Lifeboat Foundation

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are among the most important tools in modern biomedical research, leading to new and promising possibilities in precision medicine. To create them requires transforming a cell of one type, such as skin, into something of a blank slate, so it has the potential to become virtually any other kind of cell in the body, useful for regenerative therapies for everything from heart disease to diabetes.

However, current methods to induce pluripotency are inefficient: In a batch of 100 cells slated for reprogramming, only five or so complete the transition. A new study published today in Cell Reports by a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID) and School of Medicine and Public Health could improve that efficiency.

It describes combined laboratory and computational methods that lead to better completion of pluripotency, a faster process, and improved understanding of how cells become reprogrammed from one cell type to another, for instance, transforming a skin cell to a cardiac cell. And it includes some surprises, the authors say.

Continue reading “Research team finds new ways to generate stem cells more efficiently” »

Mars 2020 engineers and technicians prepare the high-gain antenna for installation on the rover’s equipment deck. The antenna is articulated so it can point directly at Earth to uplink or downlink data.

The image was taken on April 19, 2019, in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility’s High Bay 1 clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California.

JPL is building and will manage operations of the Mars 2020 rover for the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

Continue reading “Now Mars 2020 Can Phone Home” »

M.A.D.

The Poseidon drone can travel a full kilometer beneath water level, making it difficult to detect and stop once its deployed. And that level of stealth — especially when it’s tipped with a deadly nuclear bomb — has other nations concerned.

“It is worrying that countries are developing new nuclear capabilities,” Ine Eriksen Søreide, Foreign Minister of Norway, told The Barents Observer.

Continue reading “New Russian Submarine Can Launch Nuke-Carrying Drones” »

A newly-discovered gene gives infectious bacteria the ability to survive even the strongest antibiotics.

Cornell University biologists found the bacterial gene mcr-9, which when activated makes bacteria resistant to an “antibiotic of last resort” called colistin, according to research published in the journal mBio on Tuesday. If bacteria with the gene were to spread, doctors could find themselves facing a dangerous and perhaps untreatable superbug.

On Thursday, the city of Amsterdam announced its plan to replace all gasoline and diesel-powered cars and motorcycles with electric vehicles by 2030. The plan is an attempt to address unhealthy and alarming rates of air pollution in the city due to high traffic.

A team of researchers led by Harvard University scientists has improved the laboratory process of converting stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells, using biological and physical separation methods to enrich the proportion of beta cells in a sample. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, may be used to improve beta cell transplants for patients with type 1 diabetes.

In 2014, Douglas Melton’s lab showed for the first time that stem cells could be converted to functional beta cells, taking a step toward giving patients their own source of insulin. In that initial process, beta cells made up 30 percent of the final cell mixture.

“To improve from 30 percent, we needed to really understand the other 70 percent of the resulting cells,” said Adrian Veres, a graduate student in the Melton lab and lead author of the current study. “Until recently, we couldn’t take a sample of our cells and ask what cell types were in there. Now, with the revolution in single-cell sequencing, we can go from nothing to the full list.”

Continue reading “Research boosts the yield of insulin-producing cells for diabetes therapy” »

So-called phage therapy isn’t yet mainstream, but in some cases it might be the only option for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

Researchers from King’s College London have found that therapy that can induce heart cells to regenerate after a heart attack.

Myocardial infarction, more commonly known as a heart attack, caused by the sudden blocking of one of the cardiac coronary arteries, is the main cause of heart failure, a condition that now affects over 23 million population in the world, according to the World Health Organisation.

At present, when a patient survives a heart attack, they are left with permanent structural damage to their heart through the formation of a scar, which can lead to heart failure in the future. In contrast to fish and salamander, which can regenerate the heart throughout life.

Continue reading “Genetic therapy heals damage caused by heart attack” »

Person re-identification entails the automated identification of the same person in multiple images from different cameras and with different backgrounds, angles or positions. Despite recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), person re-identification remains a highly challenging task, particularly due to the many variations in a person’s pose, as well as other differences associated with lighting, occlusion, misalignment and background clutter.

Researchers at the Suning R&D Center in the U.S. have recently developed a new technique for person re-identification based on a multi-scale body-part mask guided attention network (MMGA). Their paper, pre-published on arXiv, will be presented during the 2019 CVPR Workshop spotlight presentation in June.

“Person re-identification is becoming a more and more important task due to its wide range of potential applications, such as criminal investigation, public security and image retrieval,” Honglong Cai, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “However, it remains a challenging task, due to occlusion, misalignment, variation of poses and background clutter. In our recent study, our team tried to develop a method to overcome these challenges.”

Continue reading “A multi-scale body-part mask guided attention network for person re-identification” »