Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists from Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) have developed a novel technique that can produce pure therapeutic drugs without the associated side effects.

The approach, which uses a nanostructure fabrication device, can manipulate the chirality of drug molecules by controlling the direction a substrate is rotated within the device, thus eliminating the possible side effects that can arise when people take drugs containing molecules with the incorrect chirality.

Published in the renowned international scientific journal Nature Chemistry, the research findings pave the way towards the mass production of purer, cheaper, and safer drugs that can be made in a scalable and more environmentally-friendly way.

Are you interested in having children, but turned off by the whole pregnancy thing? Well, there may be an option available in the not-too-distant future. The artificial womb — or at least the ability to create one — is inching its way toward us. The big question is whether or not society is ready for it.

The obstacles to ectogenesis — development of the fetus outside of a mother from fertilization to full-term infancy — will soon be dominated more by legal and ethical matters than by technological and medical limitations. Those who embrace technology without reservation may be waiting with open arms. But there will certainly be others who find the prospect disturbing.

The prestigious news outlet mapped the performance of 30 leading economies by plotting their public health and economic outcomes and grouping them based on whether they have instituted light, moderate or severe restrictions on commerce and social interactions.

The matrix included countries and territories’ economic outcomes, including the benchmarks of GDP, unemployment and fiscal stimulus packages and health outcomes based on testing, infection and death statistics provided by health ministries and government authorities and graphed by Worldometer and Johns Hopkins University.

As seen in the ranking chart, Vietnam stands at the furthest end with “better public health outcome,” with Taiwan coming close, followed by New Zealand, South Korea, Iceland, Argentina and Australia.

Researchers led by biologists at Tufts University have discovered that the brains of developing frog embryos damaged by nicotine exposure can be repaired by treatment with certain drugs called “ionoceuticals” that drive the recovery of bioelectric patterns in the embryo, followed by repair of normal anatomy, gene expression and brain function in the growing tadpole. The research, published today in Frontiers in Neuroscience, introduces intervention strategies based on restoring the bioelectric “blueprint” for embryonic development, which the researchers suggest could provide a roadmap for the exploration of therapeutic drugs to help repair birth defects.

As coronavirus spreads to countries with medical systems destroyed by war and corruption, citizens are finding innovative ways to help frontline workers. CNN’s Arwa Damon follows people in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Syria who have all found ways to build ventilators from recycled parts and with limited funding.

An artificial ‘robo-nose’ made from living mouse cells can replace sniffer dogs’ job of smelling narcotics like cocaine, marijuana, missing people and explosives.

Scientists have developed a new type of laser that can deliver high amounts of energy in very short bursts of time, with potential applications in eye and heart surgery or the engineering of delicate materials.

The Director of the University of Sydney Institute of Photonics and Optical Science, Professor Martijn de Sterke, said: “This laser has the property that as its pulse duration decreases to less than a trillionth of a second, its energy could go through the roof.

”This makes them ideal candidates for the processing of materials that require short, powerful pulses. One application could be in corneal surgery, which relies on gently removing material from the eye. This requires strong, short light pulses that do not heat and damage the surface.”

There’s a new hope for people suffering from paralysis.

It was January of 1980 when 21-year-old Helene Pruszynski was kidnapped, raped and murdered in Douglas County, Colorado. Her body was found in a field, but police never identified a suspect. Pruszynski’s murder became a cold case.

“We consider a case that does not have any viable leads after one to two years a cold case,” cold case detective Shannon Jensen said.

However, Jensen says the case was never forgotten. Detectives continued to re-open it for 40 years. Then, with the help of new DNA technology, the suspect was identified in December of last year as James Curtis Clanton. He will be sentenced on April 10, based on the first-degree murder laws in 1980.