Lifeboat Foundation

In April of this year, Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini emerged into the light after a 500-day stay in a cave. Her descent underground is probably the longest undertaken by a long stretch. Flamini says she lost all sense of time on the 65th day. But can she really be sure it was the 65th day? By way of comparison, in 1962 France’s Michel Siffre surfaced from the Scarasson chasm in Italy after spending what he thought was 33 days there. In fact, he spent 58 days underground.

How can isolated human beings keep regular track of time, even when they’re disconnected from their surrounding environment? Quite simply, because biological rhythms are at the heart of life, regulating it all the way from the molecular level up to that of the entire body. These include not only our sleep/wake cycles, but also body temperature, hormones, metabolism and the cardiovascular system, to name but a few.

And these rhythms have many repercussions, not least in terms of public health. Indeed, a number of diseases are episodic—for example, asthma is more severe at night, while cardiovascular accidents are more frequent in the morning. Another example is shift work, which disconnects people from their environment. It may be associated with an increased risk of cancers in workers, prompting the WHO to label it as a probable carcinogen.

Layered hybrid perovskites show diverse physical properties and exceptional functionality; however, from a materials science viewpoint, the co-existence of lattice order and structural disorder can hinder the understanding of such materials. Lattice dynamics can be affected by dimensional engineering of inorganic frameworks and interactions with molecular moieties in a process that remains unknown.

To address this problem, Zhuquan Zhang and a team of scientists in chemistry and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, Austin, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., used a combination of spontaneous Raman scattering, terahertz spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations.

The research outcomes revealed how the structural dynamics in and out of equilibrium provided unexpected observables to differentiate single-and double-layered perovskites. The study is published in Science Advances.

For the first time in my timezone, SpaceX completed 9 launches in a month. Previously, if you were based in Europe, you saw 9 launches in a month a few months ago. At 9 launches/month that is a current rate of 108 launches/year, making SpaceX’s goal of 100 launches this year a possibility.

They had a lot of trouble getting this flight off today as a recent hurricane is still affecting the weather some. They got around this by having a 5 and a half hour launch window so they just waited a few hours until the weather was clear for several minutes and they launched!

Continue reading “SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Starlink 6-13 Mission” »

Dr. Kimathi is a medical oncologist in a community setting where she sees patients with a variety of cancer diagnoses. Recently, she had several patients with toxicities to different treatments, including tamoxifen, cisplatin, and methotrexate. Concerned, she wondered if there was a common factor these patients shared to have experienced these toxicities. On review, she found that these patients had different cancer diagnoses and did not share any known comorbidities or risk factors.

Why do some cancer patients experience toxicities from certain treatments and others don’t? Drug metabolism is highly variable among patients, and even within the same patient, depending on age and disease state. Both the toxicity and efficacy of cancer chemotherapy can be affected by many different factors, including other medications, foods, dietary supplements, environmental conditions, and genetic variants in drug-metabolizing genes and drug transporters.

Throughout Gray’s life before she got the treatment, the deformed, sickle-shaped red blood cells caused by the genetic disorder would regularly incapacitate her with intense, unpredictable attacks of pain. Those crises would send Gray rushing to the hospital for pain medication and blood transfusions. She could barely get out of bed many days; when she became a mom, she struggled to care for her four children and couldn’t finish school or keep a job.

But then she received the treatment on July 2, 2019. Doctors removed some of her bone marrow cells, genetically modified them with CRISPR and infused billions of the modified cells back into her body. The genetic modification was designed to make the cells produce fetal hemoglobin, in the hopes the cells would compensate for the defective hemoglobin that causes the disease.

A Mississippi woman’s life has been transformed by a treatment for sickle cell disease with the gene-editing technique CRISPR. All her symptoms from a disease once thought incurable have disappeared.

Continue reading “Sickle cell patient’s success with gene editing raises hopes and questions” »

It’s the beginning of the flu season and hospitals in the city have reported an increase in the number of people coming in with fever, severe body pain, and fatigue. Infectious diseases expert Dr V Ramasubramanian in an interview to Pushpa Narayan explains why people should take the flu shot.

Will the flu vaccine prevent the flu?

The flu vaccine prevents the infection in up to 70% of cases, and reduces the chances of severe disease. The infection can stimulate inflammation of different parts of the body including blood vessels. This leads to a series of complications in the body including heart attacks and strokes.

In 1993, acclaimed sci-fi author and computer scientist Vernor Vinge made a bold prediction – within 30 years, advances in technology would enable the creation of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence, leading to “the end of the human era.”

Vinge theorized that once AI becomes capable of recursively improving itself, it would trigger a feedback loop of rapid, exponential improvements to AI systems. This hypothetical point in time when AI exceeds human intelligence has become known as “the Singularity.”

While predictions of superhuman AI may have sounded far-fetched in 1993, today they are taken seriously by many AI experts and tech investors seeking to develop “artificial general intelligence” or AGI – AI capable of fully matching human performance on any intellectual task.

Scientist proved for the first time that kidney cells, housed in an implantable device functioning as an artificial kidney, can survive inside the body of an animal.

A major _New York Times_ investigation reveals how the United States’ aquifers are becoming severely depleted due to overuse in part from huge industrial farms and sprawling cities. The _Times_ reports that Kansas corn yields are plummeting due to a lack of water, there is not enough water to support the construction of new homes in parts of Phoenix, Arizona, and rivers across the country are drying up as aquifers are being drained far faster than they are refilling. “It can take millions of years to fill an aquifer, but they can be depleted in 50 years,” says Warigia Bowman, director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law. “All coastal regions in the United States are really being threatened by groundwater and aquifer problems.”

Transcript: democracynow.org.

Continue reading “U.S. Aquifers Are Running Dry, Posing Major Threat to Drinking Water Supply” »