Lifeboat Foundation

Two insect-like robots, a mini-bug and a water strider, developed at Washington State University, are the smallest, lightest and fastest fully functional micro-robots ever known to be created.

Such miniature robots could someday be used for work in areas such as artificial pollination, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, micro-fabrication, or robotic-assisted surgery. Reporting on their work in the proceedings of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, the mini-bug weighs in at eight milligrams while the water strider weighs 55 milligrams. Both can move at about six millimeters a second.

A new tool has been developed to detect skin cancer; it utilizes a biosensor that can identify small changes in the characteristics of cells. | Clinical And Molecular Dx.

Envision a game-changing technology that grants the power of expression to those facing speech challenges.

An innovative solution has emerged thanks to an incredible collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Eyegaze Inc.

They have created Eyegaze Edge, an eye-driven communication device.

A system that edits RNA rather than DNA can give new life to exhausted CAR T cells.

Researchers have built a device that helps users feel temperature through a prosthetic arm. A new study shows it works with high accuracy.

About a decade ago, researchers in UC Santa Barbara chemistry professor Guillermo Bazan’s lab began to observe a recurring challenge in their research: Some of the compounds they were developing to harness energy from bacteria were instead killing the microbes. Not good if the objective of the project was to harness the metabolism of living bacteria to produce electricity.

“We needed the bacteria to be alive,” said Alex Moreland, a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow who joined the Bazan research group as a graduate student in 2014, and currently works at UCSB’s Center for Polymers and Organic Solids. “While we were developing new molecules for that application, we found that some of them didn’t work because they were killing the bacteria.”

However, instead of brushing it off as a rather annoying laboratory curiosity, in subsequent research the team leaned into the apparent antimicrobial properties of these compounds, called conjugated oligoelectrolytes (COE). Fast-forward to today, and they now have the basis for a new class of antibiotics, one that not only shows promise against a broad array of bacterial infections but can also evade the dreaded resistance that has been rendering our current generation of first-line antibiotics ineffective.

Artificial intelligence could bring about “biological conflict,” said former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who co-chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Schmidt spoke with defense reporters Sept. 12 as he helped release a new paper from his tech-oriented nonprofit think tank, the Special Competitive Studies Project. Schmidt launched the think tank with staff from the commission in order to continue the commission’s work.

AI’s applicability to biological warfare is “something which we don’t talk about very much,” Schmidt said, but it poses grave risks. “It’s going to be possible for bad actors to take the large databases of how biology works and use it to generate things which hurt human beings,” Schmidt said, calling that risk “a very near-term concern.”

According to a study published in the BMJ, a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest while receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in a hospital is 22%, but that declines rapidly after only one minute to less than 1% after 39 minutes. The likelihood of leaving with no major brain damage is similar, declining from 15% after one minute of CPR to less than 1% after 32 minutes without a heartbeat.

Only around 25% of patients survive to hospital discharge after being admitted to the emergency department for cardiac arrest. This common catastrophic medical emergency with a high mortality rate is an important public health issue, affecting around 300,000 adults every year in America alone. Unfortunately, studies have shown that long resuscitation times are linked to lower odds of survival, but there are no specific recommendations on when to stop resuscitation.

Continue reading “Survival Chances For Cardiac Arrest During CPR” »

CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy seems feasible, safe, and efficacious for patients with different autoimmune diseases, according to a study published in the Feb. 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Fabian Müller, M.D., from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, and colleagues examined patients with severe systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), idiopathic inflammatory myositis, or systemic sclerosis (eight, three, and four patients, respectively) who received a single infusion of CD19 CAR T-cells after fludarabine and cyclophosphamide preconditioning.

Efficacy was assessed up to two years after CAR T-cell infusion, measured using the Definition of Remission in SLE (DORIS) remission criteria, American College of Rheumatology-European League against Rheumatism (ACR-EULAR) major clinical response, and the score on the European Scleroderma Trials and Research Group (EUSTAR) activity index.