Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,807

A blood test has been shown to detect five types of cancer years before the diseases could be spotted using conventional diagnostic methods, according to a study published Tuesday.

Developed by a Sino-US startup, the test found cancers in 91 percent of people who showed no symptoms when the blood sample was collected but were diagnosed one-to-four years later with stomach, esophageal, colon, lung or liver cancer, researchers reported in Nature Communications.

“The immediate focus is to test people at higher risk, based on family history, age or other known risk factors,” said co-author Kun Zhang, head of the bioengineering department at the University of California San Diego and an equity holder in Singlera Genomics, which developed the test.

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The core of GPT-3, which is a creation of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, is a general language model designed to perform autofill. It is trained on uncategorized internet writings, and basically guesses what text ought to come next from any starting point. That may sound unglamorous, but a language model built for guessing with 175 billion parameters — 10 times more than previous competitors — is surprisingly powerful.

With attention focused on a pandemic and an election, AI has taken a major leap forward.

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Amazing.

The human DNA is a biological internet and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more. In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.

Only 10% of our DNA is being used for building proteins. It is this subset of DNA that is of interest to western researchers and is being examined and categorized. The other 90% are considered “junk DNA.” The Russian researchers, however, convinced that nature was not dumb, joined linguists and geneticists in a venture to explore those 90% of “junk DNA.” Their results, findings and conclusions are simply revolutionary!

According to them, our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body but also serves as data storage and in communication. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code, especially in the apparently useless 90%, follows the same rules as all our human languages. To this end they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar.

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This study attempts to answer the question: “Is hearing the last to go?” We present evidence of hearing among unresponsive actively dying hospice patients. Individual ERP (MMN, P3a, and P3b) responses to deviations in auditory patterns are reported for conscious young, healthy control participants, as well as for hospice patients, both when the latter were conscious, and again when they became unresponsive to their environment. Whereas the MMN (and perhaps too the P3a) is considered an automatic response to auditory irregularities, the P3b is associated with conscious detection of oddball targets. All control participants, and most responsive hospice patients, evidenced a “local” effect (either a MMN, a P3a, or both) and some a “global” effect (P3b) to deviations in tone, or deviations in auditory pattern. Importantly, most unresponsive patients showed evidence of MMN responses to tone changes, and some showed a P3a or P3b response to either tone or pattern changes. Thus, their auditory systems were responding similarly to those of young, healthy controls just hours from end of life. Hearing may indeed be one of the last senses to lose function as humans die.

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Plague is an age-old disease that can still be deadly today, but now researchers are developing new vaccines that could potentially protect against plague infection, early research in animals suggests.

In a new study, researchers tested three vaccines that were designed to protect people against infection from the bacteria that cause plague, known as Yersinia pestis. To create the vaccines, the researchers modified several genes of the bacteria so that they couldn’t cause disease, but would likely trigger an immune response in an animal. Specifically, the vaccines were designed to protect people against the bacteria that cause pneumonic plague, the most serious form of plague and the only type that spreads through airborne transmission.

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Here, we discover prototypical pacemaker neurons in the ancient cnidarian Hydra and provide evidence for a direct interaction of these neurons with the commensal microbiota. We uncover a remarkable gene-expression program conservation between the Hydra pacemaker neurons and pacemaker cells in Caenorhabditis elegans and the mammalian gut. We suggest that prototypical pacemaker cells emerged as neurons using components of innate immunity to interact with the microbial environment and ion channels to generate rhythmic contractions. The communication of pacemaker neurons with the microbiota represents a mechanistic link between the gut microbiota and gut motility. Our discoveries improve the understanding of the archetypical properties of the enteric nervous systems, which are perturbed in human dysmotility-related conditions.

Pacemaker neurons exert control over neuronal circuit function by their intrinsic ability to generate rhythmic bursts of action potential. Recent work has identified rhythmic gut contractions in human, mice, and hydra to be dependent on both neurons and the resident microbiota. However, little is known about the evolutionary origin of these neurons and their interaction with microbes. In this study, we identified and functionally characterized prototypical ANO/SCN/TRPM ion channel-expressing pacemaker cells in the basal metazoan Hydra by using a combination of single-cell transcriptomics, immunochemistry, and functional experiments. Unexpectedly, these prototypical pacemaker neurons express a rich set of immune-related genes mediating their interaction with the microbial environment.

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CRISPR-guided DNA cytosine and adenine base editors are widely used for many applications1,2,3,4 but primarily create DNA base transitions (that is, pyrimidine-to-pyrimidine or purine-to-purine). Here we describe the engineering of two base editor architectures that can efficiently induce targeted C-to-G base transversions, with reduced levels of unwanted C-to-W (W = A or T) and indel mutations. One of these C-to-G base editors (CGBE1), consists of an RNA-guided Cas9 nickase, an Escherichia coli –derived uracil DNA N-glycosylase (eUNG) and a rat APOBEC1 cytidine deaminase variant (R33A) previously shown to have reduced off-target RNA and DNA editing activities5,6. We show that CGBE1 can efficiently induce C-to-G edits, particularly in AT-rich sequence contexts in human cells. We also removed the eUNG domain to yield miniCGBE1, which reduced indel frequencies but only modestly decreased editing efficiency. CGBE1 and miniCGBE1 enable C-to-G edits and will serve as a basis for optimizing C-to-G base editors for research and therapeutic applications.

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