Lifeboat Foundation

All cells on Earth are made of phospholipid membranes. Now astronomers have found the component molecules in interstellar space.

One potential explanation is that the Earth was seeded from space with the building blocks for life. The idea is that space is filled with clouds of gas and dust that contain all the organic molecules necessary for life.

Indeed, astronomers have observed these buildings blocks in interstellar gas clouds. They can see amino acids, the precursors of proteins and the machinery of life. They can also see the precursors of ribonucleotides, molecules that can store information in the form of DNA.

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Many of the fundamental features of life don’t necessarily have to be the way they are. Chance plays a major role in evolution, and there are always alternate paths that were never explored, simply because whatever evolved previously happened to be good enough. One instance of this idea is the genetic code, which converts the information carried by our DNA into the specific sequence of amino acids that form proteins. There are scores of potential amino acids, many of which can form spontaneously, but most life uses a genetic code that relies on just 20 of them.

Over the past couple of decades, scientists have shown that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you supply bacteria with the right enzyme and an alternative amino acid, they can use it. But bacteria won’t use the enzyme and amino acid very efficiently, as all the existing genetic code slots are already in use.

In a new work, researchers have managed to edit bacteria’s genetic code to free up a few new slots. They then filled those slots with unnatural amino acids, allowing the bacteria to produce proteins that would never be found in nature. One side effect of the reprogramming? No viruses could replicate in the modified bacteria.

Radiation therapy was first used to treat cancer more than 100 years ago. About half of all cancer patients still receive it at some point during their treatment. And until recently, most radiation therapy was given much as it was 100 years ago, by delivering beams of radiation from outside the body to kill tumors inside the body.

Though effective, external radiation can also cause collateral damage. Even with modern radiation therapy equipment, “you have to [hit] normal tissue to get to a tumor,” said Charles Kunos, M.D., Ph.D., of NCI’s Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP). The resulting side effects of radiation therapy depend on the area of the body treated but can include loss of taste, skin changes, hair loss, diarrhea, and sexual problems.

Now, researchers are developing a new class of drugs called radiopharmaceuticals, which deliver radiation therapy directly and specifically to cancer cells. The last several years have seen an explosion of research and clinical trials testing new

Scientists created a synthetic genome for a bacterium by stringing together building blocks of DNA — and the new genome made the microbe immune to viral infection.

Even when exposed to a cocktail of bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria — the designer Escherichia coli remained unscathed, while an unmodified version of the bacterium quickly succumbed to the viral attack and died, the research team reported in their new study, published Thursday (June 3) in the journal Science. That’s because viruses usually hijack a cell’s internal machinery to make new copies of themselves, but in the designer E. coli, that machinery no longer existed.

This is a technological triumph.

Twenty-one years ago, researchers announced the first “draft” of sequencing the complete human genome. It was a monumental achievement, but the sequence was still missing about 8 percent of the genome. Now, scientists working together around the world say they’ve finally filled in that reclusive 8 percent.

If their work holds up to peer review and it turns out they really did sequence and assemble the human genome in its entirety, gaps and all, it could change the future of medicine.

Continue reading “Scientists Say They’ve Finally Sequenced the Entire Human Genome. Yes, All of It” »

Scientists may have found a promising new treatment for Covid-19 after an experimental oral antiviral drug demonstrated the ability to prevent the coronavirus from replicating, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday, citing a new study.

The drug, called TEMPOL, can reduce Covid-19 infections by impairing an enzyme the virus needs to make copies of itself once it’s inside human cells, which could potentially limit the severity of the disease, researchers at the NIH said. The drug was tested in an experiment of cell cultures with live viruses.

“We urgently need additional effective, accessible treatments for COVID-19,” Dr. Diana W. Bianchi, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, wrote in a statement. “An oral drug that prevents SARS-CoV-2 from replicating would be an important tool for reducing the severity of the disease.”

“We began this work last spring with the understanding that, like all viruses, mutations would occur in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19,” said senior study author Barton F. Haynes, M.D., director of the DHVI. “The mRNA vaccines were already under development, so we were looking for ways to sustain their efficacy once those variants appeared.

This approach not only provided protection against SARS-CoV-2, but the antibodies induced by the vaccine also neutralised variants of concern that originated in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. And the induced antibodies reacted with quite a large panel of coronaviruses.

Haynes’ team – whose work is published in Nature – built on earlier studies involving SARS, a respiratory illness caused by SARS-CoV-1. The original SARS virus emerged in November 2002, lasting until May 2004, with more than 8000 cases and 774 deaths, mostly in East Asia. The DHVI team found that a person infected with SARS developed antibodies capable of neutralising multiple coronaviruses, suggesting that a pan-coronavirus might be possible.

Global Automobile Infotainment System Market 2020 Industry Research, Review, Growth, Segmentation, Key Players Analysis and Forecast to 2025.

MIT researchers have developed the first fiber with digital capabilities that is able to capture, store, analyze and derive activity after it has been sewn into a shirt.

Yoel Fink, professor of materials science and electrical engineering, lead researcher at the Electronics Research Laboratory and lead author of the study, says digital fibers expand the possibilities for fabrics to uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for monitoring physical performance, medical conclusions and early disease detection are used.

Continue reading “Engineers create a programmable fiber | MIT News” »

The maximum lifespan for humans is between 120 and 150, according to a longitudinal analysis of blood markers, published in Nature.