Lifeboat Foundation

Biotin is also known as vitamin H, named for the German words “Haar” and “Haut,” which mean hair and skin. This was due to the fact that even slight deficiencies cause hair thinning, skin rash or brittle fingernails. New research, just published in PNAS, now shows that some forms of severe neurodegeneration, like the frontotemporal dementia seen in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can directly result from lack of sufficient biotin.

The authors discovered this by looking at fruit flies with dementia. Now, before anyone chuckles, fruit flies actually make a nice model of Alzheimer’s or other diseases when they are given the right genes. Human versions of defective MAPT (tau) genes cause these flies to develop tauopathies that resemble those that occur in our own brains. To delve deeper into the neurotoxicity of tau, they looked at over 7000 fly genes in a forward genetic screen before zeroing in on one significantly modified toxicity of the tauR406W mutant. This gene, Btnd, encodes the biotinidase enzyme that extracts biotin from food sources or recycles it from used enzymes.

TOKYO (Reuters) — Men wearing traditional loin clothes and women dressed in white robes clapped and chanted before going into an ice water bath during a Shinto ritual at a Tokyo shrine on Sunday to purify the soul and pray for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Only a dozen people took part in the annual event at Teppou-zu Inari Shrine, scaled down this year due to the health crisis, compared to over a hundred in early 2020. Spectators were not allowed at the event.

After doing warming-up exercises and chanting under a clear sky with outside temperatures at 5.1 degree Celsius (41.18 Fahrenheit), the nine male and three female participants went into a bath filled with cold water and large ice blocks. “I prayed that the coronavirus comes to an end as soon as possible,” said 65-year-old participant Shinji Ooi, who heads the Shrine’s ‘Yayoikai’ parishioner group, after the ritual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH_qe_mfF7Q&feature=youtu.be

Hey it’s Han from WrySci HX coming to you with exciting news out of Johns Hopkins University. A man was able to control two robotic arms simultaneously via a brain computer interface to the point of feeding himself. Amazing stuff! More below ↓↓↓

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Continue reading “Paralyzed Man Controls Two Robotic Arms With His Mind For The First Time” »

A new deep-learning algorithm could provide advanced notice when systems — from satellites to data centers — are falling out of whack.

When you’re responsible for a multimillion-dollar satellite hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour, you want to be sure it’s running smoothly. And time series can help.

A time series is simply a record of a measurement taken repeatedly over time. It can keep track of a system’s long-term trends and short-term blips. Examples include the infamous Covid-19 curve of new daily cases and the Keeling curve that has tracked atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations since 1958. In the age of big data, “time series are collected all over the place, from satellites to turbines,” says Kalyan Veeramachaneni. “All that machinery has sensors that collect these time series about how they’re functioning.”

Before the pandemic, the lab of Stanford University biochemist Peter S. Kim focused on developing vaccines for HIV, Ebola and pandemic influenza. But, within days of closing their campus lab space as part of COVID-19 precautions, they turned their attention to a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Although the coronavirus was outside the lab’s specific area of expertise, they and their collaborators have managed to construct and test a promising vaccine candidate.

“Our goal is to make a single-shot vaccine that does not require a cold-chain for storage or transport. If we’re successful at doing it well, it should be cheap too,” said Kim, who is the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry. “The target population for our vaccine is low-and middle-income countries.”

Their vaccine, detailed in a paper published in ACS Central Science (“A Single Immunization with Spike-Functionalized Ferritin Vaccines Elicits Neutralizing Antibody Responses against SARS-CoV-2 in Mice”), contains nanoparticles studded with the same proteins that comprise the virus’s distinctive surface spikes.

Hale — “Surviving Corona.”

Produced by Gary Jesch of CHOPS Live Animation.
with Peter Cummings — Contagious Productions.
COVID-19 Animation by Fusion Medical Animation.

Continue reading “CHOPS — ‘CyberHuman on a Performance System’ meets COVID-19 and learns there is a new book out” »

Circa 2017 o.o

Advance spreads optimism for gene therapy approach.

Have you been sleeping worse since the pandemic came round? If so, do not despair, you are not alone, studies have found that even amongst those who previously had no problems, there were issues. Now there are many reasons why this might be so, from added stress and uncertainty, to less physical exertion during the day and much more… But, one factor that can play a huge role is your diet. I am sure you know about fast and slow carbs, and I am sure some of you try your hardest to avoid them at all costs…not me though, I am a carb fan lol. But anyway, carbs can actually help you sleep when paired with the right foods because of the way they create competition between amino acids for absorption into muscles, when stimulated by glucose, but on the negative side, quick, or beige, carbs can cause waking during the night, as the blood sugar is not as stable. If you want to find out more, in a bit more depth, along with all the studies I have brought together, then check out this video, all links are in its description. Sleep well wink

In Carbs Sleep Problems — How Nutrition Affects Your Sleep Quality, I look at just that, the importance of the reciprocal link between diet and sleep.

Continue reading “How Nutrition Affects Your Sleep Quality” »

Israeli aerospace company Urban Aeronautics announced this week that it sold its first four vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft to Hatzolah Air, a nonprofit emergency medical air transport provider based in New York. The organization already operates fixed-wing aircraft (meaning propeller-driven or powered by a jet engine, with wings that don’t move) as part of its emergency missions.

To that end, “flying ambulances” isn’t a new concept; they’ve existed for a long time in the form of helicopters and planes. In fact, the Association of Air Medical Services estimates that around 550000 people get medevaced in the US each year.

But Urban Aeronautics’ Cormorant CityHawk, as the aircraft is called, will bring some functional new features to the skies. Though it’s lightweight and has a compact footprint, its interior cabin is 20 to 30 percent larger than that of a helicopter, meaning it will be able to fit two EMTs, the patient plus a companion, and medical equipment (plus the pilot) without things getting too cramped.