Lifeboat Foundation

Some parts of the body – including the tissues of the brain and testes – have long been considered to be completely hidden from our immune system.

Last year scientists made the amazing discovery that a set of previously unseen channels connected the brain to our immune system; now, it appears we might also need to rethink the immune system’s relationship with the testes, potentially explaining why some men are infertile and how some cancer vaccines fail to provide immunity.

Researchers from University of Virginia School of Medicine discovered a ‘very small door’ which allows the testes to expose some of its antigens to the immune system without letting it inside.

Continue reading “We Were Wrong — the Testes Are Connected to the Immune System” »

(Tech Xplore)—A team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin has developed a pair of glasses that allows the wearer to have tetrachromatic vision. In their paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint sever, the group describes the inspiration for their glasses and explain how they work.

Humans have three types of cone cells in the back of the eye to differentiate color. Some react to blue, some to green and some to red. The cones do their work by responding to the difference in wavelength of the incoming light. Such vision is known as trichromatic. In this new effort, the researchers have found a way of fooling the brain into seeing as if there were a fourth type of cone, by wearing glasses with two types of filters. The result is tetrachromatic vision.

To create the glasses, the researchers fashioned two types of filters, one for each eye. The filters remove some parts of the blue light spectrum. But the filters each remove a different part. When the filters are fitted into a frame and worn like regular glasses, the wearer is able to see colors that are normally hidden—metamers. In a sense, it is rather the opposite of what occurs with people who are color blind. They might see blue and red as the same, even though there is more light information there. Adding spectrum identification to color blind eyes allows for seeing more of what is already there. With the new combined filter system, a person is able to look at what appears to be an object that is all the same color, such as purple, and see more colors in it—those normally hidden metamers.

Continue reading “Double filters allow for tetrachromatic vision in humans” »

In 2003, the US Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health announced that—13 years and $2.7 billion later—they had finally finished mapping the human genome.

But the quest to understand human genetics was far from over: Genomes, which are the entire layout of our 3 billion base pairs of DNA, vary dramatically from person to person. So mapping the first human genome was really just mapping a human genome (the patient’s identity was kept secret for privacy.) And even though shorter genetic sequencing is available, doctors studying rare genetic diseases need the full scope of a patient’s genetic material to find the problematic mutation. Finding these faulty sections of genes is like a microscopic version of Where’s Waldo among 3 billion people wearing stripes, a game that has cost $3 billion to play.

In a paper published (paywall) in Science on March 23, researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University said they have figured a way to sequence the entirety of any genome for just $10,000, in a couple of weeks. Their test project? Re-sequencing the DNA of the mosquito species that spreads the Zika virus.

Continue reading “Scientists just changed the way we build genomes to make them 270,000 times cheaper” »

Researchers have identified a cellular mechanism that allows them to reverse ageing in mouse DNA and protect it from future damage.

They’ve shown that by giving a particular compound to older mice, they can activate the DNA repair process and not only protect against future damage, but repair the existing effects of ageing. And they’re ready to start testing in humans within six months.

“The cells of the old mice were indistinguishable from the young mice, after just one week of treatment,” said lead researcher David Sinclair from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia and the Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Continue reading “It’s Happening: Scientists Can Now Reverse DNA Ageing in Mice” »

I did a 10-min interview on Radio Columbia today, one of the largest stations in Latin America. We talked about robots taking jobs and the possibility of #robot politicians. It’s a combo of English and Spanish.

Aunque expertos advierten que las máquinas podrían dejar sin empleo a la mitad de la población en 30 años, Zoltan Istvan explica los beneficios de esta iniciativa.

Robot encuentro. Foto: Getty Images.

Continue reading “¿Los robots serían mejores políticos que los humanos?” »

Meanwhile, the Hubble image offered a clue about what dislodged the black hole from its galaxy’s centre. The host galaxy bore faint, arc-shaped features called tidal tales, which are produced by the gravitational tug-of-war that takes place when two galaxies collide. This suggested that galaxy 3C 186 had recently merged with another system, and perhaps their black holes merged too.

What happened next, scientists can only theorize. Chiaberge and his colleagues suggest that as the galaxies collided, their black holes began to circle each other, flinging out gravity waves “like water from a lawn sprinkler,” as NASA described it. If the black holes had unequal masses and spin rates, they might have sent more gravitational waves in one direction than the other. When the collision was complete, the newly merged black hole would have then recoiled from the strongest gravitational waves, shooting off in the opposite direction.

“This asymmetry depends on properties such as the mass and the relative orientation of the back holes’ rotation axes before the merger,” Colin Norman of STScI and Johns Hopkins University, a co-author on the paper, said in the NASA news release. “That’s why these objects are so rare.”

PWC predicts 30% of jobs to be automated by 2030s.

You’ve been warned before—robots are coming for your job. The speed of technological advancement, particularly in smart automation, has sprung countless economic studies and political warnings about how many people are likely to lose their jobs to this rise of the machines. But it’s not an easy number to peg down; estimates range from 5% to 50%.

The latest predictions from PricewaterhouseCoopers (pdf) survey the damage for specific countries. Analysts at the consulting firm said that by the early 2030s, 38% of US jobs are at a high risk of automation, more than in Germany, the UK, and Japan.

Continue reading “Why American jobs are more at risk of automation than jobs in Germany or the UK” »

A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia have discovered a key molecular process in DNA repair that could stop cells from ageing and help DNA to reverse damage.

Nice summary from Wired on Liz.

After her son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, Elizabeth Parrish began researching gene therapy treatments. She then started testing them on herself.