Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health officials continue to grapple with the coronavirus outbreak that has killed at least 81 people in China and sickened 2,800 worldwide. And back in 2018, Billionaire Bill Gates gave a warning that the world wasn’t prepared for pandemics, which should “concern us all.”

Speaking at an event hosted by Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on April 27, 2018, Gates said he believed “the world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war.”

“This preparation includes staging simulations, war games and preparedness exercises so that we can better understand how diseases will spread and how to deal with responses such as quarantine and communications to minimize panic,” Gates said.

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A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck Tuesday about 80 miles from Jamaica, shaking people in the Caribbean and as far away as Miami.

A tsunami of 0.4 feet was recorded in the Cayman Islands at George Town, but no tsunami was observed at Port Royal, Jamaica, or Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.

A tsunami threat alert was lifted Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after the quake.

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LAWRENCE, KS (KCTV) — Lawrence Memorial Hospital has a patient currently being held in isolation who may have coronavirus.

The hospital says the patient recently entered the United States from Wuhan, China, and showed symptoms of a respiratory illness.

Procedures are underway to treat the patient while minimizing exposure. These procedures, the hospital says, include placing the patient in isolation in a room specially designed for infection prevention.

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Essentially the higgs boson could create a replicator and even a teleportation device.

Can you think of any? Here’s what I mean. When we set about justifying basic research in fundamental science, we tend to offer multiple rationales. One (the easy and most obviously legitimate one) is that we’re simply curious about how the world works, and discovery is its own reward. But often we trot out another one: the claim that applied research and real technological advances very often spring from basic research with no specific technological goal. Faraday wasn’t thinking of electronic gizmos when he helped pioneer modern electromagnetism, and the inventors of quantum mechanics weren’t thinking of semiconductors and lasers. They just wanted to figure out how nature works, and the applications came later.

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So what about contemporary particle physics, and the Higgs boson in particular? We’re spending a lot of money to look for it, and I’m perfectly comfortable justifying that expense by the purely intellectual reward associated with understanding the missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. But inevitably we also mention that, even if we don’t know what it will be right now, it’s likely (or some go so far as to say “inevitable”) that someday we’ll invent some marvelous bit of technology that makes crucial use of what we learned from studying the Higgs. So — anyone have any guesses as to what that might be? You are permitted to think broadly here. We’re obviously not expecting something within a few years after we find the little bugger. So imagine that we have discovered it, and if you like you can imagine we have the technology to create Higgses with a lot less overhead than a kilometers-across particle accelerator.

Continue reading “Technological Applications of the Higgs Boson” | >

Michigan State University and Stanford University scientists have invented a nanoparticle that eats away—from the inside out—portions of plaques that cause heart attacks.

Bryan Smith, associate professor of biomedical engineering at MSU, and a team of scientists created a “Trojan Horse” nanoparticle that can be directed to eat debris, reducing and stabilizing plaque. The discovery could be a potential treatment for atherosclerosis, a leading cause of death in the United States.

The results, published in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology, showcases the nanoparticle that homes in on due to its high selectivity to a particular immune cell type—monocytes and macrophages. Once inside the macrophages in those plaques, it delivers a drug agent that stimulates the cell to engulf and eat cellular debris. Basically, it removes the diseased/dead in the plaque core. By reinvigorating the macrophages, size is reduced and stabilized.

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Recently, a team of researchers, including Professor Judy Campisi, has published an atlas charting the inflammatory senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) [1].

The nature of the SASP

As we grow older, increasing numbers of our cells enter a state known as senescence. Senescent cells no longer divide to support and help maintain the tissues that they are a part of and instead secrete a range of harmful inflammatory signals: the SASP.

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If your PC is running on any modern #Intel CPU built before Oct 2018, it’s likely vulnerable to a new hardware issue, dubbed CacheOut (CVE-2020–0549), that could let attackers leak sensitive data from OS kernel, VMs and even from SGX enclave. :-o.

Researchers demonstrated a new speculative execution vulnerability, dubbed ‘CacheOut’ assigned CVE-2020–0549, in Intel processors that could allow attackers to leak targeted sensitive data from OS kernel, co-resident virtual machines, and even stored within Intel’s secured SGX enclave.

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The Air Force’s top general says one of the designers of the ride-sharing app Uber is helping the branch build a new data-sharing network that the Air Force hopes will help service branches work together to detect and destroy targets.

The network, which the Air Force is calling the advanced battle management system (ABMS), would function a bit like the artificial intelligence construct Cortana from Halo, who identifies enemy ships and the nearest assets to destroy them at machine speed, so all the fleshy humans need to do is give a nod of approval before resuming their pipe-smoking.

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We are delighted to announce that Dr. Brian Kennedy, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Physiology at the National University of Singapore (NUS) will be joining the LEAF scientific advisory board.

Professor Kennedy is an important figure in the research community, as he is internationally recognized for his research and efforts to translate those findings into therapies that could potentially slow, delay, or even prevent age-related diseases. He previously served as the President of the Buck Institute, where he still remains as a Professor.

At the NUS, he is developing therapeutic interventions that directly target human aging along with biomarkers that can validate if a therapy has worked or not. Professor Kennedy and his team have been exploring the epigenetic clock, a biomarker that measures methylation of the human genome to determine biological age. They are also investigating inflammatory biomarkers of aging using metabolomics, the study of chemical processes involving metabolites, the intermediates and products of metabolism.

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The world’s first completely robotic heart may end the need for transplants from dead humans in as few as 10 years, the hybrid heart made of soft artificial muscles and sensors is hoped to eventually end the need for human transplants.

The hybrid robotic heart is under development and could clear NHS heart transplant waiting lists and save many lives. It is the first hybrid heart made from soft artificial muscles and sensors which are coated in human tissues that are grown in a laboratory.

There are plans partnered with the British Heart Foundation to transplant it into the first person in 2028; the hope is that this hybrid robotic heart will save thousands of lives who would normally have died while waiting for a human organ donor on global waiting lists.

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