Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 885

For the first time, the fully mechanical heart made by BiVACOR, which uses the same technology as high-speed rail lines, has been implanted inside a human being. The feat marks a major step in keeping people alive as they wait for heart transplants.

The total artificial heart (TAH) was implanted as part of an early feasibility study overseen by the US Food and Drug Administration. According to a statement from the Texas Heart Institute where the implantation surgery was carried out, the heart “is a titanium-constructed biventricular rotary blood pump with a single moving part that utilizes a magnetically levitated rotor that pumps the blood and replaces both ventricles of a failing heart.”

BiVACOR, which has been working on the device since 2013, says that the advantage of using a magnetically levitated rotor to drive the device’s blood-circulating function is that there is no friction, which can be such a damaging force to machinery that scientists are looking at ways to reduce its effects. The device is by no means the first artificial heart to be used – the first successful implant took place in 1969 – but it is the first to employ this novel use of maglev technology.

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Since 2020, the condition known as long COVID-19 has become a widespread disability affecting the health and quality of life of millions of people across the globe and costing economies billions of dollars in reduced productivity of employees and an overall drop in the work force.

The intense scientific effort that long COVID sparked has resulted in more than 24,000 scientific publications, making it the most researched health condition in any four years of recorded human history.

Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that limits people’s ability to work, and conditions such as heart failure and diabetes, which are known to last a lifetime.

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In a recent study published in Science Advances, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, used the nematode model Caenorhabditis elegans to determine whether the olfactory nervous system could non-autonomously control the mitochondrial unfolded protein response in response to cellular stress.

A critical part of maintaining a state of cellular homeostasis is coordinating responses to environmental stress across tissues. Substantial evidence now supports the fact that the central nervous system regulates stress across all tissues. Furthermore, cell non-autonomous induction of stress responses occurs in peripheral tissues when unfolded protein responses (UPR) in the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum are activated in the neurons.

Stressed cells undergo misfolding or unfolding of proteins, and UPR transmits protein folding status information to the nucleus to enable cellular stress responses or induce apoptotic cell death. The non-autonomous control of cellular stress responses is believed to be essential for the organism to survive toxic environmental conditions.

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Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to create a comprehensive weather report for two brown dwarfs located about six light years from Earth.

Researchers have created the most detailed weather report ever for two distant worlds beyond our own solar system.

The international study – the first of its kind – reveals the extreme atmospheric conditions on the celestial objects, which are swathed in swirling clouds of hot sand amid temperatures of 950°C (1750°F).

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