Lifeboat Foundation

A chip-based infection model developed by researchers in Jena, Germany, enables live microscopic observation of damage to lung tissue caused by the invasive fungal infection aspergillosis. The team developed algorithms to track the spread of fungal hyphae as well as the response of immune cells. The development is based on a “lung-on-chip” model also developed in Jena and can help reduce the number of animal experiments. The results were presented in the journal Biomaterials.

Aspergillosis is a mold infection caused by Aspergillus fumigatus, which often affects the lungs. The disease can be fatal, especially in immunocompromised individuals. In these cases, invasive aspergillosis usually occurs with fungal hyphae invading blood vessels. So far, there are only a few active substances that can combat such fungal infections. “That’s why it was so important for us to be able to represent this invasive growth in a model,” says Marie von Lilienfeld-Toal, who co-led the study. The internist is a professor at the Department of Internal Medicine II at Jena University Hospital and conducts research at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology—Hans Knöll Institute (Leibniz-HKI) in Jena, Germany.

The new aspergillosis infection model should help to better observe both the growth of the fungus and the reaction of the immune system and to find possible new approaches for therapies. In addition, new active substances can be tested. The expertise for this is available in Jena: Organ chips have long been developed at the university hospital. The startup Dynamic42, which manufactures the lung chips used in the study, was founded there. First author Mai Hoang also joined the company after completing her doctorate.

Mine operators often require regular inspections in hazardous areas for data capture, ensure worker safety, and more. Choosing the right inspection platform is … See more.

Choosing the Right Mining Inspection Platform – Let’s dive into the factors that could guide your next decision in picking the right platform for the mining environment. This is a guest post from our partners at Boston Dynamics.

DeepMind software that can predict the 3D shape of proteins is already changing biology.

We can travel in time, just not like in the movies Earendel was observed using an effect where the fabric of space-time is warped by gravity – a phenomenon predicted by Einstein. This causes light to bend as it passes by objects with large masses, like planets, suns, or even galaxies, allowing us to see around and even behind these objects.

Scientists believe they have found evidence of microbes that were thriving near hydrothermal vents on Earth’s surface just 300m years after the planet formed – the strongest evidence yet that life began far earlier than is widely assumed.

If confirmed, it would suggest the conditions necessary for the emergence of life are relatively basic.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is hightailing it to a fascinating river delta region in the Jezero Crater on Mars. But to get there, it first had to pass near its original landing site. Images from there are a trip down memory lane, back to when Percy dramatically landed on the red planet in February 2021.

Steve Ruff, Arizona State University associate research professor and Mars geologist, runs the Mars Guy channel on YouTube. He posted a video on Sunday recapping the rover’s arrival on mars and what happened to the parachute and back shell — two key components of the landing system that delivered Percy safely to the surface.

When cities transform into a colorful world of lights as darkness falls, it’s often only possible to estimate their contours, which depending on the perspective can draw the attention to key details or trivia. In fluorescence microscopy, biological cells are marked with fluorescent dyes and excited to luminesce in specific areas by optical switches– like a city at night. However, this light is usually too faint for small, rapid objects, or even goes out after a while. This is known as fluorescence bleaching.

Now, a new approach developed by Prof. Dr. Alexander Rohrbach and his team in the Laboratory for Bio-and Nano-Photonics at the University of Freiburg has found a way to make the smallest objects clearly visible without fluorescence. In this way, cellular structures or virus-sized particles can be observed 100 to 1,000 times longer, ten to 100-times faster and with almost doubled resolution than with fluorescence microscopy. While fluorescence microscopy records what you might call “night-time images” of structures, ROCS microscopy takes “day-time images”—opposites that can complement each other excellently. Rohrbach and his colleagues describe various applications of the technology in the latest issue of Nature Communications.

What if you could travel from New York to Los Angeles in just under seven hours without boarding a plane? It could be possible on a Maglev train.

Maglev — short for magnetic levitation — trains can trace their roots to technology pioneered at Brookhaven National Laboratory. James Powell and Gordon Danby of Brookhaven received the first patent for a magnetically levitated train design in the late 1960s. The idea came to Powell as he sat in a traffic jam, thinking that there must be a better way to travel on land than cars or traditional trains. He dreamed up the idea of using superconducting magnets to levitate a train car. Superconducting magnets are electromagnets that are cooled to extreme temperatures during use, which dramatically increases the power of the magnetic field.

Very good news, if unsurprising.

We already have multiple viable avenues of reducing — or eliminating altogether — this particularly pernicious form of remorseless biological entropy.

So good news… UNLESS you’re one of those people who think death is what MAKES life somehow MEANINGFUL, or that living for thousands of years or more would be BORING.

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