Lifeboat Foundation

Could a fecal transplant pill be the antidepressants of the future?

Depression is real, and it is complex. Most conditions that affect our brain chemistry are going to be complex, and there are no easy, simple answers. We can’t cure depression by just exercising more, eating better, or taking a short vacation to recharge (although there is some evidence that getting more money, especially to lift you out of poverty, helps relieve depressive symptoms).

PARIS, Dec 5 (Reuters) — France raised the risk level of bird flu to ‘high’ from ‘moderate’ on Tuesday after new cases of the disease were detected, forcing poultry farms to keep birds indoors to stem the spread of the highly contagious virus.

The decision by the agriculture ministry was published in the Official Journal on Tuesday.

Avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu, has led to the culling of hundreds of millions birds worldwide in recent years.

I have to start eating that. Wasabi, a great memory booster.

A researcher behind a study of wasabi’s effect on cognition says he knew the fiery condiment had health benefits, but “the dramatic change” in memory was a surprise.

The ‘not a book club book club’ podcast on PKD, his books, and influence.

Remain calm, smoke your sogum, and pay no attention to all those old-born repopulating our world. Unfortunately for Sebastian Hermes and his crew of resuscitation technicians, it’s not that easy after discovering the slowly resurrecting corpse of a major religious leader. Join the DickHeads and writer/musician Jayaprakash Satyamurthy as they discuss PKD’s 21st published novel, Counter-Clock World. Plus: Food as a 4-letter word. The history of the scifi scene in Bangalore. And how to not kink shame sogum smokers.

Continue reading “DickHeads Podcast #31 — Counter-Clock World — with Jayaprakash Satyamurthy” »

CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—is the microbial world’s answer to adaptive immunity. Bacteria don’t generate antibodies when they are invaded by a pathogen and then hold those antibodies in abeyance in case they encounter that same pathogen again, the way we do. Instead, they incorporate some of the pathogen’s DNA into their own genome and link it to an enzyme that can use it to recognize that pathogenic DNA sequence and cut it to pieces if the pathogen ever turns up again.

The enzyme that does the cutting is called Cas, for CRISPR associated. Although the CRISPR-Cas system evolved as a bacterial defense mechanism, it has been harnessed and adapted by researchers as a powerful tool for genetic manipulation in laboratory studies. It also has demonstrated agricultural uses, and the first CRISPR-based therapy was just approved in the UK to treat sickle-cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia.

Now, researchers have developed a new way to search genomes for CRISPR-Cas-like systems. And they’ve found that we may have a lot of additional tools to work with.

Now you can sit back and relax in your easy chair as your garden is weeded.

Ekobot.

As anyone who has tended to a garden knows, weeding is time-consuming and energy-draining. Scale it up to a farm, and it becomes a logistical nightmare. Traditional herbicides, though efficient, pose potential threats to people, animals, and the environment.

Continue reading “This brilliant robot uses AI to make your garden weed free” »

Eating junk food, stress, unhealthy lifestyle and genes explain the major reason behind increase in stomach cancer cases in India, said experts here on Wednesday.

The report found that bot attacks increased by 167 percent in the first half of the year, with a staggering 291 percent increase in intelligent bots.

Eakarat Buanoi/iStock.

73 percent of all web and app traffic was malicious in Q3 2023.

Continue reading “New study finds bots and fraud farms responsible for 73% of web traffic” »

The hypertension drug rilmenidine has been shown to slow down aging in worms, an effect that in humans could hypothetically help us live longer and keep us healthier in our latter years.

Previous research has shown rilmenidine mimics the effects of caloric restriction on a cellular level. Reducing available energy while maintaining nutrition within the body has been shown to extend lifespans in several animal models.

Whether this translates to human biology, or is a potential risk to our health, is a topic of ongoing debate. Finding ways to achieve the same benefits without the costs of extreme calorie cutting could lead to new ways to improve health in old age.