Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 508

On the internet, nothing is safe — not even your DNA, apparently.

That’s the dystopian lesson from the commercial genetic testing company 23andMe, which disclosed on Friday in a regulatory filing that hackers managed to access information on about 14,000 users or 0.1 percent of its customer user base.

But the problem goes beyond this relatively small number of people. Because the website allows users to share DNA information with other users in order to find relatives, the true number impacted is orders of magnitude larger — with about 6.9 million customers having their personal information compromised, according to TechCrunch. Big yikes on that figure, because it affects something like half of the 14 million users at 23andMe.

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“It is particularly challenging, expensive, and time-consuming to find polar bears in the Arctic, let alone count them and understand how they are coping with climate change,” said Dr. Melanie Lancaster.

Can scientists use DNA from polar bear footprints to help improve conservation efforts during this age of climate change? This is what a recent study published in Frontiers in Conservation Science hopes to address as a team of international researchers have developed a novel tool designed to use DNA from polar bear footprint skin cells with the goal of tracking the large mammals without the need to capture them, which often risks the safety of both the polar bears and their human captors in the process. This study holds the potential to develop new methods in tracking animals whose populations are at risk as climate change continues to warm the planet.

Polar bear near Utqiagvik, Alaska in May 2022. (Credit: Elisabeth Kruger, World Wildlife Fund)

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) currently estimates 22,000–31,000 polar bears worldwide, which are divided into 19 distinct sub-populations while classifying a “vulnerable” risk to polar bears on the international scale, along with having this same classification for Greenland, Denmark, and Norway. Additionally, they are polar bears are classified as “threatened” in the United States, “recovering” in Russia, and “special concern” in Canada, the last of which 60–80 percent of polar bears reside. As noted, capturing or trapping polar bears can be extremely dangerous, with previous methods using low-flying helicopters to dart polar bears.

Continue reading “Snowy Footprints as DNA Gold Mines: A New Frontier in Polar Bear Research” | >

Scientists have created tiny, self-assembling robots made from human cells that could one day repair damaged skin and tissue.

These tiny biological machines, called Anthrobots, are made from human tracheal cells without any genetic modification. Lab dish experiments revealed they can encourage neurons, or nerve cells, to grow in damaged tissue.

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Recent technological advancements have opened invaluable opportunities for assisting people who are experiencing impairments or disabilities. For instance, they have enabled the creation of tools to support physical rehabilitation, to practice social skills, and to provide daily assistance with specific tasks.

Researchers at Meta AI recently developed a promising and non-invasive method to decode speech from a person’s brain activity, which could allow people who are unable to speak to relay their thoughts via a computer interface. Their proposed method, presented in Nature Machine Intelligence, merges the use of an imaging technique and machine learning.

“After a stroke, or a brain disease, many patients lose their ability to speak,” Jean Remi King, Research Scientist at Meta, told Medical Xpress. “In the past couple of years, major progress has been achieved to develop a neural prosthesis: a device, typically implanted on the motor cortex of the patients, which can be used, through AI, to control a computer interface. This possibility, however, still requires brain surgery, and is thus not without risks.”

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With a processor that has fewer qubits, IBM has improved error correction, paving the way for the use of these processors in real life.

IBM has unveiled its much-awaited 1,000+ qubit quantum processor Condor, alongside a utility-scale processor dubbed IBM Quantum Heron at its Quantum Summit in New York. The latter is the first in the series of utility-scale quantum processors that IBM took four years to build, the company said in a press release.

Quantum computers, considered the next frontier of computing, have locked companies big and small in a race to build the platform that everybody would want to use to solve complex problems in medicine, physics, mathematics, and many more.

Continue reading “IBM finally unveils quantum powerhouse, a 1,000+ qubit processor” | >

As if space travel didn’t present enough challenges — from bone thinning and an elevated risk of cancer to the sheer tedium of spending months confined to a small capsule — scientists have now warned that prolonged exposure to microgravity and cosmic radiation could lead to erectile dysfunction.

For a NASA-funded study, published in The Faseb Journal, researchers exposed rats to doses of radiation equivalent to that found in deep space, and suspended them in harnesses to simulate weightlessness for four weeks. A year later the blood supply to the rats’ erectile tissue was found to be impaired, apparently mainly as a result of the radiation. The scientists described it as “a new health risk to consider with deep space exploration”, but said that there were signs it could be treatable. When astronauts are in orbit, such as on the International Space Station, they are protected from cosmic radiation by Earth’s magnetic field, which deflects the rays. Further out, they’re fully exposed, and transporting the material needed to shield them is difficult and expensive.

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A team of engineers at Duke University have developed a method to broaden the reach of CRISPR technologies. While the original CRISPR system could only target 12.5% of the human genome, the new method expands access to nearly every gene to potentially target and treat a broader range of diseases through genome engineering.

The research involved collaborators at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts Medical School, University of Zurich and McMaster University.

This work was published on October 4 in the journal Nature Communications.

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A new technique using deep brain stimulation tailored to each patient exceeded researchers’ expectations in treating the cognitive impairments from moderate to severe traumatic brain injury.

In 2001, Gina Arata was in her final semester of college, planning to apply to law school, when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. The injury so compromised her ability to focus she struggled in a job sorting mail.

“I couldn’t remember anything,” said Arata, who lives in Modesto with her parents. “My left foot dropped, so I’d trip over things all the time. I was always in car accidents. And I had no filter — I’d get pissed off really easily.”

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So our experiences or how we handle those experiences may have an effect on the expression of genes in our body.

A surprising thing happened when researchers began exploring whether early-life stress compounds the effects of a childhood head injury on health and behavior later in life: In an animal study, stress changed the activation level of many more genes in the brain than were changed by a bump to the head.

It’s already known that head injuries are common in young kids, especially from falling, and can be linked to mood disorders and social difficulties that emerge later in life. Adverse childhood experiences are also very common, and can raise risk for disease, mental illness and substance misuse in adulthood.

“But we don’t know how those two things can interact,” said senior study author Kathryn Lenz, associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. “We wanted to understand whether experiencing a traumatic brain injury in the context of early life stress circumstances could modulate the response to the brain injury. And using an animal model allows us to really get into the mechanisms through which these two things might be impacting brain development as it’s occurring.”

Continue reading “Stress Changes More Genes in the Mouse Brain Than a Head Injury” | >