Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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“When you have them recall their trauma, the memory goes to an unstable state. The beta blocker is something we use to block the consolidation of the emotional part of the memory being restored, while preserving the conscious part,” says McGill University’s Dr. Karem Nader.

A traumatic memory has the means of replaying itself over and again with such tenacity that it’s almost as if it were on a constant loop. It has the alarming capability of magnifying the most horrific aspects and can run through the minds of its victims with such frequency that many report feeling as if they’re a prisoner of their own mind.

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H/T Dr. Jason Williams

Creatine, the organic acid that is popularly taken as a supplement by athletes and bodybuilders, serves as a molecular battery for immune cells by storing and distributing energy to power their fight against cancer, according to new UCLA research.

The study, conducted in mice and published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, is the first to show that creatine uptake is critical to the anti-tumor activities of CD8 T cells, also known as killer T cells, the foot soldiers of the immune system. The researchers also found that creatine supplementation can improve the efficacy of existing immunotherapies.

“Because oral creatine supplements have been broadly utilized by bodybuilders and athletes for the past three decades, existing data suggest they are likely safe when taken at appropriate doses,” said Lili Yang, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and the study’s senior author. “This could provide a clear and expedient path forward for the use of creatine supplementation to enhance existing cancer immunotherapies.”

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Brain-connected machines that capture and translate electrical signals are showing great promise across a number of areas, but one with massive potential is the world of prosthetics. Scientists exploring these possibilities at Johns Hopkins University are now reporting a big breakthrough, demonstrating a system that enables a quadriplegic to control two prosthetics arms at once using only his thoughts, and also feel a sense of touch coming back the other way.

The team at Johns Hopkins University has been making some exciting progress in this area through its Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was launched by DARPA in 2006. In 2016, we saw a double amputee use his brain to control two of the team’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs (MPLs), bilateral shoulder-level prosthetics that enabled him to do things like move cups between shelves, a first for this kind of research.

This system worked via custom sockets which both supported the artificial limbs and hooked them up to nerves in the patient’s torso which, following a treatment regime, had been trained to provide specific control movements for the prosthetic limbs. Five years on, the team has made some advances.

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Researchers now have shown that they are instead made up of many individual bioelectric units generating energy- like a Tesla Battery. https://embopress.org/doi/10.15252/embj.2018101056&h=AT3…nuqUCir7ik

https://bit.ly/2J4Tkho&h=AT1YJICM5AliiHbU1dzQWsUOBj2Pv4x…AZG5eAMbU–\-\DuoKFZH11ht3gbqMTwxduJkRJYCYZr7uE11trWGGCm-ecSp9kMw

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Genetic differences in the immune system shape the collections of bacteria that colonize the digestive system, according to new research by scientists at the University of Chicago.

In carefully controlled experiments using populated with microbes from conventionally raised mice, the researchers showed that while the makeup of the microbial input largely determined the resulting of the recipients, between strains of mice played a role as well.

“When the input is standardized, you can compare mice of different genetic strains and see what these genetics do to the microbiome in recipient mice,” said microbiome researcher Alexander Chervonsky, MD, Ph.D., a senior author of the new study, published in Cell Reports. “This approach allowed us to tell whether there was a genetic influence, and indeed there is. So, the next question was what mechanisms are involved?”

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