Lifeboat Foundation

Fascinating. Yes, digital provides a slice of the human life, but its not complete.

Your family and friends will be able to interact with a digital “you” that doles out advice—even when you’re gone.

Neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS) affect millions of people worldwide and occur when parts of the nervous system lose function over time. Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) have discovered that a type of skin-related stem cell could be used to help regenerate myelin sheaths, a vital part of the nervous system linked to neurodegenerative disorders.

The discovery into these types of stem cells is significant because they could offer a simpler and less invasive alternative to using embryonic stem cells. This early stage research showed that by using these skin-related stem cells, researchers were able to restore myelin sheath formation in mice.

“This research enhances the possibility of identifying human skin stem cells that can be isolated, expanded, and used therapeutically. In the future, we plan to continue our research in this area by determining whether these cells can enhance functional recovery from neuronal injury,” said Thomas J. Hornyak, MD, PhD, Associate Professor and Chairman of the Department of Dermatology, and Principal Investigator in this research. “In the future, we plan to continue our research in this area by determining whether these cells can enhance functional recovery from neuronal injury.”

Continue reading “Skin-derived Stem Cell has Potential to Regenerate Myelin Sheath” »

Is developing the first-ever storage technology designed and built from the media up, for the cloud. We are leveraging recent discoveries in ultrafast laser optics to store data in quartz glass by using femtosecond lasers, and building a completely new storage system designed from scratch around this technology. This opens up an incredibly exciting opportunity to challenge and completely re-think traditional storage system design, and to co-design the future hardware and software infrastructure for the cloud.

We are hiring for this and related projects: Post-Doc Researchers in Storage Software and Optical Systems, and internships in Software, FPGA, Electronics and Optics.

This project is a collaboration with the University of Southampton Optoelectonics Research Centre, and was featured in a Microsoft Ignite 2017 keynote on future storage technologies.

Continue reading “Project Silica” »

Learn a new approach to accelerating corporate innovation and entrepreneurship in this two-day program at MIT.

Although most of the research on the endocannabinoid system focuses on its involvement in the CNS and immune systems, a significant amount of research over the past 20 years has demonstrated that this system also plays a role in maintaining several important functions of the skin. This article will examine the functions of the endocannabinoid system on the skin and its involvement in several skin conditions.

When traveling at five times the speed of sound or faster, the tiniest bit of turbulence is more than a bump in the road, said the Sandia National Laboratories aerospace engineer who for the first time characterized the vibrational effect of the pressure field beneath one of these tiny hypersonic turbulent spots.

“The problem is that these patches of turbulence are really fast and really small,” said researcher Katya Casper. “There are thousands of turbulent spots every second in hypersonic flow, and we need really fast techniques to study their behavior.”

The pressure field is key to understanding how intermittent turbulent spots shake an aircraft flying at Mach 5 or greater, Casper said. Hypersonic vehicles are subjected to high levels of fluctuating pressures and must be engineered to withstand the resulting vibrations.

Continue reading “High-speed experiments improve hypersonic flight predictions” »

It could let everyone benefit from good genes.

New research published in Nature Scientific Reports (opens in new window) has found that a hormone produced by plants under stress can be applied to crops to alleviate the damage caused by salty soils. The team of researchers from Western Sydney University and the University of Queensland identified a naturally-occurring chemical in plants that reduces the symptoms of salt stress in plants when applied to soil, enabling the test plants to increase their growth by up to 32 times compared with untreated plants.

Salinity is a huge issue across the world, affecting more than 220 million hectares of the world’s irrigated farming and food-producing land. Salinity occurs when salty irrigation water is repeatedly applied to crops, leading to progressively increasing levels of salt in the soil which reduces crop yields, increases susceptibility to drought and damages soil microbiology. Scientists have long tried to find ways to breed salt-tolerance or develop methods that remove salt, and this new research is promising in its potential ability to reduce the damage in crop plants that results from salt.

“We identified a compound called ACC that occurs naturally in plants when they become stressed by drought, heat or salty conditions,” said Dr. Hongwei Liu, Postdoctoral Fellow in Soil Biology and Genomics at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University.

Continue reading “New discovery could alleviate salty soil symptoms in food crops” »

Brains contain a variety of immune cells that play an important role for brain function. A team led by Prof. Kiavash Movahedi (VIB Center for Inflammation Research at VUB) has developed a comprehensive cell atlas of the brain’s immune compartment. This revealed not only the striking diversity of brain macrophages, but also uncovered microglia where they were not expected. Remarkably, these previously unknown microglia showed a clear resemblance to microglia that are normally associated with neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. The new insights are important for understanding the role of macrophages in healthy brain physiology and for developing future treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

Macrophages in the brain were first discovered 100 years ago by the Spanish scientist P\xEDo del R\xEDo-Hortega. Most brain macrophages are known as microglia. These cells are in close contact with neurons and are critical for the proper development and functioning of the brain. But beyond the microglia, brains house several other types of macrophages, many of which are relatively unknown.

Prof. Kiavash Movahedi (VIB Center for Inflammation Research, VUB), said, “While microglia are fairly well studied, other brain macrophages have remained quite enigmatic. We wanted to obtain a better understanding of these cells, as we believe they could be critical for regulating brain inflammation and immunity.”

Continue reading “Detailed brain map uncovers hidden immune cells that may be involved in neurodegenerative disorders” »