Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have suspected for some time that the link between our gut and brain plays a role in the development of Parkinson’s disease.

A new study just identified gut microbes likely to be involved and linked them with decreased riboflavin (vitamin B2) and biotin (vitamin B7), pointing the way to an unexpectedly simple treatment that may help: B vitamins.

“Supplementation of riboflavin and/or biotin is likely to be beneficial in a subset of Parkinson’s disease patients, in which gut dysbiosis plays pivotal roles,” Nagoya University medical researcher Hiroshi Nishiwaki and colleagues write in their published paper.

A modern long-range wide-body airliner like the Airbus A350 takes 15 hours of non-stop flying to travel from Los Angeles to Sydney. This makes it one of the longest and most tiring airline routes for passengers. But imagine an aircraft that will reduce travel time between the two cities to just 3 hours. Sounds unrealistic, right? After all, the jet should be capable of flying multiple times the speed of sound to achieve that feat. However, the grandson of aviation giant Bombardier, Charles Bombardier, believes the technology to build such an ambitious aircraft will be available in the foreseeable future. A mechanical engineer by education, Charles leads a nonprofit organization named Imaginactive, which has created multitudes of highly-ambitious, world-changing concepts over the last few years. The Paradoxal hypersonic jet concept is one of them, and it is designed to travel at Mach 24 (nearly 16,000 mph). At this speed, it can fly out of JFK and land at Heathrow, London, covering a distance of 3,450 miles in 11 minutes. Yes, you read that right.

According to its designer, Juan Garcia Mansilla, the development of the Paradoxal concept involved numerous scientists and engineers, including some professionals from NASA. You won’t be wrong if you think the conceptual hypersonic aircraft looks like a futuristic version of the B2 stealth bomber. Both of them are strikingly similar to the peregrine falcon, the world’s fastest bird, during its dive to catch its prey.

Also read — Inspired by the Viking Ships and aptly named ‘Norway’ — This 528-foot long superyacht concept has solar sails, a sky elevator, cinema, supercar garage and even a hospital.

MD Anderson researchers identify molecule that reduces age-related inflammation and improves brain and muscle function in preclinical models.

MD Anderson News Release June 21, 2024

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have demonstrated that therapeutically restoring…

Continue reading “Activating molecular target reverses multiple hallmarks of aging” »

SMU and the University of Rhode Island have patented an inexpensive, easy-to-use method to create solid-state nanopores (SSNs), while also making it possible to self-clean blocked nanopores.

The technique called chemically-tuned controlled dielectric breakdown (CT-CDB) addresses two key problems that have kept solid-state nanopores – which are too tiny for the human eye to see – from being used more often to build biosensors that can measure biological and chemical reactions of a given sample.

Biosensors have widespread medical applications, enabling rapid, early and effective disease diagnosis and monitoring.

Researchers develop sustainable, biocompatible materials from microalgae for high-resolution 3D printing, advancing eco-friendly manufacturing and biomedical applications.

Advances in Care Podcast — Episode 24In today’s world, genetic testing has become increasingly accessible for more people, creating an increased opportunity…

Luminescence refers to the result of a process in which an object absorbs light at one wavelength and then re-emits it at another wavelength. Through light absorption, electrons in the ground state of the material are excited to a higher energy state. After a certain amount of time characteristic of each excited state, the electrons decay to lower energy states, including the ground state, and emit light. The phenomenon is used in a wide array of technological applications involving highly efficient and reproducible emitting devices that can easily be miniaturized.

The materials with the highest luminescence efficiency include quantum dots (QDs), currently used in high-resolution displays, LEDs, solar panels, and sensors of various kinds, such as those used for precision medical imaging. Functionalization of the surface of QDs with various types of molecules permits interaction with cellular structures or other molecules of interest for the purpose of investigating molecular-level biological processes.

QDs are semiconductor nanoparticles whose emissive characteristics are directly linked to dot size, owing to the phenomenon of quantum confinement. For this reason, monitoring and control of crystal growth during synthesis of QDs in solution permits intelligent planning of the desired luminescence.

External validation of a model for persistent perfusion deficit in patients with incomplete reperfusion after thrombectomy:

Background and ObjectivesWe recently developed a model (PROCEED) that predicts the occurrence of persistent perfusion deficit (PPD) at 24 hours in patients with incomplete angiographic reperfusion after thrombectomy. This study aims to externally validate…

Most of our progress in disease treatment and prevention to date has been the product of the linear process of hit-or-miss efforts to find useful interventions. Because we have lacked tools for systematically exploring all possible treatments, discoveries under this paradigm have owed a lot to chance. Likely the most notable chance breakthrough in medicine was the accidental discovery of penicillin — which opened up the antibiotic revolution and has since saved perhaps as many as 200 million lives. But even when discoveries aren’t literally accidental, it still takes good fortune for researchers to achieve breakthroughs with traditional methods. Without the ability to exhaustively simulate possible drug molecules, researchers have to rely on high-throughput screening and other painstaking laboratory methods, which are much slower and more inefficient.

To be fair, this approach has brought great benefits. A thousand years ago, European life expectancy at birth was just in the twenties, since so many people died in infancy or youth from diseases like cholera and dysentery, which are now easily preventable. By the middle of the nineteenth century, life expectancy in the United Kingdom and the United States had increased to the forties. As of 2023, it has risen to over eighty in much of the developed world. So, we have nearly tripled life expectancy in the past thousand years and doubled it in the past two centuries. This was largely achieved by developing ways to avoid or kill external pathogens — bacteria and viruses that bring disease from outside our bodies.

Today, though, most of this low-hanging fruit has been picked. The remaining sources of disease and disability spring mostly from deep within our own bodies. As cells malfunction and tissues break down, we get conditions like cancer, atherosclerosis, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. To an extent we can reduce these risks through lifestyle, diet, and supplementation — what I call the first bridge to radical life extension. But those can only delay the inevitable. This is why life expectancy gains in developed countries have slowed since roughly the middle of the twentieth century. For example, from 1,880 to 1900, life expectancy at birth in the United States increased from about thirty-nine to forty-nine, but from 1980 to 2000 — after the focus of medicine had shifted from infectious disease to chronic and degenerative disease — it only increased from seventy-four to seventy-six.