Lifeboat Foundation

Carbon nanotubes embedded in leaves detect chemical signals that are produced when a plant is damaged.

MIT engineers have developed a way to closely track how plants respond to stresses such as injury, infection, and light damage, using sensors made of carbon nanotubes. These sensors can be embedded in plant leaves, where they report on hydrogen peroxide signaling waves.

Plants use hydrogen peroxide to communicate within their leaves, sending out a distress signal that stimulates leaf cells to produce compounds that will help them repair damage or fend off predators such as insects. The new sensors can use these hydrogen peroxide signals to distinguish between different types of stress, as well as between different species of plants.

An international team of scientists, led by University of Helsinki reported that vitamin B3, niacin, has therapeutic effects in progressive muscle disease. Niacin delayed disease progression in patients with mitochondrial myopathy, a progressive disease with no previous curative treatments.

Vitamin B3 forms have recently emerged as potent boosters of energy metabolism in rodents. These vitamins are precursors for NAD⁺, a molecular switch of metabolism between fasting and growth modes.

As fasting has been shown promote health and longevity in for example mice, a variety of “NAD boosters” are being developed. However, whether actual NAD⁺ deficiency exists in human disease, and whether NAD⁺ boosters could have curative effects in patients with degenerative diseases, has remained elusive.

Science’s dream of creating perfect custom organs on demand as soon as a patient needs one is still a long way off. But tiny versions are already serving as useful research tools and stepping stones toward full-fledged replacements.

The Lowdown

Continue reading “Lab-Grown Mini Kidneys Are Bringing Science Closer to Custom Organs” »

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EXCLUSIVE — A California-based biopharmaceutical company claims to have discovered an antibody that could shield the human body from the coronavirus and flush it out of a person’s system within four days, Fox News has exclusively learned.

Later Friday, Sorrento Therapeutics will announce their discovery of the STI-1499 antibody, which the San Diego company said can provide “100% inhibition” of COVID-19, adding that a treatment could be available months before a vaccine hits the market.

New findings suggest past infections may offer some protection against the novel coronavirus.

People, bicycles, cars or road, sky, grass: Which pixels of an image represent distinct foreground persons or objects in front of a self-driving car, and which pixels represent background classes?

This task, known as panoptic segmentation, is a fundamental problem that has applications in numerous fields such as self-driving cars, robotics, augmented reality and even in biomedical image analysis.

At the Department of Computer Science at the University of Freiburg Dr. Abhinav Valada, Assistant Professor for Robot Learning and member of BrainLinks-BrainTools focuses on this research question. Valada and his team have developed the state-of-the-art “EfficientPS” artificial intelligence (AI) model that enables coherent recognition of visual scenes more quickly and effectively.

This new paper argues that continued economic growth on Earth will hit a thermodynamic limit within the third millenium, if economic activities and energy consumption cannot be decoupled. The maximum size would be up to 7000 times the current one. An in-space economy would offer a way out.

“Energy Limits to the Gross Domestic Product on Earth” https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.05244

(Image: Wikipedia — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_mile_tower.jpg)

MONDAY, May 11, 2020 (HealthDay News) — An experimental vaccine seems to give monkeys extended protection from an HIV-like infection — by “waking up” an arm of the immune system that vaccines normally do not.

Experts cautioned that animal research often does not pan out in humans. The decades of work toward an HIV vaccine has been a clear example. But, researchers said, this vaccine works differently, targeting two “arms” of the immune system.

And they think the work potentially has broader lessons for vaccines being developed for other viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

There may be hope yet for a universal flu vaccine — one powerful dose of immunisation that can provide long-lasting protection for multiple influenza strains, all in a single shot.

A discovery like that would be a holy grail for public health, and after more than a decade of careful research, a specific version called FLU-v is now moving into the last rounds of clinical testing.

So far, researchers say the results have been “very encouraging”, and the vaccine has successfully passed phase I and phase II clinical trials. Although trials in these phases are limited to assessing the safety of the vaccine, there’s also evidence it might be effective.