Lifeboat Foundation

Will open avenues for drug discovery

Scientists have developed a new blood test for Alzheimer’s disease that can detect early indicators of the disease long before the first symptoms appear in patients. The blood test would thus open the door to new avenues in drug discovery, said the researchers from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

The blood test uses a technology called immuno-infrared sensor to measure distribution of pathological and healthy structures of amyloid-beta, according to a study published in the Molecular Cell. The pathological amyloid-beta structure is rich in a sticky, sheet-like folding pattern that makes it prone to aggregation, while the healthy structure is not.

Continue reading “Blood test to detect Alzheimer’s disease” »

Scientists at LIGO detected billion-year-old gravitational waves, and they are expecting to detect a lot more. This is an excerpt from ‘The Little Book of Black Holes’ by Frans Pretorius and Steven S. Gubser, reprinted with permission from the publisher Princeton University Press.

I t has now been decades since stem cell technology emerged as the next great breakthrough in modern medicine, with the bold potential for one day curing everything from heart disease to cancer. Today, that optimism doesn’t appear to have diminished.

It’s easy to recall the excitement. In the late 1990s, when stem cell research was still relatively unexplored but gathering pace, the hope surrounding future uses for such treatments appeared near limitless. Once greater advances had been made, it was often argued, doctors could one day inject patients with cells that have the ability to transform into any other type of cell, making it possible to grow whole new organs. In theory, any damaged area…

A split in the African plate resulted in a gaping crevice in Kenya’s Rift Valley. While it is moving slowly, it is fast in geographical terms.

3D map of all known stellar systems in the solar neighbourhood within a radius of 12.5 light-years. The Sun is at the centre and the Epsilon Indi binary system with the brown dwarf Epsilon Indi B lies near the bottom. The colour is indicative of the temperature and the spectral class — white stars are (main-sequence) A and F dwarfs; yellow stars like the Sun are G dwarfs; orange stars are K dwarfs; and red stars are M dwarfs, by far the most common type of star in the solar neighbourhood. The blue axes are oriented along the galactic coordinate system, and the radii of the rings are 5, 10, and 15 light-years, respectively.

Bank is latest to harness tech as a cheaper and better way of tackling crime.

Scientists have discovered that a particular type of lipid, or fat—thought to only exist in the skin—lives in your eye and could have a part in preventing diabetic retinopathy.

An early symptom is blurry vision in which straight lines appear distorted. That can progress to darkness, whiteouts, or blurry areas in the center of the visual field. The disease does not, by itself, lead to total blindness because peripheral vision remains unaffected. Although some therapies delay loss of central vision, no current treatments restore it completely.

“Macular degeneration therapies seem to be treating disease symptoms, rather than its cause,” Lin says. “We focused on the role of macrophages in regulating inflammation and the growth of abnormal blood vessels to see whether it may be possible one day to help people who don’t get much benefit from existing treatments and design therapies that may prevent progression to advanced forms of the disease.”

Virus delivers genes to fight vision loss.

From research labs to factories, farms, and even our own homes, robots are everywhere these days. But which are the most important robots ever built? We decided to welcome our new robot overlords with just such a list. Read on to discover which robots we owe a debt of a gratitude for their part in turning science fiction into, well, science.