Lifeboat Foundation

Tyson’s latest book “Cosmic Queries” covers the gamut from early Earth’s pond scum to potential multiverses to out-of-the-box ideas about the potential that we live in a false vacuum cosmos.

After the past year’s pandemic pall, it’s nice to be reminded that we remain inextricably connected to the cosmos beyond Earth’s atmosphere. In the new book “Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going,” astrophysicist and StarTalk podcast host Neil DeGrasse Tyson, along with George Mason University physics professor James Trefil, clearly remind us of our cosmic legacy.

Tyson, Director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, is well known for his ability to provoke the public into thinking harder about our place in the cosmos. And “Cosmic Queries” does just that. Tyson and Trefil succinctly lead the reader through almost every aspect of cosmic history while addressing age-old questions with new verve.

Continue reading “Provocative New Neil DeGrasse Tyson Book Highlights Little-Known Cosmic Tidbits” »

“The research is part of an explosion of new techniques and ideas for studying early development. Today, in the same issue of Nature, two other research groups are reporting a leap forward in creating ”artificial” human embryos.

Those teams managed to coax ordinary skin cells and stem cells to self-assemble into look-alike early human embryos they call ”blastoids,” which they grew for about 10 days in the lab. Several kinds of artificial models of embryos have been described before, but those described today are among the most complete, because they possess the cells needed to form a placenta. That means they are a step closer to being viable human embryos that could develop further, even until birth.

Scientists say that they would never try to establish a pregnancy with artificial embryos—an act that would be forbidden today in most countries.

Continue reading “A mouse embryo has been grown in an artificial womb—humans could be next” »

Dr James Desmond, DVM, Co-Founder, Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue & Protection (LCRP), discussing his work at LCRP, as well as his zoonotic disease surveillance work with EcoHealth.

Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue & Protection (LCRP — https://www.liberiachimpanzeerescue.org/) is the first and only chimpanzee sanctuary and conservation center in Liberia rescuing chimpanzees who are victims of the illegal bush meat and pet trades. The organization has over 40 orphaned chimpanzees, nearly all under the age of five, currently under their care.

Continue reading “Dr James Desmond, Co-Founder, Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue & Protection — Zoonotic Disease Surveillance” »

Following in my recent series on subjects that are all the rage in anti-aging and longevity circles, to help you get a good grasp of the essentials so you can know what all the talk is about, and can make informed judgements rather than just following the herd blindly. This time it is on Metformin. This is a drug widely known as a diabetes drug and it has been in use for a very long time, indeed it is one of the most prescribed drugs there is. Recently it has also been a buzz word in the anti aging/longevity communities following the review of data and with it s mechanism of action, being touted and recommended by a variety of voices in the public domain. But how does it work, and how could it improve longevity? Is it safe? Well, if you want to go into a bit more depth and know all the details, I have put together a video which helps you understand what all the fuss is about. And whatever you are doing, have a great day.

Metformin is very popular in the anti aging paradigm currently so let’s have a look at what it is, what it offers, and what the trade offs are… because, well, it is always wise to have all the data.

Continue reading “Metformin Mechanism Of Action” »

A unique — details are a bit sketch 😉 looks amazing tho!

Requirements:

Continue reading “Russian Aerospace-Robotics Farm is hiring” »

Typically, pyramidal cells and GABAergic interneurons in the brain are activated simultaneously. A team of neuroscientists at New York University, however, recently identified a unique class of neurons that do not fire at the same time as all principal neurons, cells and interneurons. Interestingly, the team found that these specific neurons are most active during the DOWN state of non-REM (NREM) sleep, when all other neuron types are silent.

“As is often the case in science, our discovery was a true serendipity,” György Buzsáki, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told MedicalXpress. “By collecting sleep recordings in deep layers of the cortex, we observed that spikes of some rare neurons occasionally occurred during the so-called ‘DOWN state’ epochs of sleep. No neuron was supposed to do such thing, as DOWN state is known (and identified by) by its complete neuronal silence (lack of spikes).”

The neocortex, a set of layers in a region of the brain called cerebral cortex, is rebooted thousands of times every night from the transient (50−300 ms long) DOWN state. In their study, Buzsáki and his colleagues identified a class of neurons that appear to be most active when all other neurons (i.e., excitatory pyramidal and inhibitory neurons) are silent, in the DOWN state, during NREM stages of sleep. In their follow up experiments, they showed that these neurons are neuroglia-form cells found in the deeper layers of the neocortex, which specifically express genes known as ID2 and Nkx2.1.

It has long been understood that a parent’s DNA is the principal determinant of health and disease in offspring. Yet inheritance via DNA is only part of the story; a father’s lifestyle such as diet, being overweight and stress levels have been linked to health consequences for his offspring. This occurs through the epigenome—heritable biochemical marks associated with the DNA and proteins that bind it. But how the information is transmitted at fertilization along with the exact mechanisms and molecules in sperm that are involved in this process has been unclear until now.

A new study from McGill, published recently in Developmental Cell, has made a significant advance in the field by identifying how environmental information is transmitted by non-DNA molecules in the sperm. It is a discovery that advances scientific understanding of the heredity of paternal life experiences and potentially opens new avenues for studying disease transmission and prevention.

The continuous improvement of imaging technology holds great promise in areas where visual detection is necessary, such as with cancer screening. Three-dimensional imaging in particular has become popular because it provides a more complete picture of the target object and its context.

“More doctors and radiologists are looking at these 3D volumes, which are new technologies that allow you to look not just at one image, but a set of images,” said UC Santa Barbara psychology professor Miguel Eckstein, whose expertise lies in the field of visual search. “In some imaging modalities this gives doctors information about volume and it allows them to segment what they’re interested in.”

Common wisdom is that with all this additional information provided, the rate of detection success should increase considerably. However that’s not always the case, Eckstein said. In a study published in the journal Current Biology, he, lead author Miguel Lago and their collaborators point out an odd foible of human vision: We’re actually worse at finding small targets in 3D image stacks than if they were in a single 2D image.

Summary: Study sheds light on what causes normal proteins to convert to a diseased form associated with CJD and Kuru.

Source: Imperial College London.

For the first time, researchers have pinpointed what causes normal proteins to convert to a diseased form, causing conditions like CJD and Kuru.