Lifeboat Foundation

I have always said the trick with being diagnosed with cancer is living long enough to see newer and better therapies coming out to help you outlive your own diagnosis:

Scientists at Northwestern University have discovered a “kill code” in every cell of the body that’s triggered by chemotherapy and that causes cancerous cells to self-destruct. What’s more, they’ve learned enough about the code that they’ve figured out how to trigger it without chemo—a finding that they believe could lead to new therapies.

The discovery, reported in the journals Nature Communications and eLife, is a code that’s found in both large and small ribonucleic acids (RNAs). The researchers also have early evidence that the small RNAs, called microRNAs, can be introduced into cells to trigger the kill switch.

Continue reading “Discovery of cancer ‘kill code’ could inspire new treatments” »

Are you up for this challenge?

Want to talk to aliens? Now’s your chance.

The “AI for Social Good” contest has a prize pool of $25 million.

Okay Google, feed the hungry.

What the hell is this?!

Kepler and K2 Missions is dead. Happy Halloween!

Group Facetime. I think this means we are closer to platforms that can support Virtual Reality… #Holodeck

Apple today released iOS 12.1, the first major update to the iOS 12 operating system designed for the iPhone and the iPad. iOS 12.1 comes more than a month after the September release of iOS 12 and a few weeks after iOS 12.0.1, a bug fix update.

Continue reading “Apple Releases iOS 12.1 With eSIM Support, Real-Time Depth Control, Group FaceTime, New Emoji and More” »

Rip Kepler 🕊

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s elite planet-hunting spacecraft has been declared dead, just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary.

Officials announced the Kepler Space Telescope’s demise Tuesday.

Continue reading “Kepler telescope dead after finding thousands of worlds” »

Yale-NUS researchers discover drug cocktail that increases lifespan…

A community of learning, founded by two great universities, in Asia, for the world.

The October Journal Club will be focusing on a new study in worms where a combination of compounds acted in synergy to almost double lifespan.

SUMMARY There is growing interest in pharmacological interventions directly targeting the aging process. Pharmacological interventions against aging should be efficacious when started in adults and, ideally, repurpose existing drugs. We show that dramatic lifespan extension can be achieved by targeting multiple, evolutionarily conserved aging pathways and mechanisms using drug combinations. Using this approach in C. elegans, we were able to slow aging and significantly extend healthy lifespan. To identify the mechanism of these drug synergies, we applied transcriptomics and lipidomics analysis. We found that drug interactions involved the TGF-b pathway and recruited genes related with IGF signaling. daf-2, daf-7, and sbp-1 interact upstream of changes in lipid metabolism, resulting in increased monounsaturated fatty acid content and this is required for healthy lifespan extension. These data suggest that combinations of drugs targeting distinct subsets of the aging gene regulatory network can be leveraged to cause synergistic lifespan benefits.