Lifeboat Foundation

Cancer fighting nanovaccines have shown significant promise, but clinical application has been hampered by complications in large-scale manufacturing, quality control, and safety. Biomedical engineers at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) developed a new technology that enables nanovaccines to bind to the albumin protein naturally present in the body. The albumin protein then delivers these nanocomplexes to the lymph nodes, resulting in potent immune activation against multiple tumor types in mouse cancer models. The use of natural albumin as a universal vaccine shuttle is a significant step towards the application of cancer nanovaccine immunotherapy in humans.

Nanovaccines that work to mount an immune response against a tumor basically consist of two components: the part that delivers the vaccine to the correct site, the lymph nodes, where immune system activation happens; and the part that activates the immune cells to expand and specifically target the tumor.

Continue reading “Engineers use natural protein as nanoshuttle for anti-cancer vaccines” »

AI “deepfakes” have become a cheap way to digitally alter faces. Just look what they did to Henry Cavil’s Superman mustache.

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The code that allows iOS devices to boot up — and that Apple makes sure to keep private — has leaked online.

A report from Motherboard said the code, aptly named iBoot, could be retrieved on GitHub, a hosting service for software developers to publish and share code.

Apple later requested GitHub take down the code — and in doing so confirmed the leaked code is real.

Continue reading “The critical secret code that allows iOS devices to boot up has leaked online — and Apple has confirmed it’s real” »

Really wish we were already interplanetary travelers.

Two scientists in spacesuits, stark white against the auburn terrain of desolate plains and dunes, test a geo-radar built to map Mars by dragging the flat box across the rocky sand.

When the geo-radar stops working, the two walk back to their all-terrain vehicles and radio colleagues at their nearby base camp for guidance. They can’t turn to their mission command, far off in the Alps, because communications from there are delayed 10 minutes.

Continue reading “Mars on Earth: Simulation tests in remote desert of Oman” »

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has arrived in California for final assembly in preparation for launch in 2019.

The two halves of the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) arrived at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems’ Space Park facility in Redondo Beach, California, on Feb. 2, after being transported from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, according to a statement from NASA. Later this summer, the optical telescope and integrated science instrument module (OTIS) will be combined with the Telescope’s spacecraft element; together they will officially become the Webb observatory.

Teamwork!

Russian cosmonauts and US and Japan astronauts held the first ever space badminton tournament at the International Space Station on Tuesday.

We wanted to bring your attention to an open-access publication in which the researchers suggest that the age-related decline of the thymus is more important than DNA mutation as a cancer risk factor[1].

Repairing the damage

As we have discussed in this article, cancer is caused by DNA damage that creates mutations. Damage to our DNA happens all the time, and we have various repair systems in place for it.

Dr. Atala is the Director of Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest School of…