Lifeboat Foundation

The Season of the Dragon continues with The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr and beyond. Dragons have emerged from the Halls of Colossus, and they now threaten to burn down all of Tamriel. Wielding powerful new weapons and abilities, unlikely allies must band together in order to defeat these legendary monsters.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr is now live on PC/Mac, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Starting with the Wrathstone DLC game pack and ESO: Elsweyr Chapter (both now live), the Season of the Dragon continues with the upcoming Scalebreaker DLC and will conclude with the Dragonhold DLC late 2019. Keep an eye out for more information on both Scalebreaker and Dragonhold at Quakecon!

Continue reading “The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr — Official E3 Cinematic Trailer” »

QuTech has resolved a major issue on the road toward a working large-scale quantum computer. QuTech, a collaboration of TU Delft and TNO, and Intel have designed and fabricated an integrated circuit that can controlling qubits at extremely low temperatures. This paves the way for the crucial integration of qubits and their controlling electronics in the same chip. The scientists have presented their research during the ISSCC Conference in San Francisco.

Quantum computers

“This result brings us closer to a large-scale quantum computer which can solve problems that are intractable by even the most powerful supercomputers. Solutions to those problems can make a strong impact on everyday life, for instance in the fields of medicine and energy,” said team lead Fabio Sebastiano from QuTech and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science.

But apart from a few small-scale examples, the only stem cell-based medical treatment practised in clinics uses haematopoietic stem cells found in the blood and bone marrow – which only produce blood cells – for transplants in blood cancer patients. These cells are taken from a patient’s sibling or an unrelated donor, before being infused into a patient’s blood, or they’re taken from a patient’s own blood before being reinfused. The procedure has been used to treat blood malignancies for almost half a century, and recently multiple sclerosis too. So how likely is it that the predictions about stem cells’ longevity-enhancing powers will become a reality?

Startups are offering stem cells as the cure to everything from age-related illness to wrinkles. But the science is far from clear-cut.

A new proof-of-concept study has found a combination of two drugs, already approved by the FDA for other uses, may boost the release of stem cells from bone marrow and accelerate the healing of broken bones. Only demonstrated in animals at this stage, the researchers suggest clinical trials could progress rapidly considering the drugs have already been demonstrated as safe in humans.

“The body repairs itself all the time,” says corresponding author on the study Sara Rankin. “We know that when bones break they will heal, and this requires the activation of stem cells in the bone. However, when the damage is severe, there are limits to what the body can do of its own accord.”

A great deal of current research is focusing on mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapies. MSCs are a type of adult stem cell that can grow into a variety of different cell types including muscle, fat or bone. Many current MSC treatments in development involve extracting a small number from a patient, growing them in laboratory conditions, then injecting them back into the patient.

Using this technique, the researchers were able to reduce tumour size in mice by between eight and nine times without harming healthy tissue. In the future, the team hopes to test this new therapy on patients with melanoma.

Dev Genes Evol. 2012 Mar;222:29–44. doi: 10.1007/s00427-011‑0387-z. Epub 2012 Feb 23.

Gap junctional proteins are important components of signaling pathways required for the development and ongoing functions of all animal tissues, particularly the nervous system, where they function in the intracellular and extracellular exchange of small signaling factors and ions. In animals whose genomes have been sufficiently sequenced, large families of these proteins, connexins, pannexins, and innexins, have been found, with 25 innexins in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans Starich et al. (Cell Commun Adhes 8: 311–314, 2001) and at least 37 connexins in the zebrafish Danio rerio Cruciani and Mikalsen (Biol Chem 388:253–264, 2009). Having recently sequenced the medicinal leech Hirudo verbana genome, we now report the presence of 21 innexin genes in this species, nine more than we had previously reported from the analysis of an EST-derived transcriptomic database Dykes and Macagno (Dev Genes Evol 216: 185–97, 2006); Macagno et al. (BMC Genomics 25:407, 2010).

“Corona is the foe. You and I are bros. No discrimination, I’m not virus.”

African students in Shandong, China create a music video to express their best wishes for China amid the #coronavirus outbreak. #StayStrongChina

Optical technologies that can be used to modulate neuronal activity are opening up exciting possibilities for research in neuroscience and biology. Optical tools allow neuroscientists to excite and inhibit neurons or areas of the brain at will. They can thus be used to investigate the function of specific brain circuits or regions, as well as to identify new potential treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.

The generation of tethered azobenzene photoswitches targeted at membrane bilayers or linked to ion channels is a pioneering optical technique that could further aid the study of the human brain. This technique, however, particularly when implemented at high light intensities, can lead to a considerable increase in temperature and can thus be harmful to neurons when used repeatedly.

To overcome this limitation, researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, have recently created a new light-sensitive azobenzene compound, dubbed Ziapin2, which can be used to build photoswitches that do not increase in temperature when irradiated with visible light. This new compound, introduced in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, partitions into the plasma membrane with a high stability, enabling its thinning and an increased capacitance at a steady state.

Changing a single word can alter the way an AI program judges a job applicant or assesses a medical claim.