Lifeboat Foundation

For thousands of years, humans have used honey, propolis, and venom from the European honeybee Apis mellifera as medicines.

More recently, scientists have discovered that honeybee venom and its active component, melittin, are toxic to a wide range of tumors — including melanoma, lung, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers — in laboratory tests.

Melittin is the molecule that creates the painful sensation of a bee’s sting. Scientists do not fully understand how it kills cancer cells, however.

Paradoxically, Jupiter’s ice-covered moon of Europa may have seafloor volcanoes capable of generating enough chemical energy and heat to support life, says new paper.

My take on the dugout loop. Yes, around the end I mistyped “lifestyle”, I’m very sorry, oh wait, I’m not.

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Engineers have designed a computer processor that thwarts hackers by randomly changing its microarchitecture every few milliseconds. Known as Morpheus, the puzzling processor has now aced its first major tests, repelling hundreds of professional hackers in a DARPA security challenge.

In 2017, DARPA backed the University of Michigan’s Morpheus project with US$3.6 million in funding, and now the novel processor has been put to the test. Over four months in 2020, DARPA ran a bug bounty program called Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT), pitting 525 professional security researchers against Morpheus and a range of other processors.

The goal of the program was to test new hardware-based security systems, which could protect data no matter how vulnerable the underlying software was. Morpheus was mocked up to resemble a medical database, complete with software vulnerabilities – and yet, not a single attack made it through its defenses.

We don’t know about how life away from Earth affects living things.

Astronauts have been sending animals to space longer than they’ve been going themselves, and the results have helped humans in space and on Earth.

In 2019, the European Union banned chlorpyrifos, allowing three more months of use. Canada’s three-year phaseout risks ongoing harms, as well as dumping of this product on our market.

Back in 2000, Canadian politicians spoke up against commonly used lawn and household chlorpyrifos products when the U.S. banned domestic uses. Despite a year of study, the PMRA had not taken action.

How long will chlorpyrifos persist in commerce?

Circa 2010

Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line’s impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.

HeLa (/ ˈ h iː l ɑː / ; also Hela or hela) is an immortal cell line used in scientific research. It is the oldest and most commonly used human cell line.^[1] The line is named after and derived from cervical cancer cells taken on February 8, 1951,^[2] from Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American mother of five, who died of cancer on October 4, 1951.^[3] The cell line was found to be remarkably durable and prolific, which allows it to be used extensively in scientific study.^[4][5]

Scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic HeLa cell. Zeiss Merlin HR-SEM.

The gentic code found in cancer cells could actually be used in crispr to end aging.

Cancer cell immortality leads to massive tumors, metastatic spread, and potentially re-emergence. Researchers are working to determine how cancer cells achieve immortality.