Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Scientists from the UNC School of Medicine, Columbia University, and Rockefeller University have revealed the inner workings of one of the most fundamental and important molecular machines in cells.

The researchers, in a study published in Science, used biochemical experiments and cryo– (cryo-EM) to determine the atomic structure of a complex assembly of molecules known as the histone mRNA three-prime (3’) end-processing machine. This machine plays a fundamental role in proper activity and duplication of the cell genome and when defective, it may lead to human diseases, including cancers.

Histone proteins are found in all plants and animals, and they form a “beads-on-a-string” arrangement where the DNA in chromosomes is wrapped around the beads of histones. Histones ensure the efficient packaging of DNA and help regulate which genes are turned “on” and which are kept “off,” processes needed for all cells to function properly.

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Four newly-discovered species of shark are capable of trotting around on land, using four fins as stubby legs.

They’re the most recently-evolved types of sharks known to science, according to CNET. And while they still live in the water, using their fins to crawl across coral reefs, they can briefly wriggle across dry land to migrate from one tide pool to another.

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NASA’s Christina Koch returned to Earth safely on Thursday after shattering the spaceflight record for female astronauts with a stay of almost 11 months aboard the International Space Station.

Koch touched down at 0912 GMT on the Kazakh steppe after 328 days in space, along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency.

Koch was shown seated and smiling broadly after being extracted from the Soyuz descent module in the Roscosmos space agency’s video footage from the landing site.

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Thoughts?

Despite centuries of colonization and agriculture, Cuba’s rivers are in good health.

Sugarcane and cattle farming on the island date back to the late fifteenth century. To measure water quality in Cuba’s rivers today, Paul Bierman at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Rita Hernández at the Cienfuegos Center for Environmental Studies in Cuba and their colleagues sampled water in 25 river basins in central Cuba. This is the first time in more than 60 years that scientists from Cuba and the United States have joined forces to study the island’s hydrology.

More than 80% of the samples had levels of Escherichia coli bacteria that exceeded international standards for recreational use. The bacteria are indicators of faecal contamination, and probably came from the cattle that graze on many riverbanks.

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Cue in MolochDAO. Launched as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) by SpankChain co-founder and chief executive officer Ameen Soleimani earlier this year, MolochDAO puts members’ ether (ETH) tributes toward funding Ethereum projects that members vote on.

The can-do, do-it-yourself attitude of the group has proven popular in the Ethereum community and has already influenced several spinoffs, leading some to credit Moloch with a resurgence in Ethereum DAOs.

On August 16th, the DAO’s associated Twitter account reflected on what the group has accomplished in its first six months in operation.

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Extreme cold is being utilized to bring humans back from the brink of death; after being shot or stabbed and losing half of your blood there is only a 5% chance for survival, but this experimental procedure may help to increase these dire odds.

It is not unheard of for victims of cold water drownings to be successfully resuscitated, this led to Mads Gilbert coining the phrase “nobody is dead until warm and dead” after resuscitating a woman who fell through ice and her temperature dropped to 13.7C. Incidents such as these also raise questions about the likelihood of the science of cold helping to bring humans back from the brink of death.

Trauma surgeon Samuel Tisherman is putting the science of cold to the test, rather than warm patients up he is cooling them down. In 2019 a patient was placed into suspended animation for the first time by Tisherman and his team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The procedure described in New Scientist details how the patient was rapidly cooled down to 10-15C which temporarily stopped vital functions to put the patient into a state somewhere between life and death. The team was investigating whether stimulating the same situation as drowning in cold water in a hospital setting could help patients.

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