Lifeboat Foundation

And yet, today, the struggle against HIV may be undergoing a sea change.

U.S. health officials and HIV experts are beginning to talk about a future in which transmission in the United States could be halted. And that future, they say, could come not within a generation, but in the span of just a few years.

“We have the science to solve the AIDS epidemic,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, himself a longtime HIV researcher and clinician, told STAT in a recent interview. “We’ve invested in it. Let’s put it into action.‘’

Continue reading “The end of HIV transmission in the U.S.: A once-unthinkable dream becomes an openly discussed goal” »

The Milky Way has a violent past. When it isn’t swallowing renegade sausage galaxies, it seems to be waging endless games of interstellar tug-of-war with its nearest galactic neighbors — and not always winning. According to a new study published Sept. 19 in the journal Nature, one such encounter ended with a cosmic wound to the Milky Way’s disk that still hasn’t fully healed, 300 million years later.

That wound, researchers say, is visible in a cluster of several million stars that are not behaving as they should be. While still rotating around the Milky Way’s galactic center, these rogue stars also orbit around one another in a wobbly, spiral pattern that has only become more tangled over the past eon. [Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]

“We have observed shapes. [of star clusters] with different morphologies, such as a spiral similar to a snail’s shell,” lead study author Teresa Antoja, a researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) at the University of Barcelona, said in a statement. “These substructures allow us to conclude that the disk of our galaxy suffered an important gravitational disturbance.”

There is intense debate over how closely drone and model aircraft enthusiasts should be regulated.

Mosquitoes that are three times larger than normal are swarming areas affected by Hurricane Florence.

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The GTPases constitute a very large protein family, whose members are involved in the control of cell growth, transport of molecules, synthesis of other proteins, etc. Despite the many functions of the GTPases, they follow a common cyclic pattern (Figure 1). The activity of the GTPases is regulated by factors that control their ability to bind and hydrolyse guanosine triphosphate (GTP) to guanosine diphosphate (GDP). So far, it has been the general assumption that a GTPase is active or “on” when it is bound to GTP and inactive or “off” in complex with GDP. The GTPases are therefore sometimes referred to as molecular “switches.”

The bacterial translational elongation factor EF-Tu is a GTPase, which plays a crucial role during the synthesis of proteins in bacteria, as the factor transports the amino acids that build up a cell’s proteins to the cellular protein synthesis factory, the ribosome. Previous structural studies using X-ray crystallography have shown that EF-Tu occurs in two markedly different three-dimensional shapes depending on whether the factor is “on” (i.e. bound to GTP) or “off” (i.e. bound to GDP) (Figure 2). The binding of GTP/GDP have therefore always been thought to be decisive for the factor’s structural conformation.

Continue reading “Molecular switches are not just ‘on’ or ‘off’” »

Home kits could one day allow diabetes patients to make their own insulin — potentially saving them thousands of dollars a year.

Searching for a more direct connection between the gut and the brain, researchers were shocked to see that distance spanned by a single synapse, relaying the signal in less than 100 milliseconds, less than the blink of an eye. The finding has profound implications for the understanding of appetite and appetite suppressants, most of which target slow-acting hormones rather than fast-acting synapses.

Is it time for cosy agricultural era universtites to be seriously disrupted with physical campuses abolished in this modern age when we are all Professor Googles, and when knowledge evolves faster than courses? Why pay rip off fees for information that is out of date before the end of three years?

Senior professors among 300 people alleged to have bullied students and colleagues.

Some industrial activities can give a ROI in a reasonable times. Recovery and reuse of space debris and wreckages, at least in its recovery part, is very much needed, for orbital safety. With proper orbital infrastructures, to capture debris, the logical next step will be to re-process them, getting powders for 3D printing, a platform for orbital ISRU, very first bricks of orbital factories. Assembly of satellites and vehicles in orbit is a large industrial perspective, that will decrease the cost of design, construction and launch: a first step towards a self sustaining space industrial development. There’s a number of in-orbit operations: transport and maintenance of satellites in orbit, refuelling stations, repair shops, orbital sites, orbital yards, spaceports, habitats. All the activities tied to space tourism, such as hotels and lodging facilities, passengers transportation systems (Earth-Orbit, inter-orbit, Earth-Moon). Products from zero gravity, asteroid and lunar mining are other very promising industrial activities, on which several startups were already born.

Priority to enabling technologies.