Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. Navy welcomed a new amphibious assault ship into the fleet this week even as one of its sister ships lay burning. The ship, designed to deliver Marines by air into hostile territory, was commissioned in a low-key virtual ceremony to ensure social distancing. Tripoli will be based at San Diego Naval Base, California, where sister ship USS Bonhomme Richard is currently on fire.

The ship’s traditional commissioning ceremony, a public event that would have drawn thousands and originally set to take place at Pensacola, Florida, was canceled due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Instead the ship was commissioned by “administrative message” from the Navy to the fleet, while onboard the crew raised the commissioning flag to signify the event.

Aging/longevity link!

Molecular biologists and bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have unraveled key mechanisms behind the mysteries of aging. They isolated two distinct paths that cells travel during aging and engineered a new way to genetically program these processes to extend lifespan.

The research is described July 17 in the journal Science.

Continue reading “Researchers discover 2 paths of aging and new insights on promoting healthspan” »

New insights into an elusive process that protects developing sperm cells from damage in growing embryos, sheds light on how genetic information passes down, uninterrupted, through generations.

The study identified a protein, known as SPOCD1, which plays a key role in protecting the early-stage precursors to sperm, known as germ cells, from damage in a developing embryo.

During their development, germ cells undergo a reprogramming process that leaves them vulnerable to rogue genes, known as jumping genes, which can damage their DNA and lead to infertility.

It might seem as though humans have little in common with the lowly yeast cell. Humans have hair, skin, muscles, and bones, among other attributes. Yeast have, well, none of those things.

But besides their obvious differences, yeast and humans, and much of life for that matter, have a great deal in common, especially at the cellular level. One of these commonalities is the enzyme our cells use to make RNA copies of sections of our DNA. The enzyme slides along a strand of DNA that has been unpacked from the chromosome in which it resides, to “read” the genetic code, and then assembles an RNA strand that contains the same code. This copying process, known as transcription, is what happens at a molecular level when a gene is activated in an organism. The enzyme responsible for it, RNA polymerase, is found in all eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus) and it is essentially the same in all of them, whether the cells are from a redwood, an earthworm, a caribou, or a mushroom.

That fact has presented a mystery for scientists, though: Although the DNA in a yeast cell is different in many ways from the DNA in a human cell, the same enzyme is able to work with both. Now, a team of Caltech researchers has discovered one way this happens.

2017…

Check out this content on BBC Three.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXhCysAEa4k

This discussion includes Dr. Williams’ work with gene therapy, cancer research, and follistatin — a myostatin inhibitor. he administered to himself years ago.

Dr. Williams, CMO of BioViva Science, is a radiologist with a passion for gene and cellular therapies that can be administered under image guidance. He also has an interest in image guided cancer therapies. He did research for several years with adenoviral vector technology for the treatment of cancer. He has spent the last five years involved in research using AAV technology. Dr. Williams obtained his medical degree from Louisiana State University and completed an internship in Internal Medicine followed by a residency in Radiology at The University Of South Alabama. In residency, he was selected for the RSNA Research Fellow award.

Continue reading “Gene Therapy Today with Dr. Jason Williams and Liz Parrish” »

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, offered up some interesting thoughts on Intel’s Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) instruction set, calling it a “power virus” that was only created to make the company’s CPU hardware perform well in benchmarks. He also admitted to being “biased” and “grumpy” in his assessment.

His comments came in a mailing list (via Phoronix) discussing an article suggesting AVX-512 might not be part of Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake architecture. If that comes to pass, it will be just fine by Torvalds.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: “When you’re dealing with something that’s changing in real time—that’s really the nature of science.”

“As the information changes, then you have to be flexible enough—and humble enough—to be able to change how you think about things.” abcn.ws/32pBD6L

Can artificial intelligence enhance human surgeons with AI superpowers to reduce medical errors?