Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of researchers has used liquid gallium to create an antiviral and antimicrobial coating and tested it on a range of fabrics, including facemasks. The coating adhered more strongly to fabric than some conventional metal coatings, and eradicated 99% of several common pathogens within five minutes.

“Microbes can survive on the fabrics hospitals use for bedding, clothing and face masks for a long time,” says Michael Dickey, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and Camille & Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. “Metallic surface coatings such as copper or silver are an effective way to eradicate these pathogens, but many metal particle coating technologies have issues such as non-uniformity, processing complexity, or poor adhesion.”

Dickey and colleagues from NC State, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) in Korea and RMIT University in Australia set out to develop a simple, cost-effective way to deposit metal coatings on fabric.

On Wednesday, researchers revealed the first evidence that the approach appears to be working — improving vision for at least some patients with the condition, known as Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA, a severe form of vision impairment.

So doctors genetically modified a harmless virus to ferry the CRISPR gene editor and infused billions of the modified viruses into the retinas of Knight’s left eye and Kalberer’s right eye, as well as one eye of five other patients. The procedure was done on only one eye just in case something went wrong. The doctors hope to treat the patients’ other eye after the research is complete.

Once the CRISPR was inside the cells of the retinas, the hope was that it would cut out the genetic mutation causing the disease, restoring vision by reactivating the dormant cells.

Continue reading “A Gene-Editing Experiment Let These Patients With Vision Loss See Color Again” »

Recent research in mice turned to the blood-brain barrier for clues as to why Alzheimer’s disease occurs and how to stop it.

The search for a fountain of youth has obsessed humankind for millennia, but a new wave of research is showing that the secret may have been running through our veins all along.

SARS-CoV-2 remains a global threat to human health particularly as escape mutants emerge. There is an unmet need for effective treatments against COVID-19 for which neutralizing single domain antibodies (nanobodies) have significant potential. Their small size and stability mean that nanobodies are compatible with respiratory administration. We report four nanobodies (C5, H3, C1, F2) engineered as homotrimers with pmolar affinity for the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Crystal structures show C5 and H3 overlap the ACE2 epitope, whilst C1 and F2 bind to a different epitope. Cryo Electron Microscopy shows C5 binding results in an all down arrangement of the Spike protein. C1, H3 and C5 all neutralize the Victoria strain, and the highly transmissible Alpha (B.1.1.7 first identified in Kent, UK) strain and C1 also neutralizes the Beta (B.1.35, first identified in South Africa). Administration of C5-trimer via the respiratory route showed potent therapeutic efficacy in the Syrian hamster model of COVID-19 and separately, effective prophylaxis. The molecule was similarly potent by intraperitoneal injection.

Neutralizing nanobodies bind SARS-CoV-2 spike RBD and block interaction with ACE2. Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 27 846–854 (2020).

Researchers have rediscovered a century-old cancer treatment, injecting dead bacteria into tumors to help the immune system target and kill the cancerous cells. Preclinical tests and early human trials indicate the treatment is safe and potentially effective.

In the late 19th century a scientist by the name of William Coley suspected an unusual relationship between bacterial infection and cancer remission. Coley began experimenting with different bacterial formulations to treat cancer.

These formulations became known as “Coley’s toxins” and Coley inadvertently, and unknowingly, became a pioneer of cancer immunotherapy. For much of the 20th century Coley’s research was relegated to a footnote in science history. His experiments were somewhat erratic and lacked any standardization, so very few researchers were able to replicate his results.

Few studies have examined and compared spousal concordance in different populations. This study aimed to quantify and compare spousal similarities in cardiometabolic risk factors and diseases between Dutch and Japanese populations.

Our minds rarely stay still when left alone. Such trains of thought, however, may unfold in vastly different ways. Here, we combined electrophysiological recording with thought sampling to assess four types of thoughts: task-unrelated, freely moving, deliberately constrained, and automatically constrained. Parietal P3 was larger for task-related relative to task-unrelated thoughts, whereas frontal P3 was increased for deliberately constrained compared with unconstrained thoughts. Enhanced frontal alpha power was observed during freely moving thoughts compared with non-freely moving thoughts. Alpha-power variability was increased for task-unrelated, freely moving, and unconstrained thoughts. Our findings indicate these thought types have distinct electrophysiological signatures, suggesting that they capture the heterogeneity of our ongoing thoughts.

For years now, artificial intelligence has been hailed as both a savior and a destroyer. The technology really can make our lives easier, letting us summon our phones with a “Hey, Siri” and (more importantly) assisting doctors on the operating table. But as any science-fiction reader knows, AI is not an unmitigated good: It can be prone to the same racial biases as humans are, and, as is the case with self-driving cars, it can be forced to make murky split-second decisions that determine who lives and who dies. Like it or not, AI is only going to become an even more omnipresent force: We’re in a “watershed moment” for the technology, says Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO.

A conversation with the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Continue reading “Misinformation Is About to Get So Much Worse” »

Quantum physics is directly linked to consciousness: Observations not just change what is measured, they create it… Here’s the next episode of my new documentary Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind (2021), Part II: CONSCIOUSNESS & INFORMATION

*Subscribe to our YT channel to watch the rest of documentary (to be released in parts): https://youtube.com/c/EcstadelicMedia.

Continue reading “Consciousness & Information | Part II of the Documentary Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind” »