Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 721

Although each condition occurs in a small number of individuals, collectively these diseases exert a staggering human and economic toll because they affect some 300 million people worldwide. Yet, with a mere 5 to 7 percent of these conditions having an FDA-approved drug, they remain largely untreated or undertreated.

Developing new medicines represents a daunting challenge, but a new artificial intelligence tool can propel the discovery of new therapies from existing medicines, offering hope for patients with rare and neglected conditions and for the clinicians who treat them.

The AI model, called TxGNN, is the first one developed specifically to identify drug candidates for rare diseases and conditions with no treatments.

Identifies possible therapies for thousands of diseases, including ones with no current treatments.

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Healthy, stable ecosystems provide services that keep us healthy, such as supplying food and clean water, producing oxygen, and making green spaces available for our recreation and wellbeing.

Another key service ecosystems provide is disease regulation. When nature is in balance – with predators controlling herbivore populations, and herbivores controlling plant growth – it’s more difficult for pathogens to emerge in a way that causes pandemics.

But when human activities disrupt and unbalance ecosystems – such as by way of climate change and biodiversity loss – things go wrong.

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Human evolution is linked to the manipulation of the environment. Since the first hominid to use a stone as a tool — or a bone according to the iconic scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey —, we have come to recognise this as materials science. This discipline uses physics, chemistry and engineering to study how materials are formed and what their physical properties are, as well as to discover and develop new materials, such as smart materials in order to find new uses applicable to any sector.

Smart materials are materials that are manipulated to respond in a controllable and reversible way, modifying some of their properties as a result of external stimuli such as certain mechanical stress or a certain temperature, among others. Because of their responsiveness, smart materials are also known as responsive materials. These are usually translated as “active” materials although it would be more accurate to say “reactive” materials.

For example, we can talk about sportswear with ventilation valves that react to temperature and humidity by opening when the wearer breaks out in a sweat and closing when the body cools down, about buildings that adapt to atmospheric conditions such as wind, heat or rain, or about drugs that are released into the bloodstream as soon as a viral infection is detected.

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There’s still so much we don’t know about Alzheimer’s disease, but the link between poor sleep and worsening disease is one that researchers are exploring with gusto.

In a study published in 2023, scientists found that using sleeping pills to get some shut-eye could reduce the build-up of toxic clumps of proteins in fluid that washes the brain clean every night.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis found people who took suvorexant, a common treatment for insomnia, for two nights at a sleep clinic experienced a slight drop in two proteins, amyloid-beta and tau, that pile up in Alzheimer’s disease.

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A data breach earlier this year at SRP Federal Credit Union has left nearly a quarter-million people exposed to possible identity theft and account fraud.

The ransomware group Nitrogen has claimed responsibility for extracting 650 gigabytes of sensitive customer data, according to reports filed recently with the state attorney general’s offices in Texas and Maine. The breach has been publicly reported throughout December by cybersecurity analysts, financial technology companies and national news media.

Screen captures of what seemed to be raw customer data from SRP were posted on social media through bogus accounts as early as Dec. 5.

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