Lifeboat Foundation

There’s never been a house call quite like this. In a first for telepresence communication, a NASA flight surgeon was ‘holoported’ to the International Space Station (ISS), appearing and conversing as a virtual presence in real time, hundreds of miles above the surface of Earth.

If it sounds like Star Trek, you’re not too far off. (after all, Star Trek: Voyager did feature an artificial physician who was a holographic projection.)

But this isn’t science fiction. When NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid was beamed up to the ISS in October of last year, the illusion was made possible thanks to Microsoft’s ‘holoportation’ technology, which lets users interact with 3D representations of remote participants in real time.

How might we leverage knowing that a particular neurological feature makes someone more vulnerable to autism or Alzheimer’s or more likely to achieve academically?

Superconductors are materials that conduct electrical current with practically no electrical resistance at all. This ability makes them extremely interesting and attractive for a plethora of applications such as loss-less power cables, electric motors and generators, as well as powerful electromagnets that can be used for MRI imaging and for magnetic levitating trains. Now, researchers from Nagoya University have detailed the superconducting nature of a new class of superconducting material, magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene.

For a material to behave as a superconductor, low temperatures are required. Most materials only enter the superconducting phase at extremely low temperatures, such as −270°C, which is lower than those measured in outer space. This severely limits their practical applications because such extensive cooling requires very expensive and specialized liquid helium cooling equipment. This is the main reason superconducting technologies are still in their infancy.

High temperature superconductors (HTS), such as some iron and copper-based examples, enter the superconducting phase above −200°C, a temperature that is more readily achievable using liquid nitrogen which cools down a system to −195.8°C. However, the industrial and commercial applications of HTS have been thus far limited. Currently known and available HTS materials are brittle ceramic materials that are not malleable and cannot be made into useful shapes like wires. In addition, they are notoriously difficult and expensive to manufacture. This makes the search for new superconducting materials critical and a strong focus of research for physicists like Prof. Hiroshi Kontani and Dr. Seiichiro Onari from the Department of Physics, Nagoya University.

Cigarette smoking is overwhelmingly the main cause of lung cancer, yet only a minority of smokers develop the disease. A study led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and published online on April 11, 2022, in Nature Genetics suggests that some smokers may have robust mechanisms that protect them from lung cancer by limiting mutations. The findings could help identify those smokers who face an increased risk for the disease and therefore warrant especially close monitoring.

“This may prove to be an important step toward the prevention and early detection of lung cancer risk and away from the current herculean efforts needed to battle late-stage disease, where the majority of health expenditures and misery occur,” said Simon Spivack, M.D., M.P.H., a co-senior author of the study, professor of medicine, of epidemiology & population health, and of genetics at Einstein, and a pulmonologist at Montefiore Health System.

New research suggests that socioeconomic hardship during childhood leaves children vulnerable to lower cognitive ability in adolescence and increased trait anxiety during adulthood. The findings, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, further suggest that these effects are driven by the recruitment of the right lateral prefrontal cortex.

Growing up in poverty can have negative repercussions on mental health. For example, children who grow up in socioeconomic deprivation demonstrate lower cognitive ability and report higher trait anxiety as young adults. Researchers Pavla Čermáková and her team launched a study to investigate this interplay between early socioeconomic difficulty, cognitive ability, and trait anxiety and to shed light on the neural mechanism behind these relationships.

“I have always found fascinating how early life influences our mental health when we are adults. I see a huge opportunity for prevention of later mental disorders if we focus on what is happening in the earliest stages of human life,” Čermáková, an associate professor at Charles University in Prague and head of the Department of Epidemiology at the Second Faculty of Medicine.

Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria — Dr. Erin Duffy, Ph.D., Chief of Research & Development, and Kevin Outterson, ESQ., Executive Director, CARB-X.

The Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X — https://carb-x.org/) is a global non-profit partnership accelerating antibacterial products to address drug-resistant bacteria, a leading cause of death around the world. 1.27 million deaths worldwide were attributed to resistant bacterial infections in 2019.

Continue reading “Dr. Erin Duffy, Ph.D. & Kevin Outterson, ESQ — Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (CARB-X)” »

Targeting Root Causes Of Diseases And Aging — Dr. Andrew Adams, Ph.D., Vice President, Neurodegeneration Research; Co-Director, Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine, Eli Lilly.

Dr. Andrew Adams, Ph.D. is Vice President of Neurodegeneration Research at Eli Lilly (https://www.lilly.com/) and Co-Director of their new Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine (https://lilly.mediaroom.com/2022-02-22-Lilly-Announc…ort-Site), a $700 million initiative to establish an institute for researching and developing genetic medicines, specifically acting at the nucleic acid level, to advance an entirely new drug class that target the root cause of diseases, an approach that is fundamentally different than medicines available today.

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Deep learning–based language models, such as BERT, T5, XLNet and GPT, are promising for analyzing speech and texts. In recent years, however, they have also been applied in the fields of biomedicine and biotechnology to study genetic codes and proteins.