Lifeboat Foundation

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic does not affect everyone equally. While anyone can contract COVID-19, accumulating data suggest that older people or those with pre-existing comorbidities are far more likely to have severe complications or die from the disease. While researchers scramble to unravel the mechanisms of action underlying the disease’s wide-ranging effects, news that the disease hits older people hardest has been received without demur: it is widely accepted that to be old is to be fragile. Indeed, even in so-called normal times, everyone expects more things break as people age: bones, hearts, brains. In the context of the pandemic, being old is seen as just one more comorbidity.

It should not be.

We accept growing old and losing our vitality as an inevitability of life. To do so is to overlook the fact that ageing is, fundamentally, a plastic trait—influenced both by our genetic predispositions and many (controllable) environmental factors. Anecdotally we know this to be true: for some, being in their eighties means being confined to a wheelchair whereas for others, like Eileen Noble, who at 84 years old was the oldest runner in 2019’s London Marathon, it decidedly does not. The burgeoning field of biogerontology is now beginning to amass data in support of such observations. Single genetic mutations in evolutionarily conserved pathways across model organisms—ranging from fruit flies to mice—increase lifespan by up to 80%. Crucially, not only do these animals live longer, they also have a longer youthspan—the proportion of their lives in which they retain the trappings of youth such as peak mobility, immunity, and stress resilience.

If you think you may have been exposed to COVID-19 but were unable to access testing at the time, you’ll soon be able to get a 15-minute rapid antibody test at Kroger!

Lasers were created 60 years ago this year, when three different laser devices were unveiled by independent laboratories in the United States. A few years later, one of these inventors called the unusual light sources “a solution seeking a problem”. Today, the laser has been applied to countless problems in science, medicine and everyday technologies, with a market of more than US$11 billion per year.

A crucial difference between lasers and traditional sources of light is the “temporal coherence” of the light beam, or just coherence. The coherence of a beam can be measured by a number C, which takes into account the fact light is both a wave and a particle.

From even before lasers were created, physicists thought they knew exactly how coherent a laser could be. Now, two new studies (one by myself and colleagues in Australia, the other by a team of American physicists) have shown C can be much greater than was previously thought possible.

Fellow futurist podcaster Peter Hayward joins me to discuss the challenge of fostering foresight in a short-sighted world.

Researchers at Uppsala University, in Sweden, in collaboration with the SciLifeLab Drug Discovery and Development Platform, have taken “a large step forward” in developing a potential CAR T-cell therapy for glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that is often difficult to treat.

Their project is now entering the final preclinical stage of development, according to the university. The goal is to start clinical studies within four years.

“Extremely few breakthroughs have been made around treating Glioblastoma,” Magnus Essand, professor of gene therapy at Uppsala, said in a press release.

Human body bio-factories of tommorow for organ and tissue replacement.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr Alexander Titus Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI).

Continue reading “Advanced Technology: Science Fiction to Science Fact and Encouraging a Culture of Responsibility” »

Researchers are now calling for a set of guidelines, similar to those used in animal research, to guide the humane use of brain organoids and other experiments that could achieve consciousness. In June, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine began a study with the aim of outlining the potential legal and ethical issues associated with brain organoids and human-animal chimaeras.

A handful of experiments are raising questions about whether clumps of cells and disembodied brains could be sentient, and how scientists would know if they were.

A genome-wide CRISPR knockout screen uncovers a wide array of host genes required for SARS-CoV-2 infection as potential therapeutic targets.

An international team of researchers has developed a multifunctional skin-mounted microfluidic device that is able to measure stress in people in multiple ways. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their device and how it could be useful.

Prior research has shown that long-term stress can damage a person’s health. It can lead to diabetes, depression, obesity and a host of other problems. Some have suggested that one of the ways to combat stress is to create a means for alerting a person to their heightened stress so that they might take action to reduce it. To that end, prior teams have developed skin-adhesive devices that that collect sweat samples. The tiny samples contain small amounts of cortisol, a hormone that can be used as a marker of stress levels. In this new effort, the researchers have improved on these devices by developing one that measures more than just cortisol levels and is much more comfortable.

The researchers began with the notion that in order to convince people to wear a device full time, it had to be both useful and comfortable. The solved the latter issue by making their device out of soft materials that adhere gently to the skin. They also used a skeletal design for their microfluidic sweat-collection apparatus—a flexible mesh. They also added more functionality. In addition to cortisol, their device is able to measure glucose and vitamin C levels. They also added electrodes underneath that are able to measure sweat rate and electrical conductivity of the skin, both of which change in response to stress. They also added a wireless transmitter that sends all of the data to a nearby smartphone running the device’s associated app.