Lifeboat Foundation

CHICAGO (AP) — Newer drugs are substantially improving the chances of survival for some people with hard-to-treat forms of lung, breast and prostate cancer, doctors reported at the world’s largest cancer conference.

Among those who have benefited is Roszell Mack Jr., who at age 87 is still able to work at a Lexington, Kentucky, horse farm, nine years after being diagnosed with lung cancer that had spread to his bones and lymph nodes.

“I go in every day, I’m the first one there,” said Mack, who helped test Merck’s Keytruda, a therapy that helps the immune system identify and fight cancer. “I’m feeling well and I have a good quality of life.”

Continue reading “Drugs make headway against lung, breast, prostate cancers” »

Medicine’s ever-increasing focus on longevity is bad for society, says a prominent physician. (But, who’d voluntarily give up those bonus years?)

Seamus O’Mahony

Nearby in the sky are 2 interacting galaxies: LEDA 62867 (left) and NGC 6786 (right). Millions of years from now, after a long and graceful dance, NGC 6786 will likely consume its smaller galactic partner.

Today, on World Environment Day, we are encouraged to consider the theme for 2019—air pollution—and its effects on the global human population. We are told of the impacts of breathing in polluted, urban air and we hear governments around the world promising to tackle it.

🤔👀😂

Yes, seriously.

Continue reading “Curbing air pollution” »

A powerful “mass driver” could launch moon-mined ore into space.

Today, we wish to highlight a new open access publication in which the researchers take a novel approach to the regeneration of the thymus, a small but vitally important organ that is key to our immune system.

The thymus shrinks as we age

The thymus is one of the most important organs in the body, and it is where thymocytes produced in the bone marrow travel to become new T cells before being trained in the lymph nodes to become the defenders of the adaptive immune system. However, as we get older, the thymus increasingly turns to fat and starts to shrink, causing its ability to produce new T cells to fall dramatically. This process is known as thymic involution and actually begins shortly after puberty, so this is one aspect of aging that begins fairly early in life, although it is many decades later before its decline causes serious health issues.

Continue reading “Creating Thymus Organoids Using Tissue Engineering” »

Brain death isn’t the end… at least, not for the slaughtered pigs who had their brains revived, thanks a new technique.

Chinese scientists have found a major lithium deposit in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, estimated to contain more than 5 million tons.

There are approximately 40 million tons of proven lithium reserves in the world, the Xinhua News Agency’s Globe magazine reported.

A team led by research fellow Wen Hanjie from the Institute of Geochemistry under the Chinese Academy of Sciences found 340,000 tons of lithium oxide in a test site in central Yunnan.

Continue reading “Chinese scientists find 5 million tons of lithium deposits in Yunnan” »