Lifeboat Foundation

“This was a short-term experiment, just eight weeks,” Liu said. “In people, obesity doesn’t occur overnight or even in eight weeks. People have a suboptimal lifestyle for 20, 30 years before they become obese. It’s possible that if you have Western diet for so long, you cross a point of no return and your Paneth cells don’t recover even if you change your diet. We’d need to do more research before we can say whether this process is reversible in people.”

Eating a Western diet impairs the immune system in the gut in ways that could increase risk of infection and inflammatory bowel disease, according to a study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Cleveland Clinic.

The study, in mice and people, showed that a diet high in sugar and fat causes damage to Paneth cells, immune cells in the gut that help keep inflammation in check. When Paneth cells aren’t functioning properly, the gut immune system is excessively prone to inflammation, putting people at risk of inflammatory bowel disease and undermining effective control of disease-causing microbes. The findings, published today (May 18, 2021) in Cell Host & Microbe, open up new approaches to regulating gut immunity by restoring normal Paneth cell function.

Continue reading “Eating a Western Diet Impairs the Immune System in the Gut – May Increase Risk of Inflammation, Infection” »

Even as a chip shortage is causing trouble for all sorts of industries, the semiconductor field is entering a surprising new era of creativity, from industry giants to innovative start-ups seeing a spike in funding from venture capitalists that traditionally avoided chip makers.

While a variety of industries struggle with supplies, semiconductor experts say there are plenty of new ideas and, most surprising, start-ups.

The vehicle became stuck multiple times and repeatedly drove away when roadside assistance approached.

At the time the proposed planet signal is strongest, stellar activity on the surface of the star was Also strong, says Lubin. Thus, he notes, the signal associated with the planet can be explained by activity emanating from stellar activity instead of from the telltale periodic tug on Barnard’s Star from a putative super-earth.

As I noted here previously, Barnard’s Star, which lies only 6 light years away in Ophiuchus, has long fascinated astronomers both due to its proximity to Earth and the fact that it has the largest apparent motion across our line of sight as any known stellar object. In the 105 years since its discovery by astronomer E.E. Barnard, it is the nearest star to our own Sun in the Northern Celestial Hemisphere, the authors note.

One of the more infamous claims of planets around barnard’s star came in in 1963, when Swarthmore College astronomer Peter van de Kamp announced that he had detected a planet using Swarthmore’s 24-inch refractor at Sproul Observatory. Van de Kamp later updated his findings three more times, proposing a second planet in the system with periods of 12 and 20 years, respectively, the authors note.

Giving COVID survivors just one dose of the vaccine could help end the pandemic faster In South Korea, an analysis that included more than 500000 people age 60 and older found that the Pfizer vaccine was 89% effective in preventing infection just two weeks after the first shot. AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has not been authorized for emergency use in the U.S., was found to be 86% effective in that same time period. Again, that’s after a single dose, and it’s regardless of prior COVID history.

Commentary: Getting a second dose of Pfizer or Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine might not be necessary for COVID survivors.

On 27 June 1918, two young German soldiers—one age 18, the other 17—died in Berlin from a new influenza strain that had emerged earlier that year. Their lungs ended up in the collection of the Berlin Museum of Medical History, where they rested, fixed in formalin, for 100 years. Now, researchers have managed to sequence large parts of the virus that infected the two men, giving a glimpse into the early days of the most devastating pandemic of the 20th century. The partial genomes hold some tantalizing clues that the infamous flu strain may have adapted to humans between the pandemic’s first and second waves.

The researchers also managed to sequence an entire genome of the pathogen from a young woman who died in Munich at an unknown time in 1918. It is only the third full genome of the virus that caused that pandemic and the first from outside North America, the authors write in a preprint posted on bioRxiv.

“It’s absolutely fantastic work,” says Hendrik Poinar, who runs an ancient DNA lab at McMaster University. “The researchers have made reviving RNA viruses from archival material an achievable goal. Not long ago this was, like much ancient DNA work, a fantasy.”

Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, is an innovative conservation biologist, who is Founder and President of the non-profit Amazon Biodiversity Center, the renowned Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, and the person who coined the term “biological diversity”.

Dr. Lovejoy currently serves as Professor in the department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University, and as a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation based in Washington, DC.

Continue reading “Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, Founder / President, Amazon Biodiversity Ctr — Snr. Fellow, United Nations Fnd” »

Google detailed TPUv4 at Google I/O 2021. They’re accelerator chips that deliver high performance on AI workloads.

Companies caught in the middle of the global semiconductor shortage, which is roiling the car business, are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.