Lifeboat Foundation

A possible wheelchair for the future! 😃

Self-balancing and stair-climbing wheelchair provides more independence.

More info: https://bit.ly/2LigV2x

Biotin is also known as vitamin H, named for the German words “Haar” and “Haut,” which mean hair and skin. This was due to the fact that even slight deficiencies cause hair thinning, skin rash or brittle fingernails. New research, just published in PNAS, now shows that some forms of severe neurodegeneration, like the frontotemporal dementia seen in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can directly result from lack of sufficient biotin.

The authors discovered this by looking at fruit flies with dementia. Now, before anyone chuckles, fruit flies actually make a nice model of Alzheimer’s or other diseases when they are given the right genes. Human versions of defective MAPT (tau) genes cause these flies to develop tauopathies that resemble those that occur in our own brains. To delve deeper into the neurotoxicity of tau, they looked at over 7000 fly genes in a forward genetic screen before zeroing in on one significantly modified toxicity of the tauR406W mutant. This gene, Btnd, encodes the biotinidase enzyme that extracts biotin from food sources or recycles it from used enzymes.

TOKYO (Reuters) — Men wearing traditional loin clothes and women dressed in white robes clapped and chanted before going into an ice water bath during a Shinto ritual at a Tokyo shrine on Sunday to purify the soul and pray for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Only a dozen people took part in the annual event at Teppou-zu Inari Shrine, scaled down this year due to the health crisis, compared to over a hundred in early 2020. Spectators were not allowed at the event.

After doing warming-up exercises and chanting under a clear sky with outside temperatures at 5.1 degree Celsius (41.18 Fahrenheit), the nine male and three female participants went into a bath filled with cold water and large ice blocks. “I prayed that the coronavirus comes to an end as soon as possible,” said 65-year-old participant Shinji Ooi, who heads the Shrine’s ‘Yayoikai’ parishioner group, after the ritual.

This is my message to my fellow Americans and my friends around the world after January 62021.

The mayor of Paris has said a €250m (£225m) makeover of the Champs-Élysées will go ahead, though the ambitious transformation will not happen before the French capital hosts the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Anne Hidalgo said the planned work, unveiled in 2019 by local community leaders and businesses, would turn the 1.9 km (1.2 mile) stretch of central Paris into “an extraordinary garden”.

The Champs-Élysées committee has been campaigning for a major redesign of the avenue and its surroundings since 2018.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission will allow SpaceX to launch 10 Starlink satellites into polar orbit on an upcoming mission, but deferred a decision on a much broader modification of SpaceX’s license.

In an order published Jan. 8, the FCC granted SpaceX permission to launch 10 Starlink satellites into a 560-kilometer orbit with an inclination of 97.6 degrees. Those satellites will launch on a Falcon 9 no earlier than Jan. 14 as part of Transporter-1, a dedicated smallsat rideshare mission.

SpaceX had been lobbying the FCC for weeks for permission to launch Starlink satellites into a polar orbital plane as the FCC considers a modification of the company’s license to lower the orbits of satellites originally authorized for higher altitudes. That included a Nov. 17 request to launch 58 satellites into a single polar orbital plane, citing “an opportunity for a polar launch in December” that it did not identify.

If humans plan to go to live and work beyond Earth someday, they will need technologies that allow for sustainable living in alien environments. This is especially true of Mars, which is extremely cold, dry, and subject to more radiation than we are used to. On top of that, it also takes six to nine months to send spacecraft there, and that’s every two years when Earth and Mars are closest to each other in their orbits.

As such, settling on the Red Planet will require some serious creativity!

Continue reading “Winning Urban Farming Ideas for Mars!” »

Fifteen states have not criminalized the barbaric crime of female genital mutilation or FGM — and that is 15 too many. Connecticut is one of those 15 states.

China is positioning itself to be a world leader in quantum technology, including drafting international standards.