Lifeboat Foundation

See researchers’ recipe for synthetic mesenchymal stem cells, which showed cardiac regenerative potential in mice.

A new Facebook tool deploys facial-recognition to identify users in photos, even when they’re not tagged.

Gene therapy is the process of replacing defective genes with healthy ones, adding new genes to help the body fight or treat disease, or deactivating problem genes. It holds the promise to transform medicine and create options for patients who are living with difficult, and even incurable, diseases. Learn how this innovative therapy works.

The US federal government has lifted an enforced moratorium on funding research into how to make viruses deadlier and more transmissible.

The moratorium, which was imposed three years ago, froze funding for what’s called “gain of function” research: controversial experiments seeking to alter pathogens and make them even more dangerous. Now, the money is back on the table, giving those trials the green light once more.

The director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Francis S. Collins, announced the lifting of the moratorium on Tuesday, saying gain of function (GOF) research with viruses like influenza, MERS, and SARS could help us “identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health”.

Continue reading “The US Just Ended Its Own Ban on Engineering Deadly Viruses in The Lab” »

Have you ever had an argument because you disagree about the way something happened? You were both there, you saw the same thing, but you remember it differently.

This happens quite a lot, because human memories are imperfect. As much as we all like to think we can trust our own minds, memories can be altered over time.

Elizabeth F. Loftus is a researcher and professor of cognitive psychology and human memory. She is well known in the field for her work on the creation and nature of false memories, and how people can be influenced by information after an event has happened, event consulting or providing expert witness testimony for hundreds of court cases.

Continue reading “It’s Possible to Plant False Memories Into Your Brain, And It Could Be a Good Thing” »

If you’re like most of our readers, you’re probably reading this right now on your mobile, which means there’s also a chance you’re reading it on a broken, fragmented phone screen.

Luckily, the days of squinting at cracked phone displays like this could soon be over, thanks to a team of Japanese scientists who have developed a new kind of self-healing glass that fuses itself back together, simply by pressure being applied.

The self-healing polymer, created by researchers at the University of Tokyo, was initially discovered by accident while they were studying new adhesives.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Developed Glass That Heals Itself When You Press It Together” »

This Autonomous Flying Car will be ready to take to the skies by 2018.

Continuous automatic sampling during production aims to keep Danish biotechnology at the forefront. The equipment, and the company behind it, are the result of fruitful collaboration between businesses and universities.

Biotech companies can now take samples from their production as often as they wish, untouched by human hands.

This is all thanks to new equipment developed by start-up company Biomatics Technology. Both the company and product were nurtured in the Biopro network, which involves a number of Danish biotech companies and DTU and the University of Copenhagen.

Bone-hardening substance provides more surgical options to treat hip damage.