Lifeboat Foundation

An interesting cautionary note on the well-intentioned effort to supply personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks, via 3D printing. I’ll confess that I have not thought through all the implications.

“One of the hospitals calls it ‘the garage PPE,’” said Sarah Boisvert, founder of 3D-printing school Fab Lab Hub, who works with hospitals to 3D-print materials. “This is a far more complicated problem than just making Christmas ornaments for your family.”

Lovett readily admits that he is not an expert. But he and others who want to help are stymied in part by a lack of clear government regulation around simple designs.

Continue reading “Why DIY 3D-Printed Face Masks and Shields Are So Risky” »

Essentially, the study found that some immune systems are less capable of recognizing the infection. This diminished ability to recognize the coronavirus can make a person more susceptible to developing symptoms in general, as well as more likely to experience severe symptoms that require hospitalization.

Getting down to the scientific specifics of the findings, the study focused on the immune system genes known as human leukocyte antigen genes. These genes are highly involved in the immune system’s ability to recognize pathogens, but they come in a variety of forms and vary from person to person.

The research team, from Oregon Health & Science University and the Portland VA Research Foundation, believe that HLA gene variations may make certain people more vulnerable to the coronavirus.

The study was carried out by Professor Li Lanjuan and colleagues from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China and published in a non-peer reviewed paper released on website medRxiv.org on Sunday.

Li’s team analyzed the strains from 11 randomly chosen coronavirus patients from Hangzhou, where there have been 1,264 reported cases, and then tested how efficiently they could infect and kill cells.

More than 30 different mutations were detected, of which 19 were previously undiscovered.

👽 A slap to health workers.

Fyodor R. Dawn Spelling

Opening America. The President keeps teasing it in his daily propaganda, ego-stroke photo op. His sycophantic surrogates repeat the refrain on social media and in press releases. Soulless partisan television hosts pound us relentlessly with it. MAGA cult members protest mask-less and in close quarters for it.

Continue reading “Re-Opening America Now is A Slap in the Face to Healthcare Workers” »

National Eye Institute (NEI) researchers profiling epigenomic changes in light-sensing mouse photoreceptors have a clearer picture of how age-related eye diseases may be linked to age-related changes in the regulation of gene expression. The findings, published online April 21 in Cell Reports, suggest that the epigenome could be targeted as a therapeutic strategy to prevent leading causes of vision loss, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health.

“Our study elucidates the molecular changes and biological pathways linked with aging of rod photoreceptors, light-sensing cells of the retina. Future investigations can now move forward to study how we can prevent or delay vision loss in aging and hopefully reduce the risk of associated neurodegeneration” said the study’s lead investigator, Anand Swaroop, Ph.D., senior investigator and chief of the NEI Neurobiology, Neurodegeneration, and Repair Laboratory.

Each organism is born with a genome, a library of genes that control all the body’s cellular and tissue functions. Expression of those genes—when information stored in DNA is converted into instructions for making proteins or other molecules—is modulated and maintained by the organism’s epigenome. The epigenome tags the DNA code to modify gene expression in ways that can be favorable and unfavorable for survival.

#News, #Covid

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday unveiled a coronavirus ‘heat map’ powered by Facebook data which is aimed at helping track the spread of the disease and plan for reopening society. The first map (pictured) is based on more than two million responses to surveys which asked users in the US to self-report symptoms over a period of 10 days in April.

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg discusses Facebook’s new COVID-19 tracking site” »

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh today published research showing how they’d solved a frustrating problem for people who use a brain-computer interface (BCI) to control prosthetic devices with their thoughts.

While the research itself is interesting – they created an algorithm that keeps the devices from constantly needing to be re-calibrated to handle the human brain’s fluctuating neuronal activity – the real takeaway here is how close we are to a universal BCI.

BCIs have been around for decades in one form or another, but they’re costly to maintain and difficult to keep working properly. Currently they only make sense for narrow use – specifically, in the case of those who’ve lost limbs. Because they’re already used to using their brain to control an appendage, it’s easier for scientists and researchers to harness those brainwaves to control prosthetic devices.

Newly-developed nanovalves allow the flow of individual nanoparticles in liquids to be controlled in tiny channels. This is of interest for lab-on-a-chip applications such as in materials science and biomedicine.

In a study published in Nature, a UCLA-led team of researchers describe how the nanomachine recognizes and kills bacteria, and report that they have imaged it at atomic resolution. The scientists also engineered their own versions of the nanomachine, which enabled them to produce variations that behaved differently from the naturally occurring version.

Their efforts could eventually lead to the development of new types of antibiotics that are capable of homing in on specific species of microbes. Drugs tailored to kill only a certain species or strain of bacteria could offer numerous advantages over conventional antibiotics, including lowering the likelihood that bacteria will develop resistance. In addition, the tailored drugs could destroy harmful cells without wiping out beneficial bugs in the gut microbiome, and they could eventually offer the possibilities of being deployed to prevent bacterial infections, to kill pathogens in food and to engineer human microbiomes so that favorable bacteria thrive.

Continue reading “Bactericidal nanomachine: Researchers reveal the mechanisms behind a natural bacteria killer” »