Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 948

The body is pretty good at repairing itself, but some parts of our anatomy struggle to bounce back after an injury.

One such material is cartilage – the spongy yet firm connective tissue that keeps our bones from rubbing and jarring against each other. Over time, the translucent or ‘hyaline’ components of cartilage can become heavily degraded, resulting in painful conditions like osteoarthritis and chondromalacia.

Scientists have been working on a way to regenerate hyaline cartilage for years, and now a team led by Northwestern University in the US has achieved a breakthrough. They have developed a biomaterial that, injected into damaged cartilage in living sheep, acted as a scaffold that promoted cartilage regrowth in active joints.

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The kitchen can be a messy place in any home – some more than others, as anyone who’s lived in a student flat can attest to – but it turns out the humble microwave is home to far more microbes than you could possibly imagine.

And, not only that, but the bacteria these devices are hoarding is resistant to radiation and multiplying by the second.

A new study from a team from Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence SL in Paterna, Spain, published in journal Frontiers in Microbiology has found that hardy microbes able to adapt to extreme conditions and thrive in microwaves.

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Increasing serotonin can change how people learn from negative information, as well as improving how they respond to it, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications.

The study by scientists at the University of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry and the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Oxford Health Biomedical Research Center (OH BRC) found people with increased serotonin levels had reduced sensitivity to punishing outcomes (for example, losing money in a game) without significantly affecting sensitivity to rewarding ones (winning money).

The study involved 26 participants who were given the drug to increase serotonin, with a further 27 in a , who were asked to do a series of tasks measuring learning and behavioral control. State-of-the-art models were then used to understand participant behavior.

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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are now used to capture images and carry out a wide range of missions in outdoor environments. While there are now several UAV designs with different advantages and characteristics, most conventional aerial robots are underactuated, meaning that they have fewer independent actuators than their degrees of freedom (DoF).

Underactuated systems are often more cost-effective and can be controlled using simpler control strategies than overactuated systems (i.e., robots that have more independent actuators than their DoF). Nonetheless, they are often less reliable and not as capable of precisely controlling their position and orientation.

Researchers at Tecnalia’s Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA) in Spain recently developed a new overactuated aerial that can independently control the position and orientation of its main body. This robot, introduced in a paper published in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, has four quadrotors that cooperatively carry its central body.

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