Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 676

According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Services, nearly 50 million Americans are currently living with an autoimmune condition. It’s the third-largest category of diseases affecting the nation, according to the agency. Doctors and scientists have been using a number of promising CRISPR treatments to address some of these conditions; now, the results of a new study in China could offer a way to make these treatments even more widely available.

As Nature‘s Smriti Mallapaty explains, the study focused on three people whose treatments were created using donor cells as opposed to cells taken from the patients themselves. This is significant because the prospect of using donor cells allows for CRISPR treatments to be developed in larger quantities — something that could make a big difference in a lot of people’s lives around the world.

Mallapaty describes the three patients in the study as having “severe autoimmune conditions.” One of them, a man in his fifties with systemic sclerosis, said that he started feeling better within a few days, and was able to resume working two weeks after the treatment. This particular study isn’t the only one of its kind — Nature‘s reporting mentions that another trial was subsequently conducted with more patients, while another doctor is leading a similar study using donor cells to treat lupus.

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A team of engineers at Nanjing University, working with a pair of colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a new way to extract lithium from briny water.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes the process they developed and the device they built and how it could be used to extract lithium from various natural sources. Seth Darling, with Argonne National Laboratory in the U.S., has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team on this new effort.

Lithium is in high demand due to its use in batteries. Unfortunately, its traditional sources, hard rock ores, are expected to decline in the coming years. Because of that, scientists have been looking for other sources like briny water found in the world’s oceans. Prior research has suggested there is more than enough to meet global demand for as long as needed.

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The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, designed, built, and operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO), achieved a major breakthrough in solar physics by directly mapping the strength of the magnetic field in the solar corona, the outer part of the solar atmosphere that can be seen during a total eclipse. This breakthrough promises to enhance our understanding of space weather and its impact on Earth’s technology-dependent society.

The corona: the launch pad of space weather.

The Sun’s magnetic field generates regions in the Sun’s atmosphere, often rooted by sunspots, that store vast amounts of energy that fuel explosive solar storms and drive space weather. The corona, the Sun’s outer atmosphere, is a superheated realm where these magnetic mysteries unfold. Mapping coronal magnetic fields is essential to understanding and predicting space weather — and to protect our technology in Earth and space.

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Mouse study finds fathers on unhealthy diets can cause cardiovascular disease in their daughters. When they become fathers, men who have an unhealthy, high-cholesterol diet can cause increased risk of cardiovascular disease, or CVD, in their daughters, a University of California, Riverside-led mouse study has found.

The research, published in the journal JCI Insight, is the first to demonstrate this result seen only in female offspring.

CVD, the leading cause of death globally, is a group of disorders that affects the heart and blood vessels. Hypertension (high blood pressure) is a leading risk factor for CVD. In the United States, nearly 703,000 people died in 2022 from heart disease, the equivalent of one in every five deaths.

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