Lifeboat Foundation

NASA is hyper focused on sending humans to the lunar surface by 2024, and those astronauts are going to need space suits to pull off the job — suits that the space agency currently doesn’t have. Now one company, with decades of experience making space suits for NASA, says it has an ensemble that could be ready by the agency’s ambitious deadline.

Cell freezing (cryopreservation)—which is essential in cell transfusions as well as basic biomedical research—can be dramatically improved using a new polymeric cryoprotectant, discovered at the University of Warwick, which reduces the amount of ‘anti-freeze’ needed to protect cells.

The ability to freeze and store cells for cell-based therapies and research has taken a step forward in the paper “A synthetically scalable poly(ampholyte) which dramatically Enhances Cellular Cryopreservation.” published by the University of Warwick’s Department of Chemistry and Medical School in the journal Biomacromolecules. The new polymer material protects the cells during freezing, leading to more cells being recovered and less solvent-based antifreeze being required.

Cryopreservation of cells is an essential process, enabling banking and distribution of cells, which would otherwise degrade. The current methods rely on adding traditional ‘antifreezes’ to the cells to protect them from the cold stress, but not all the cells are recovered and it is desirable to lower the amount of solvent added.

Scientists have modeled the jerks inside our planet’s core that cause magnetic north to go haywire. Accurate models of magnetic north inform our GPS.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) currently has several ongoing trials testing immunotherapy cancer treatments like CPG and checkpoint inhibitor drugs. In fact, the internet was up in arms last year when Stanford University doctors cured 87 out of 90 mice with a “vaccine” that stimulated the immune system to attack cancerous cells. It was described as a “breakthrough treatment,” but the truth is, a very similar treatment was already being used to treat human patients at a hospital in Mexico.

CHIPSA Hospital, which is located in Tijuana, is an integrative immunotherapy hospital that offers patients access to several cutting-edge therapies and nutritional regimens. Many of our treatments have been long discounted by mainstream medical communities, only to be later approved and legitimized in the United States. CPG is one of them.

Dr. Anton Escobedo, the hospital’s medical director, said the clinical study was actually music to his hears. “When the study came out,” he said, “I was pleased to see they were using CPG. We have a lot of experience with a form of CPG so we weren’t surprised to see it work well in combination with checkpoint inhibitors. We love when science proves what we’re doing is right. 10 years ago, they wouldn’t even acknowledge it.”

But that always looked like a tall order when faced with stiff competition from tech giants like Google, IBM, and Amazon, all happy to pour billions into AI research. Faced with that reality, OpenAI has undergone a significant metamorphosis in the last couple of years.

Musk stepped away last year, citing conflicts of interest as his electric car company Tesla invests in self-driving technology and disagreements over the direction of the organization. Earlier this year a for-profit arm was also spun off to enable OpenAI to raise investment in its effort to keep up.

A byzantine legal structure will supposedly bind the new company to the original mission of the nonprofit. OpenAI LP is controlled by OpenAI’s board and obligated to advance the nonprofit’s charter. Returns for investors are also capped at 100 times their stake, with any additional value going to the nonprofit, though that’s a highly ambitious target that needs to be hit before any limits on profiteering would kick in.

Scientists are “extremely concerned” by a bacterium resistant to antibiotics of last resort.

A team of fusion researchers succeeded in proving that energetic ions with energy in mega electron volt (MeV) range are superiorly confined in a plasma for the first time in helical systems. This promises the alpha particle (helium ion) confinement required for realizing fusion energy in a helical reactor.

The deuterium-tritium reaction in a high-temperature plasma will be used in fusion reactors in the future. Alpha particles with 3.5 MeV energy are generated by the fusion reaction. The alpha particles transfer their energy to the plasma, and this alpha particle heating sustains the high-temperature plasma condition required for the fusion reaction. In order to realize such a plasma, which is called a burning plasma, the energetic ions in the MeV range must be tightly confined in the plasma.

Numerical simulations predicted the favorable results of MeV ion confinement in a plasma in helical systems that have the advantage of steady-state operation in comparison with tokamak systems. However, demonstration of MeV ion confinement by experiment had not been reported. Recently, the study was greatly advanced by an MeV ion confinement experiment performed in the deuterium operation of the Large Helical Device (LHD), which is owned by National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), in Japan. In deuterium plasmas, 1 MeV tritons (tritium ions) are created by deuteron-deuteron fusion reactions. The tritons have the similar behavior with alpha particles generated in a future burning plasma.

The ESA BioRock space experiment was carried into orbit, bound for the International Space Station (ISS), on 25 July 2019 as part of the SpaceX CRS-18 mission. CRS-18 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, aboard a Falcon 9 launcher. The experiment will investigate the growth of biofilms and their ability to extract minerals and use them as nutrients (biomining) in microgravity conditions. This will be directly compared with results obtained under Mars and Earth gravity conditions simulated using a centrifuge on the ISS. The findings will contribute towards a better understanding of the growth of microorganisms in space, which is also key to bioregenerative life support systems, the formation of biofilms and microbial ore extraction. In future, such processes could be used in the biomining of economically valuable chemical elements such as copper on other planets. The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is playing a key role in the experiment.

Three species of bacteria are being investigated in the BioRock experiment: Sphingomonas desiccabilis, Bacillus subtilis and Cupriavidus metallidurans. “Our research focuses on the organism Bacillus subtilis,” says Petra Rettberg from the DLR Institute of Aerospace Medicine. “We are curious to see how well this bacterium can extract nutrients from the minerals of the basalt that was inoculated with Bacillus spores for the space experiment.” Over the coming weeks, the experiment will be put into operation on the ISS and is expected to remain in space until the end of August 2019. The experiment will then return to Earth for analysis and evaluation, with the samples later being examined in the astrobiological laboratories at the DLR site in Cologne.

Biofilms are among the oldest visible signs of life on Earth and could also perhaps be found to be the earliest forms of life on other planets and moons in the Solar System. A biofilm is a structured community of microorganisms on a surface, encapsulated in a self-formed matrix made of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS). This EPS matrix holds the microorganisms together in their three-dimensional arrangement and enables the biofilm to adhere to surfaces. The properties of microorganisms living within a biofilm generally differ substantially from those of microorganisms of the same species existing independently. The dense environment of the film allows them to cooperate with one another, interact in many ways and protects these minute organisms from external influences. This means that microorganisms in biofilms are highly resistant to various chemical and physical effects and can be used for a range of applications in space.