Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 6416

For the first time in Israel, a doctor at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva has used a da Vinci robot to perform the complex surgery of untrapping a man’s ureter from behind his vena cava — the largest vein in the body that carries blood to the heart from other areas.

Last month, a 41-year-old patient checked in to Beilinson suffering from the effects of retrocaval ureter, a ureter that abnormally encircles the inferior vena cava. Only one in 1500 people are born with this deformity, which worsens over decades until eventually it leads to sepsis.

With a retrocaval ureter, the ureter passes behind the large vein instead of in front of it or right by it. The only way to cure the person is to perform a complex operation to move the ureter.

Usually “open” surgery is performed, meaning the patient is cut open. But Dr. Shay Golan, head of the Urologic Oncology Service at Beilinson, decided to try something new and, for the first time in Israel, a robot performed the surgery in 50 minutes, making only three very small incisions (each less than 1 centimeter) in his belly and without any blood loss.

Continue reading “Israeli doctor uses tiny, robot ‘hands’ to untrap urethra” | >

High-energy #lasers are moving quickly from prototype to deployment for the #USArmy and #USNavy. We’ve helped make that happen.

A brief history of high-energy lasers.

The U.S. military has had electromagnetic spectrum weapons in mind since the 1960s. Throughout the 1980s, industry and military laid the groundwork for figuring out how to reach practical power levels, beam control and adaptive optics. The Department of Defense officially recognized lasers as a plausible future weapon in 1999, marking the beginning of formal research and development.

%{[ data-embed-type= image data-embed-id=6105d4fd38fdfbe3338b45e7 data-embed-element= span data-embed-size=320w data-embed-align= left data-embed-alt= Raytheon has installed the prototype High Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) aboard a Polaris MRZR all-terrain vehicle to defend military forces from enemy unmanned aircraft. data-embed-src= https://img.militaryaerospace.com/files/base/ebm/mae/image/2…max&w=1440 data-embed-caption= Raytheon has installed the prototype High Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) aboard a Polaris MRZR all-terrain vehicle to defend military forces from enemy unmanned aircraft. ]}%However, researchers did demonstrate limited-use lasers earlier than that, with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) firing a 100-kilowatt laser in 1968 and the Navy-ARPA Chemical Laser producing 250 kilowatts in 1975.

Continue reading “High-energy laser weapons move quickly from prototype to deployment” | >

When the Human Genome Project reached its ambitious goal of mapping the entire human genome, it seemed the world was entering an era of personalized medicine, where evidence from our own specific genetic material would guide our care.

That was 2003, and nearly a generation after that spectacular collaborative achievement, we are still waiting for that promise to materialize. We may know that a person carries a gene associated with breast cancer, for example, but not whether that person will go on to develop the disease.

New research by McMaster University evolutionary biologist Rama Singh suggests the reason is that there is another, hidden layer that controls how interact, and how the many billions of possible combinations produce certain results. That layer is composed of largely uncharted biochemical pathways that in cells through chemical reactions.

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Summary: Combining artificial intelligence, mathematical modeling, and brain imaging data, researchers shed light on the neural processes that occur when people use mental abstraction.

Source: UCL

By using a combination of mathematical modeling, machine learning and brain imaging technology, researchers have discovered what happens in the brain when people use mental abstractions.

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Modified RNA CRISPR boosts gene knockdown in human cells.

In the latest of ongoing efforts to expand technologies for modifying genes and their expression, researchers in the lab of Neville Sanjana, PhD, at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and New York University (NYU) have developed chemically modified guide RNAs for a CRISPR system that targets RNA instead of DNA. These chemically-modified guide RNAs significantly enhance the ability to target – trace, edit, and/or knockdown – RNA in human cells.

Longevity. Technology: In the study published in Cell Chemical Biology, the research team explores a range of different RNA modifications and details how the modified guides increase efficiencies of CRISPR activity from 2-to 5-fold over unmodified guides. They also show that the optimised chemical modifications extend CRISPR targeting activity from 48 hours to four days.

Increasing the efficiencies and “life” of CRISPR-Cas13 guides is of critical value to researchers and drug developers, allowing for better gene knockdown and more time to study how the gene influences other genes in related pathways.

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From the time of Aristotle, it has been known that the human liver has the greatest regenerative capacity of any organ in the body, being able to regrow even from a 70% amputation, which has enabled live-donor transplants. Although the liver regenerates fully upon injury, the mechanisms that regulate how to activate or stop the process and when regeneration is terminated, are still unknown. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden (Germany), at the Gurdon Institute (Cambridge, UK) and at the University of Cambridge (Biochemistry Department) have now found that a regulatory cell type—mesenchymal cell—can activate or stop liver regeneration. The mesenchymal cells do so by the number of contacts they establish with the regenerating cells (epithelial cells). This study suggests that mistakes in the regeneration process, which can give rise to cancer or chronic liver diseases, are caused by the wrong number of contacts between both populations. The work is described in a paper published in the journal Cell Stem Cell on 2nd August 2021.

The molecular mechanisms by which adult liver trigger the regenerative response remain largely unknown. Approximately 29 million people in Europe suffer from a chronic liver condition such as cirrhosis or liver cancer. They are a major cause of morbidity and mortality with liver diseases accounting for approximately two million deaths per year worldwide. Currently, there is no cure and liver transplants are the only treatment for liver failure. Scientists are therefore exploring new options for how to trigger the regenerative capacity of the liver as an alternative means to restore function.

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And here is a really smart person talking about brain interfaces.

In this talk we introduce Shivon Zilis, Project Director at Neuralink, to her team’s work and the ethical impacts of implanting technology into the brain. We learn about the latest developments in Neuralink’s technology and the goals the team keeps in mind when designing and implementing technology that could change the way humans interact and understand technology.

Visit https://cucai.ca/ to learn more.

Continue reading “The Future of Neuralink” | >