Lifeboat Foundation

Research is edging us closer to a cure for type 1 diabetes, with encapsulated insulin producing cells that could last for years — ending daily injections

Over 400,000 in the UK alone live with type 1 diabetes, and daily injections are far from a ‘cure’ for the condition. Although these have saved millions worldwide, they’re inaccurate in comparison to the body’s own finely tuned insulin producing cells. This leads to progressive damage and complications.

The wonders of cell therapy

Continue reading “Breakthrough Diabetes Cell Therapy Could Be A Game Changer” »

Tesla new competitor is in town, they are paying top dollar for Tesla’s talent. Guess Musk should have backed off SpaceX, because his money making has serious competition.

Tesla has lost a lot of talent to this company.

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Watch this robot solve a Rubik’s Cube in about a second…

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No more spilled soup or coffee.

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Disney and Lucasfilm have more films beyond the next five in the works.

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Dinner and a show with a Robot.

The most memorable moments in travel are often the most eccentric. From oil wrestling to staring contests, or being entertained over dinner by robots, our readers share their way-out memories.

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Researchers succeeded in calculating effects in ultra-cold atom clouds which can only be explained in terms of the quantum correlations between many atoms. Such atom clouds are known as Bose-Einstein condensates and are an active field of research.

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Cancer is a mysterious disease for many reasons. Chief among the unknowns are how and why tumors form.

Two University of Iowa studies offer key insights by recording in real time, and in 3-D, the movements of cancerous human breast tissue cells. It’s believed to be the first time cancer cells’ motion and accretion into tumors has been continuously tracked. (See accompanying videos.)

The team discovered that cancerous cells actively recruit healthy cells into tumors by extending a cable of sorts to grab their neighbors—both cancerous and healthy—and reel them in. Moreover, the Iowa researchers report that as little as five percent of cancerous cells are needed to form the tumors, a ratio that heretofore had been unknown.

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An international team of researchers has developed a new algorithm that could one day help scientists reprogram cells to plug any kind of gap in the human body. The computer code model, called Mogrify, is designed to make the process of creating pluripotent stem cells much quicker and more straightforward than ever before.

A pluripotent stem cell is one that has the potential to become any type of specialised cell in the body: eye tissue, or a neural cell, or cells to build a heart. In theory, that would open up the potential for doctors to regrow limbs, make organs to order, and patch up the human body in all kinds of ways that aren’t currently possible.

It was Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka who first reprogrammed cells in this way back in 2007 — it later earned him a Nobel Prize — but Yamanaka’s work involved a lot of labourious trial and error, and the process he followed is not an easy one to reproduce. Mogrify aims to compute the required set of factors to change cells instead, and it’s passed its early tests with flying colours.

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