Lifeboat Foundation

In the average human body, tens of billions of cells die everyday. It’s a natural process, important for keeping the body healthy. Now, for the first time, researchers at Yale School of Medicine have directly imaged the death of neurons in mice, as well as how the body clears them out afterwards.

Although it might seem like brain cells are things you’d definitely want to keep around, it’s better to get rid of the ones that aren’t working. After all, a build-up of dead cells can damage the nervous system and has been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases.

Continue reading “Yale captures first ever video of brain clearing out dead neurons” »

Whole genome duplication followed by massive gene loss has shaped many genomes, including the human genome. Why some gene duplicates are retained while most perish has puzzled scientists for decades.

A study, published today in Science, has found that gene retention depends on the degree of “functional and structural entanglement”, which measures interdependency between gene structure and function. In other words, while most duplicates either become obsolete or they evolve new roles, some are retained forever because, evolutionarily speaking, they’re simply stuck.

“When we scan genomes there are some gene pairs that remain from whole genome duplication events that occurred millions of years ago,” says Elena Kuzmin, a co-lead author of the study and former graduate student who trained with Charles Boone, professor of molecular genetics in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, at the University of Toronto, who co-led the study.

We are in this together. From oxygen hoods to ventilators, our scientists and engineers across the agency are uniting to join the fight against coronavirus. Tune in to #NASAScience Live on June 25 at 3 p.m. EDT to watch this nationwide effort.

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Gilead’s Covid-19 drug remdesivir will be priced at $3,120 for a typical U.S. patient with commercial insurance.

Gilead Sciences Inc. detailed its pricing plans for Covid-19 drug remdesivir, saying it will charge U.S. hospitals $3,120 for a typical patient with commercial insurance.

Continue reading “Covid-19 Drug Remdesivir to Cost $3,120 for Typical Patient on Private Insurance” »

However, the situation has been improving as Chinese tech giants including e-commerce company Alibaba, search engine Baidu, on-demand delivery company Meituan Dianping, ride-hailing operator Didi Chuxing and smartphone maker Xiaomi now offer more affordable health care plans via mutual aid platforms, which operate as a collective claim-sharing mechanism.

China’s online mutual aid platforms are disrupting old school insurance companies by leveraging big data and internet finance technologies to offer low cost medical coverage.

Animal experiments demonstrating the anti-aging effects of exchanging young blood plasma for old have been prominent in the last two months. Several groups are saying it’s time to translate their findings into human trials. But I’ve recently learned that others have been doing this for several years. What can we learn from their results to guide the next steps in experimentation?

I had never heard of Grifols, the Spanish pharmaceutical company that is the world’s largest supplier of albumin. Since 2005, Grifols has been quietly funding world leaders in plasma exchange research in humans. Albutein ® is their brand-name solution of human albumin.

Last month, the first results of the Grifol’s AMBAR trial were released. (AMBAR stands for A lzheimer’s M odulation B y A lbumin R eplacement). It was a much larger-scale phase 2.5 trial, with 496 subjects recruited from sites in Spain and USA, and treated for 14 months. A single treatment consisted of removing 2.5 to 3 litres of blood (more than half the body’s inventory) and replacing it with Albutein. Patients began with 6 weekly treatments, and thereafter there were 12 monthly smaller plasma replacements (0.7 litres), again with Albutein.

More than 500,000 people throughout the world have died of the new coronavirus, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The staggering milestone comes as virus cases have surged in the U.S. in recent weeks, and as South America has emerged as a virus hotspot.

More than a quarter of the world’s reported coronavirus deaths have occurred in the U.S., where 31 states have seen a jump in cases compared to two weeks ago. The number of new confirmed coronavirus cases nationwide hit a record high of 45,300 on Friday — a more than 5,000-case spike from the day before.

In Texas and Florida, governors are now rolling back reopening measures in an effort to stem the virus’ spread. The intensive care units in some Texas hospitals are now 100% full, after the state broke hospitalization records for 15 days in a row.

June 25, 2020 — The rapid politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen in messages members of the U.S. Congress sent about the issue on the social media site Twitter, a new analysis found.

Using artificial intelligence and resources from the Ohio Supercomputer Center, researchers conducted an analysis that covered all 30,887 tweets that members sent about COVID-19 from the first one on Jan. 17 through March 31.

The newly crowned Fugaku system is analysing droplet spread in offices and public transport.