Lifeboat Foundation

Rapamycin, a drug that has life-extending effects on mice (and possibly dogs and humans), also reverses age-related dental problems in mice. 🦷 Out now in eLife from researchers at The University of Washington School of Dentistry & JAX’s Kaczorowski Lab:

Rapamycin, which has life-extending effects on mice, also reverses age-related dental problems such as periodontitis and regrows bones in the animals.

As we celebrate the #SpaceStation20th anniversary, NASA astronaut Don Pettit explains how his perception of the Earth changed during his time aboard the space station.

Go NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. It’s your birthday. ✨

This Friday marks 30 years of stunning imagery and ground breaking discoveries for the one-of-a-kind orbiting telescope. Join us in observing #Hubble30 by sharing your favorite galactic image! https://go.nasa.gov/3aoSMxH

It took centuries, but we now know the size of the Universe, this will blow your mind! 😱

More space facts: https://amazingfact.co/category/spacefacts/

Pleased to have been the guest on this most recent episode of Javier Ideami’s Beyond podcast. We discuss everything from #spaceexploration to #astrobiology!

In this episode, we travel from Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars with Bruce Dorminey. Bruce is a science journalist and author who primarily covers aerospace, astronomy and astrophysics. He is a regular contributor to Astronomy magazine and since 2012, he has written a regular tech column for Forbes magazine. He is also a correspondent for Renewable Energy World. Writer of “Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System”, he was a 1998 winner in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards (AJOYA) as well as a founding team member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Science Communication Focus Group.

Continue reading “From Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars” »

The COVID-19 pandemic will have a profound impact on robotics, as more companies look to automation as a way forward. While wide-scale automation had long seemed like an inevitability, the pandemic is set to accelerate the push as corporations look for processes that remove the human element from the equation.

Of course, Locus Robotics hasn’t had too much of an issue raising money previously. The Massachusetts-based startup, which raised $26 million back in April of last year, is adding a $40 million Series D to its funds. That brings the full amount to north of $105 million. This latest round, led by Zebra Technologies, comes as the company looks to expand operations with the launch of a European HQ.

“The new funding allows Locus to accelerate expansion into global markets,” CEO Rick Faulk said in a release, “enabling us to strengthen our support of retail, industrial, healthcare, and 3PL businesses around the world as they navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that they come out stronger on the other side.”

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Physicists around the world are cracking open the proton, within the nucleus of the atom, to see what’s inside.

The proton is a fundamental building block of the atomic nucleus, and among other things it’s used as a medical probe in magnetic resonance imaging. It also has a rich inner structure made up of subatomic particles called quarks and gluons, which bind the quarks together.

Continue reading “Cracking open the proton” »

npj Computational Materials volume 6, Article number: 73 (2020) Cite this article.

Researchers at Tulane University School of Medicine identified a gene that causes an aggressive form of breast cancer to rapidly grow. More importantly, they have also discovered a way to “turn it off” and inhibit cancer from occurring. The animal study results have been so compelling that the team is now working on FDA approval to begin clinical trials and has published details in the journal Scientific Reports.

The team led by Dr. Reza Izadpanah examined the role two genes, including one whose involvement in cancer was discovered by Tulane researchers, play in causing triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). TNBC is considered to be the most aggressive of breast cancers, with a much poorer prognosis for treatment and survival. Izadpanah’s team specifically identified an inhibitor of the TRAF3IP2 gene, which was proven to suppress the growth and spread (metastasis) of TNBC in mouse models that closely resemble humans.

In parallel studies looking at a duo of genes—TRAF3IP2 and Rab27a, which play roles in the secretion of substances that can cause tumor formation —the research teams studied what happens when they were stopped from functioning. Suppressing the expression of either gene led to a decline in both tumor growth and the spread of cancer to other organs. Izadpanah says that when Rab27a was silenced, the tumor did not grow but was still spreading a small number of cancer cells to other parts of the body. However, when the TRAF3IP2 gene was turned off, they found no spread (known as “metastasis” or “micrometastasis”) of the original tumor cells for a full year following the treatment. Even more beneficial, inhibiting the TRAF3IP2 gene not only stopped future tumor growth but caused existing tumors to shrink to undetectable levels.