Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Everyone knows it takes a male and a female to make a baby. But what a new study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences suggests is that maybe it doesn’t. In a new study, the team of scientists reports they did the seemingly impossible: Produce healthy baby mice from two mothers. The researchers describe their achievement in a breakthrough new paper in Cell Stem Cell.

The single-sex parent phenomenon has been observed naturally in reptiles, fish, amphibians, and invertebrates, but it was never thought to be possible in mammals, who reproduce differently. But as the team describe in their paper, all it took was overcoming the genetic limitations that usually make same-sex parenting impossible. The team, which also included researchers from Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin, China, used a combination of stem cells and CRISPR precision gene editing to produce healthy mice from two mothers. Interestingly, they tried the same with embryos from two fathers, but those offspring only lived a few days.

In the paper, they describe the bizarre, ingenious way the mouse embryos were formed using an egg from one mother a stem cell from another mother. The team’s breakthrough was figuring out how to manipulate the DNA of the stem cell so that the babies wouldn’t have birth defects.

Read more

The universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. At least, that’s what the vast majority of scientists would have you believe. But according to a team of Spanish physicists, it may not be the expansion of the universe that’s changing rate, but time itself. Time might be slowing down, and that means that it could eventually stop altogether.

Read more

In a lab at Johns Hopkins University, little bits of human eyes are growin in a dish. When one thinks of an eye, they likely think of the full bulbous form — the lens, an iris; the vitreous body. These retinal organoids are not that. Technically, they’re retinas grown from human stem cells — globs of the white tissue that lines the very back of the eye. While growing eye globs is a technical marvel in itself, their creation has a compounded purpose. Scientists generated them to understand why we can even see color and to learn how we can help people who can’t.

“As a scientist, I think that you have to have a passion for what you’re doing and a connection to your organism,” organoid-creator and Johns Hopkins University graduate student Kiara Eldred tells Inverse. “I cared for the organoids every day in the beginning and then every other day as they got older. In the lab, my co-authors and I all kind of refer to them as our babies because we have to care for them all the time.”

In a study published Thursday in Science, Eldred and her team reveal why these retinas are so important. Humans have three types of color-detecting cells that sense red, green, or blue light. But the mechanisms behind why this is hasn’t been fully understood. Here, the team discovered that blue cells are made first, and then red and green cells later. Learning the timing of these cell formations was a novel finding — and made sense, considering we and other primates have something called trichromatic color vision.

Read more

Senolytics are the first therapies that directly target the aging process to delay or prevent age-related diseases and are now in human trials. Today we thought it was the ideal time to have a look at how they work and the companies involved.

Senescent cells and aging

As we get older, more and more of our the cells in our bodies become dysfunctional and enter into a state known as senescence. These senescent cells no longer divide or support the tissues and organs of which they are part; instead, they secrete a range of harmful inflammatory chemical signals, which are known as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP).

Read more

Today’s launch abort was the first ever failure of the Soyuz FG launch vehicle, since it started in service in 2001.

A botched launch of the Russian spaceship Soyuz narrowly avoided becoming the latest fatal space incident on Thursday. Rescue systems managed to save the lives of two crew members and conduct an emergency landing.

The Soyuz-MS-10 spacecraft was meant to deliver Roscosmos’ Aleksey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague, members of Expedition 57/58, to the International Space Station (ISS). But 119 seconds after take-off from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle experienced a malfunction and crew rescue protocols were engaged.

Continue reading “Almost like Columbia: Two crew members dodge death by an inch in botched Russian space launch” | >