Lifeboat Foundation

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California has achieved a major breakthrough in the quest to develop nuclear fusion power.

The NIF is the world’s largest inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device and contains the world’s largest laser. Its 192 beams are housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields. When combined, these can generate over a million joules of energy, or about 0.1% the amount of a lightning bolt.

Scientists have been using the immense power of this laser to heat small capsules of deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) in an effort to reach “ignition” and kickstart thermonuclear fusion. This process, the same reaction that powers our Sun, could one day provide a limitless source of clean energy.

The effects of fracking on nearby water sources may be worse than previously thought, according to a new study that found hydraulic fracturing can alter the composition of surface water and not just groundwater.

The study, published Thursday in Science, is the first to link fracking to small increases in salt concentrations in surface water, particularly during the early stages of production. While the highest salt levels were well below what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers harmful, researchers identified a robust association between new wells and water quality changes, triggering public health concerns.

“Our work provides the first large-scale sample evidence showing that hydraulic fracturing is related to the quality of nearby surface waters for several U.S. shales,” Christian Leuz, co-author of the study and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, said in a news release.

COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and existing gene therapies, including those built with the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, are delivered into cells with viral vectors or lipid nanoparticles. A research team led by CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, Ph.D., of the Broad Institute has developed a new mRNA delivery system that harnesses a human protein.

The system, dubbed SEND, leverages the ability of a human protein called PEG10 to bind to its own mRNA and form a protective capsule around it. In a new study published in Science, Zhang and colleagues engineered PEG10 to take on RNA cargoes of their choice and successfully delivered the system to mouse and human cells.

The findings support SEND as an efficient delivery platform for RNA-based gene therapies that can be repeatedly dosed, the researchers suggested. Because SEND uses a protein that’s produced naturally in the body, it may not trigger immune responses that can render gene therapies ineffective, the team said.

This study illustrates how complex the relationship between genes and the environment is. Although our study uses genetic methods, it provides strong evidence that, as well as genetics, the environment really matters when we talk about education.

A child’s educational success depends on the genes that they haven’t inherited from their parents, as well as the genes they have, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.

Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the study confirms that genes a person inherits directly are most likely to contribute to their achievements in education. But parent genes that aren’t directly inherited, yet have still shaped parents’ own education levels and subsequently influenced the lifestyle and family environment they provide for their children, are also important and can affect how well a person does at school and beyond.

Continue reading “A parent’s genes can influence a child’s educational success, inherited or not” »

Why are products sold that have not been fully tested for safety and public health?

A study led by researchers at the University of Toronto highlights the extensive damage that can be caused by common teeth-whitening agents.

Published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, the study assessed the dental cell damage caused by the use of carbamide peroxide teeth-whitening treatments.

Continue reading “Research Shows Extensive Damage Caused by Common Teeth-Whitening Products” »

Investigators who previously developed a recipe for turning skin cells into primitive muscle-like cells that can be maintained indefinitely in the lab without losing the potential to become mature muscle have now uncovered how this recipe works and what molecular changes it triggers within cells. The research, which was led by scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and is published in Genes & Development, could allow clinicians to generate patient-matched muscle cells to help treat muscle injuries, aging-related muscle degeneration, or conditions such as muscular dystrophy.

It’s known that expression of a muscle regulatory gene called MyoD is sufficient to directly convert skin cells into mature muscle cells; however, mature muscle cells do not divide and self-renew, and therefore they cannot be propagated for clinical purposes. “To address this shortcoming, we developed a system several years ago to convert skin cells into self-renewing muscle stem-like cells we coined induced myogenic progenitor cells, or iMPCs. Our system uses MyoD in combination with three chemicals we previously identified as facilitators of cell plasticity in other contexts,” explains senior author Konrad Hochedlinger, Ph.D., a principal investigator at the Center for Regenerative Medicine at MGH and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

In this latest study, Hochedlinger and his colleagues uncovered the details behind how this combination converts skin cells into iMPCs. They found that while MyoD expression alone causes skin cells to take on the identity of mature muscle cells, adding the three chemicals causes the skin cells to instead acquire a more primitive stem cell–like state. Importantly, iMPCs are molecularly highly similar to muscle tissue stem cells, and muscle cells derived from iMPCs are more stable and mature than muscle cells produced with MyoD expression alone.

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Vitamin K Intake and Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease in the Danish Diet Cancer and Health Study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369182/

Continue reading “Vitamins K1 And K2 Are Associated With Cardiovascular Disease-Related Hospitalization Risk” »

SPACE STATION CREW MEMBER DISCUSSES LIFE IN SPACE WITH MEN’S HEALTH MAGAZINE

Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 65 Flight Engineer Shane Kimbrough of NASA discussed life and research aboard the space station during an in-flight interview August 18 with Men’s Health Magazine. Kimbrough launched in April on a SpaceX Crew Dragon as part of a planned six-month mission.

I will always remember the moments around our first sampling attempt. Longtime friend (and Sampling System Chief Engineer) Louise Jandura and I were in the operations area awaiting the next data downlink. It was “so far, so good” with our earlier morning results showing we had achieved a full-depth borehole. Other members of the team began to filter in as images of the sealed sample tube came up on the ops room monitors. We were all starting to get that feeling you can get in this business when a big milestone comes together because, at first look, it appeared to be our first cored sample. But within minutes, the team noted that the volume probe indicated no sample was in the tube, and we quickly switched to problem-solving mode – once again trying to solve another problem tossed our way from the surface of Mars.

Our team has been working hard over the last 12 days to both ensure we have adequately assessed the data from the first coring attempt and also developed a solid plan forward. After further review of the engineering and imaging data, our final conclusion is the same as our initial assessment: The rock simply wasn’t our kind of rock.

The Sampling and Caching System aboard the rover performed as expected – quite well, as a matter of fact. However, the rock we chose for this first effort did not. The act of coring into it resulted in the rock breaking apart into powder and small fragments of material, which were not retained in the tube due to their size. Although we had successfully acquired over 100 cores in a range of different test rocks on Earth, we had not encountered a rock in our test suite that behaved in quite this manner.