Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists develop anticancer drugs that target PARP proteins involved in the DNA damage response.

Why are so many young people getting cancer?

Here’s what the data say:

Clues to a modern mystery could be lurking in information collected generations ago.

Nanomedicine to Cure All!

Aortic aneurysms are bulges in the aorta, the largest blood vessel that carries oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes, or injury can all increase the risk of aneurysms, which tend to occur more often in Caucasian male smokers over the age of 65.

“The soft tissues that make up blood vessels act essentially like rubber bands, and it’s the elastic fibers within these tissues that allow them to stretch and snap back,” says Professor Anand Ramamurthi, chair of the Department of Bioengineering in Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. “These fibers are produced primarily before and just after birth. After that, they don’t regenerate or undergo natural repair after injury. So when they become injured or diseased, the tissue weakens and causes an aneurysm, which can grow over time. After about seven to 10 years, it typically reaches the rupture stage.”

Continue reading “Nanomedicine research aims to transform treatment of aortic aneurysms” »

Models of systems in physics usually start with elementary processes. New work with a neural network shows how models can also be built by observing the system as a whole and deducing the underlying interactions.

OpenAI made a big splash when it showed off its new video generator Sora last month.

The text-to-video model can be used to “create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions,” according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

And with stunning results, from a camera gliding through a snowy scene to photorealistic wooly mammoths.

This video shows the fly model reproducing a flight maneuver (spontaneous turning) of a real fly, executing commands to walk at a speed of 2 cm/s while turning left and right, and the model imitating a walking trajectory of the real fruit fly, which includes walking at different speeds, turning and briefly stopping. Credit: Vaxenburg et al.

By infusing a virtual fruit fly with artificial intelligence, Janelia and Google DeepMind scientists have created a computerized insect that can walk and fly just like the real thing.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence brings a virtual fly to life” »

Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces and pressures inside a subatomic particle for the first time.

Lurking some nine billion light years away from Earth is what appears to be a so-called cosmic megastructure in the shape of an enormous ring. It’s so large that its existence should be impossible, according to new research reported on by The Guardian, challenging a fundamental assumption of our understanding of the Universe.

Known as the “Big Ring,” the structure spans an astonishing 1.3 billion light years in diameter — a significant portion of the observable Universe’s estimated size of 94 billion light years. By contrast, the largest known galaxy is a “mere” 16 million light years across. If it were visible in the night sky to the naked eye, the Big Ring would be equal in diameter to fifteen full moons. Succinctly put: it’s unfathomably huge.

The unpublished findings, presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Thursday, add to a growing list of inexplicably large structures that remain confounding — if not controversial — to scientists.

Cerebral cavernous malformations occur in 0.5% of the population; 85% are sporadic, and 15% are familial or radiation-induced. Several genetic variants, including variants in CCM, drive their development. Read the full review:

Review Article from The New England Journal of Medicine — Cavernous Malformations of the Central Nervous System.