Lifeboat Foundation

Julio Gil-Pulgar · @gil_pulgar | Jul 29, 2019 | 06:00.

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We look back at the historic 1969 moon landing of the Apollo 11. Hear stories from the original crew, explore photos and experience the launch in VR.

The asteroid managed to get within just 73,000 kilometers of our planet without anyone noticing. The miss lends a new sense of urgency to preparations for a potential collision one day.

The news: On Thursday July 25 an asteroid dubbed “Asteroid 2019 OK”, measuring 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), got uncomfortably close to Earth, according to NASA’s near-Earth objects database. It was less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon away, making it a very close call in space terms. If it had landed on a populated area it could have caused major damage, although this outcome is statistically quite unlikely.

Should we worry? It’s hard not to feel concerned that a “city-killer” sized asteroid wasn’t detected further ahead of time. It was announced just hours before it passed by Earth, after being detected just a few days beforehand by teams in the US and Brazil. Its relatively small size, unusual orbit, and fast speed all conspired to make it tough to spot, researchers told the Washington Post.

But getting human cells to grow in another species is not easy. Nakauchi and colleagues announced at the 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Austin, Texas that they had put human iPS cells into sheep embryos that had been engineered not to produce a pancreas. But the hybrid embryos, grown for 28 days, contained very few human cells, and nothing resembling organs. This is probably because of the genetic distance between humans and sheep, says Nakauchi.

The research could eventually lead to new sources of organs for transplant, but ethical and technical hurdles need to be overcome.

For decades, computer programmers have been trying to beat multiplayer games by finding reliable patterns in data.

Researchers at Facebook and Carnegie Mellon University published a whitepaper in Science Journal in July that flips this switch. Their software embraces randomness, and it is reliably beating humans at games.

Jump to media player The semi-autonomous robot is able to use human tools and guide itself across difficult terrain.

At a certain point in our lives all of us develop a negative relationship with the mirror on the wall. It just keeps showing too many lines, too many grey hairs and sagging stuff everywhere.

I know quite a few people who end up refusing to face the mirror for any reason whatever!

Continue reading “Neuroscientists reveal the number one exercise for slowing down the aging process” »

Medicine has a “Goldilocks” problem. Many therapies are safe and effective only when administered at just the right time and in very precise doses – when given too early or too late, in too large or too small an amount, medicines can be ineffective or even harmful. But in many situations, doctors have no way of knowing when or how much to dispense.

Now, a team of bioengineers led by UC San Francisco’s Hana El-Samad, PhD, and the University of Washington’s David Baker, PhD, have devised a remarkable solution to this problem – “smart” cells that behave like tiny autonomous robots which, in the future, may be used to detect damage and disease, and deliver help at just the right time and in just the right amount.

Skeletal muscle is important not only for locomotion but also for regulating metabolic function. Lahiri et al. studied the interactions between the gut microbiota and skeletal muscle in mice. They identified genes and signaling pathways involved in the regulation of skeletal muscle mass and function that responded to cues from the gut microbiota. Additional biochemical and functional analysis also revealed the influence of the gut microbiota on the function of neuromuscular junctions. These findings open the door to a better understanding of the role of the gut microbiota in the mechanisms underlying loss of muscle mass.

The functional interactions between the gut microbiota and the host are important for host physiology, homeostasis, and sustained health. We compared the skeletal muscle of germ-free mice that lacked a gut microbiota to the skeletal muscle of pathogen-free mice that had a gut microbiota. Compared to pathogen-free mouse skeletal muscle, germ-free mouse skeletal muscle showed atrophy, decreased expression of insulin-like growth factor 1, and reduced transcription of genes associated with skeletal muscle growth and mitochondrial function. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry analysis of skeletal muscle, liver, and serum from germ-free mice revealed multiple changes in the amounts of amino acids, including glycine and alanine, compared to pathogen-free mice. Germ-free mice also showed reduced serum choline, the precursor of acetylcholine, the key neurotransmitter that signals between muscle and nerve at neuromuscular junctions.