuronal networks is a complex and occasionally invasive procedure. Mathematical models provide a non-invasive means to accomplish the task of understanding neuronal networks, but most current models are either too computationally intensive, or they cannot adequately simulate the different types of complex neuronal responses. In a recent study, published in Nonlinear Theory and Its Applications, IEICE, a research team led by Prof. Tohru Ikeguchi of Tokyo University of Science, has analyzed some of the complex responses of neurons in a computationally simple neuron model, the Izhikevich neuron model.

“My laboratory is engaged in research on neuroscience and this study analyzes the basic mathematical properties of a neuron model. While we analyzed a single neuron model in this study, this model is often used in computational neuroscience, and not all of its properties have been clarified. Our study fills that gap,” explains Prof. Ikeguchi. The research team also comprised Mr. Yota Tsukamoto and Ph.D. student Ms. Honami Tsushima, also from Tokyo University of Science.