Lifeboat Foundation

Giant strides will be made in treating haemophilia, while an Alzheimer’s drug has reinvigorated interest in therapies for dementia | The World Ahead.

In the future, soft robotic hands with advanced sensors could help diagnose and care for patients or act as more lifelike prostheses.

But one roadblock to encoding soft robotic hands with human-like sensing capabilities and dexterity has been the stretchability of pressure sensors. Although pressure sensors—needed for a robotic hand to grasp and pick up an object, or even take a pulse from a wrist—have been able to bend or stretch, their performance has been significantly affected by such movement.

Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago have found a way to address this issue and have designed a new pressure sensor that can be stretched up to 50 percent while maintaining almost the same sensing performance. It is also sensitive enough to sense the pressure of a small piece of paper, and it can respond to pressures almost instantaneously.

Scientists in South Africa are warning of a new strain of COVID-19. The variant, which is yet to be named, appears to have a high number of mutations, and there’s a possibility it could be able to evade our immune response and be even more transmissible.
At first, health officials thought they were seeing a small cluster of outbreaks in South Africa’s most populous province. But after examining specimens, they realized they were dealing with something far more serious — a new variant that could be the hardest yet to contain.
Officials are worried that the new variant, known simply as B.1.1.529, could quickly spread through the country and beyond. Only about 35% of adults in South Africa are fully vaccinated, and the rate of vaccination has slowed. And given the findings so far, even current vaccines may not be enough to stop it.
Several countries, including the UK and Germany have announced a ban on flights from South Africa and five neighboring countries as cases of the new variant have already appeared in Botswana and in Hong Kong. No matter where the variant started, it could quickly become a global problem.

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Continue reading “New COVID-19 variant: How dangerous is B.1.1.529? | DW News” »

The National Institutes of Health has launched a program to study a rare type of cells, called “senescent” cells, that play both positive and negative roles in biological processes. The NIH Common Fund’s Cellular Senescence Network (SenNet) program will leverage recent advances in studying individual cells, or single-cell analysis, to comprehensively identify and characterize the differences in senescent cells across the body, across various states of human health, and across the lifespan. The rarity and diversity of these cells previously made them difficult to identify and study; therefore, a deeper understanding will help researchers develop therapies that encourage beneficial effects of senescent cells while suppressing their tissue-damaging effects.

“The number of senescent cells in a person’s body increases with age, which may reflect both an increase in the generation of these cells and a decreased ability of the aging immune system to regulate or eliminate these cells. This age-related accumulation of senescent cells leads to production of inflammatory molecules and corruption of healthy cells,” said Richard J. Hodes, M.D., director of the National Institute on Aging, part of NIH. “This can affect a person’s ability to withstand stress or illness, recuperate from injuries, and maintain normal brain function. The aim of NIH’s strengthened focus on this field of science is to one day conquer these and other challenges.”

Continue reading “NIH launches program to map a rare type of non-dividing cells implicated in human health and disease” »

We already have technology that allows wildlife to pass vaccines among themselves, and developing methods may speed up the process. But critics claim that they risk human infections and criminal misuse.

Scientists have discovered a way to stop the COVID-19 virus from replicating in infected human cells, marking major progress towards a definitive treatment for the deadly illness and accentuating the potential of genetic engineering to cure viral diseases.

The study explores the use of CRISPR, a genome editing tool, and builds on research that started at Australia’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in 2019, when Dr. Mohamed Fareh and Prof. Joe Trapani showed that CRISPR could be used to eliminate abnormal RNAs that drive children’s cancers.

At the beginning of the pandemic, and in collaboration with Director Prof. Sharon Lewin and Dr. Wei Zhao from the Doherty Institute, the scientists reprogrammed the same CRISPR tool to suppress replication of the RNA virus SARS-CoV-2 — and importantly, its “variants of concern” — in a test tube model. SARS-CoV-2, which is short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, is the virus that causes COVID-19.

Researchers have imaged a major component in conjugation—the process bacteria use to share DNA with each other.

During conjugation, bacteria can exchange genetic information in the form of special pieces of DNA. These include genes that help them resist attacks from common antimicrobial drugs, making many illnesses caused by these bacteria resistant to treatment.

Continue reading “Key step in how bacteria acquire drug resistance revealed” »

Health official are reportedly calling for steps to be taken to keep a potentially worrying new variant of the coronavirus out of the country.

Scientists in South Africa revealed Thursday that they had detected a new COVID-19 variant with “a very high number of mutations,” blamed for an “exponential” surge in infections there.

The number of daily infections in Africa’s hardest-hit country has increased tenfold since the start of the month.

ROME, July 2 (Reuters) — A United Nations-backed scientific research centre has teamed up with an Italian tech firm to explore whether laser light can be used to kill coronavirus particles suspended in the air and help keep indoor spaces safe.

The joint effort between the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) of Trieste, a city in the north of Italy, and the nearby Eltech K-Laser company, was launched last year as COVID-19 was battering the country.

They created a device that forces air through a sterilization chamber which contains a laser beam filter that pulverizes viruses and bacteria.