Lifeboat Foundation

Opinions: Give your opinions in the comments section.

3D printed lab meat, and plant based meats will be more widespread in our future. Would you eat stem cell 3D printed lab meat or plant based meat? Why or why not? What are the differences between natural vs unnatural. Growing up in Texas I know most Texans frown on it, as BBQ is a religion. Is 3D printing meat sustainable\.

Whether it comes from a plant or the cells of an animal, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the meat of the future will probably not be coming from the flesh of slaughtered animals. Instead, whether made from plants or cells, it will be formed into ‘meat’ by a 3D printer. In September of 2021, a Japanese team of researchers at the University of Osaka announced that they had 3D printed Wagyu beef. Beef connoisseurs will recognize the name; Wagyu beef is prized (and suitably priced) for its flavor and fat marbling. Legends abound about the cows such beef derives from, how they are allegedly coddled and massaged, fed a special diet that includes beer — but much of those tales are either exaggerated or pure urban legend. As Joe Heitzeberg, the co-founder and CEO of Crowd Cow explains, There are four breeds native to Japan. Of those four breeds, one of the breeds is genetically unique. It has a genetic predisposition to create this crazy marbling of fat on the inside of muscle tissue. No other livestock does that. The researchers at the University of Osaka used two different types of stem cells from Wagyu cows to create cultured meat, growing living animal cells onto some type of matrix where they are then incubated and grown into animal tissue that has never been part of a living animal. There are currently no reports on the taste of the cultured Wagyu beef but we can assume it’s ‘good’ and given a little time, the technology should be able to produce excellent Wagyu cultured meat — at what price, however, is another big question mark. But there’s another simpler solution that could be a better meat replacement than cultured meat, as even meat grown from stem cells still contains cholesterol and some of the negative health concerns associated with animal protein. Plant-based imitation meat is also being created with 3D printers, and the results are surprising even hardcore meat lovers.

Continue reading “Staking a Claim on the Steak of Tomorrow: 3D Printing Tech is Making ‘Meat’” »

In a first, U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient.

Unusual opportunity

Last week’s procedure marks the first time that a pig organ has been transplanted into a human who has a chance to survive and recover. In 2021, surgeons at New York University Langone Health transplanted kidneys from the same line of genetically modified pigs into two legally dead people with no discernible brain function. The organs were not rejected, and functioned normally while the deceased recipients were sustained on ventilators.

Continue reading “First pig-to-human heart transplant: what can scientists learn?” »

Despite the fact that floating around in space looks like a certified blast, it’s not something the human body is optimized for. In order to make these trips possible, scientists are going to have to figure out how to mimic Earth’s gravity in space.
» Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker.
» Watch more Elements! http://bit.ly/ElementsPlaylist.
» Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com.
» Sign Up for Seeker’s Newsletter! https://www.seeker.com/newsletters.

We evolved with gravity constantly pulling on us at a rate of about 9.8 m/s2, or 1 g. Our bodies are built in a way that takes that into account. Our rigid bones can hold us up, our cardiovascular system can pump blood to and from our extremities, our vestibular system in our ears keeps us balanced, and so on. Our bodies are also good at adapting to our needs, which means when you take gravity away the body starts to change. Bones lose mineral density, hearts weaken, and the vestibular system shuts off because suddenly there is no “up” anymore. So long as the body stays in space these changes aren’t really a problem, but coming back to Earth and readapting to 1 g can be painful and disorienting.

Continue reading “Humans Might Need Artificial Gravity for Space Travel” »

Pfizer Japan Inc. said Friday it has applied to the health ministry for approval of its COVID-19 pill which, if granted, would make it the second oral drug for mild coronavirus cases available in the country.

The new drug application for Paxlovid, a combination of the antiviral drugs nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, comes as Japan is battling its sixth surge of COVID-19 cases amid a spread of the omicron variant, with the country already agreeing to procure enough of the drug for 2 million people.

“Data science is also absolutely key to our research at the Quadram Institute into the gut microbiome and its influence on human health, all of which is mediated by the complex interactions of micro-organisms, the food we eat, and the environment of the gastro-intestinal tract itself.”

E[datascientist] leverages AI and network science in order to surface scientific connections and explore multi-causal relationships, for example to better understand the microbiome. The platform also improves the digitisation, and reduces the siloisation, of legacy scientific R&D systems, which can be used in tandem with datasets from publicly available databases, all in a standardised format. In this way e[datascientist] supports the entire R&D workflow, accelerating the generation of novel insights and ultimately reducing time to market.

Eagle Genomics plans to continue to be engaged in discussions with a range of other organisations to ensure that its platform continues to become a burgeoning global life sciences knowledge discovery hub.

A new smart type of food packaging promises to eliminate food poisoning by killing harmful bacteria.

According to scientists, the packaging destroys hazardous bacteria like E.coli, Salmonella, and Listeria, allowing meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables to last longer.

“Food safety and waste have become a major societal challenge of our times with immense public health and economic impact which compromises food security. One of the most efficient ways to enhance food safety and reduce spoilage and waste is to develop efficient, biodegradable non-toxic food packaging materials,” Philip Demokritou of Harvard Chan School, who co-led the work, said in a statement.

In fact, it’s not even the first time that IBM has tried — unsuccessfully — to unload the project, in yet another sign that corporate expectations for AI are continuing to crash into reality.

“Health care always is going to turn out to be more subtle, as well as more regulated for the right reasons, than it is in other areas,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in an Axios and HBO interview last year. “And to me, that’s natural. It is a decision that may impact somebody’s life or death. You got to be more careful. So in health care, it turns out maybe we were too optimistic.”

The sale, if it actually goes through this time, would affect millions of patients and entire government healthcare strategies.

Houston, TX — Oct 8, 2020 - In a letter published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, a team of physicians from Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, and the University of California, San Francisco, describe a remarkable case of a Type 1 diabetes (T1D) patient, who no longer needs insulin to maintain optimal blood sugar levels. The physicians employed a precision/personalized medicine approach to specifically target the underlying genetic mutation, which was the primary driver of this patient’s diabetes.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of a T1D patient who has experienced a complete reversal of insulin-dependence and we are excited by the prospect that that could be a viable therapeutic strategy for a subset of T1D patients” said corresponding author Dr. Lisa R. Forbes, deputy director for clinical services and community outreach for the Texas Children’s William T. Shearer Center for Human Immunobiology and assistant professor of Pediatrics, Immunology, Allergy and Retrovirology at Baylor.

T1D is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little to no insulin, a hormone that maintains sugar levels in the blood. Currently, the treatment options available to T1D patients consist of managing blood sugar levels with insulin, diet and exercise to prevent further complications.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, in collaboration with TCS Research and Wageningen University, recently devised a new strategy that could improve coordination among different robots tackling complex missions as a team. This strategy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a split-architecture that addresses communication and computations separately, while periodically coordinating the two to achieve optimal results.

The researchers’ paper was recently presented at the IEEE RoboCom 2022 conference, held in conjunction with IEEE CCNC 2022, a top tier conference in the field of networking and distributed computing. At IEEE RoboCom 2022, it received the Best Paper Award.

“Swarm-robotics is on the path to becoming a key tool for human civilization,” Dr. Sudipta Saha, the lead researcher of the team that carried out the study, told TechXplore. “For instance, in medical science, it will be necessary to use numerous nano-bots to boost immune-therapy, targeted and effective drug transfer, etc.; while in the army it will be necessary for exploring unknown terrains that are hard for humans to enter, enabling agile supervision of borders and similar activities. In construction, it can enable technologies such as large-scale 3D printing and in agriculture it can help to monitor crop health and intervene to improve yields.”