Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of researchers has used liquid gallium to create an antiviral and antimicrobial coating and tested it on a range of fabrics, including facemasks. The coating adhered more strongly to fabric than some conventional metal coatings, and eradicated 99% of several common pathogens within five minutes.

“Microbes can survive on the fabrics hospitals use for bedding, clothing and face masks for a long time,” says Michael Dickey, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and Camille & Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. “Metallic surface coatings such as copper or silver are an effective way to eradicate these pathogens, but many metal particle coating technologies have issues such as non-uniformity, processing complexity, or poor adhesion.”

Dickey and colleagues from NC State, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) in Korea and RMIT University in Australia set out to develop a simple, cost-effective way to deposit metal coatings on fabric.

On Wednesday, researchers revealed the first evidence that the approach appears to be working — improving vision for at least some patients with the condition, known as Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA, a severe form of vision impairment.

So doctors genetically modified a harmless virus to ferry the CRISPR gene editor and infused billions of the modified viruses into the retinas of Knight’s left eye and Kalberer’s right eye, as well as one eye of five other patients. The procedure was done on only one eye just in case something went wrong. The doctors hope to treat the patients’ other eye after the research is complete.

Once the CRISPR was inside the cells of the retinas, the hope was that it would cut out the genetic mutation causing the disease, restoring vision by reactivating the dormant cells.

Continue reading “A Gene-Editing Experiment Let These Patients With Vision Loss See Color Again” »

Air pollution is likely to have been responsible for up to 6 million premature births and 3 million underweight babies worldwide every year, research shows.

Global analysis of indoor and outdoor pollution also finds link to low birth weight.

Unprecedent measurements confirm galaxies idle when they run out of cold gas.

New research, published in Nature and led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has just answered one of the fundamental questions about our universe: Why did some of the oldest, most massive galaxies go quiescent early in their formation? The answer, we now know, is because they ran out of cold gas.

The most massive galaxies in our universe formed incredibly early, just after the Big Bang.

In a new study from Skoltech and the University of Kentucky, researchers found a new connection between quantum information and quantum field theory. This work attests to the growing role of quantum information theory across various areas of physics. The paper was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Quantum information plays an increasingly important role as an organizing principle connecting various branches of physics. In particular, the theory of quantum error correction, which describes how to protect and recover information in quantum computers and other complex interacting systems, has become one of the building blocks of the modern understanding of quantum gravity.

“Normally, information stored in physical systems is localized. Say, a computer file occupies a particular small area of the hard drive. By “error” we mean any unforeseen or undesired interaction which scrambles information over an extended area. In our example, pieces of the computer file would be scattered over different areas of the hard drive. Error correcting codes are mathematical protocols that allow collecting these pieces together to recover the original information. They are in heavy use in data storage and communication systems. Quantum error correcting codes play a similar role in cases when the quantum nature of the physical system is important,” Anatoly Dymarsky, Associate Professor at the Skoltech Center for Energy Science and Technology (CEST), explains.

Recent research in mice turned to the blood-brain barrier for clues as to why Alzheimer’s disease occurs and how to stop it.

Bill Andrews gives us the simplest definition of aging as well as what he thinks to be accomplished to really admit aging has been cured.

This is an excerpt of a presentation he made last year at the NHIMA. See the description of the video for details.

Continue reading “Bill Andrews on age reversal and the Betty White Test (videoclip con S/T en Español)” »

Not sure if this is new or not. We all know about the Carrington event, but it looks like tree rings reveal a number of much more massive events in the past 10,000 years — perhaps 10 times as strong as the Carrington event, perhaps 100 times or more. (This particular article only references the lower estimates.)

Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive, and potentially destructive, eruptions from the Sun.

The search for a fountain of youth has obsessed humankind for millennia, but a new wave of research is showing that the secret may have been running through our veins all along.