Lifeboat Foundation

And unexpectedly, Covid-19 has proved to be the catalyst. “What the pandemic has done is accelerate the adoption of genomics into infectious disease by several years,” says deSouza, the Illumina chief executive. He also told me he believes that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of genomics into society more broadly — suggesting that quietly, in the midst of chaos and a global catastrophe, the age of cheap, rapid sequencing has arrived.

Ultrafast and ultracheap sequencing could reshape the future of health care.

Post-mortem changes may shed light on important brain studies.

In the hours after we die, certain cells in the human brain are still active. Some cells even increase their activity and grow to gargantuan proportions, according to new research from the University of Illinois Chicago.

In a newly published study in the journal Scientific Reports, the UIC researchers analyzed gene expression in fresh brain tissue — which was collected during routine brain surgery — at multiple times after removal to simulate the post-mortem interval and death. They found that gene expression in some cells actually increased after death.

“The Office of Racial Equity at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission will handle the program and artists from ”historically marginalized communities” are encouraged to apply.

Other basic income programs under development in San Francisco include funds for emergency medical technicians and Black and Pacific Islander expectant mothers, FOX 2 reported.

You could call it art for art’s sake — plus $1000 a month.

Continue reading “San Francisco to pay ‘essential’ artists $1,000 per month basic income in pilot program amid pandemic” »

Discovery “requires us to rethink everything we thought we knew about peroxisomes.”

In his first year of graduate school, Rice University biochemist Zachary Wright discovered something hidden inside a common piece of cellular machinery that’s essential for all higher order life from yeast to humans.

What Wright saw in 2015 — subcompartments inside organelles called peroxisomes — is described in a study published today in Nature Communications.

A new Covid-19 variant from the Amazon is now responsible for the majority of new infections in Brazil, with many doctors there saying they are seeing more young and otherwise healthy patients falling ill. Hopefully Covid doesnt bounce back and turn into the 1918 flu.

“We’re in the trenches here, fighting a war,” said Andréia Cruz, a 42-year-old emergency-ward nurse in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. In the past three weeks alone, the surrounding state of Rio Grande do Sul has seen nearly 5000 people die from Covid-19, more than in the final three months of last year.

The spread of the virus in Brazil threatens to turn this country of 213 million into a global public-health hazard. The so-called P.1 strain, present in more than 20 countries and identified in New York last week, is up to 2.2 times more contagious and as much as 61% more able to reinfect people than previous versions of the coronavirus, according to a recent study.

Continue reading “Covid-19 Variant Rages in Brazil, Posing Global Risk” »

Necessity truly can be the mother of invention. A new university president explains how the pandemic forced massive changes at his institution — and why smart use of technology was invaluable.

During the pandemic, the National Museum of Mathematics found new ways to build human connections.

LOS ANGELES — UCLA neuroscientists reported Monday that they have transferred a memory from one animal to another via injections of RNA, a startling result that challenges the widely held view of where and how memories are stored in the brain.

The finding from the lab of David Glanzman hints at the potential for new RNA-based treatments to one day restore lost memories and, if correct, could shake up the field of memory and learning.

“It’s pretty shocking,” said Dr. Todd Sacktor, a neurologist and memory researcher at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. “The big picture is we’re working out the basic alphabet of how memories are stored for the first time.” He was not involved in the research, which was published in eNeuro, the online journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

Continue reading “Memory transfer between snails challenges view of how brain remembers” »

The world’s most powerful laser is scheduled for a slate of experiments next year.

The laser, in Romania, managed to fire at 10 petawatts — that’s one-tenth the power of all the sunlight that reaches Earth concentrated into a single laser beam — during a test run in March. Now, according to ExtremeTech, the scientists behind it intend to discover new high-energy cancer treatments and simulate supernovas to reveal how the stellar explosions form heavy metals.

The laser is part of the European Union’s Extreme Light Infrastructure project. The hope is that lasers will lead to new medical techniques, a better understanding of how the universe works, and improved nuclear safety.