Lifeboat Foundation

We are learning more about fungal infection and neurological diseases. Recently we learned of gingival diseases and Alzheimer’s. My wonder is how plants such as Moringa in one’s diet, that have antifungal properties, can help.

Fungal infections are emerging as a major medical challenge, and a team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine has developed a mouse model to study the short-term consequences of fungal infection in the brain.

The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications the unexpected finding that the common yeast Candida albicans, a type of fungus, can cross the blood-brain barrier and trigger an inflammatory response that results in the formation of granuloma-type structures and temporary mild memory impairments in mice. Interestingly, the granulomas share features with plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease, supporting future studies on the long-term neurological consequences of sustained C. albicans infection.

Continue reading “Fungi cause brain infection and memory impairment in mice” »

The latest Facebook hack should have shown everyone nothing is safe. Researchers have now shown how easy it is to steal data from people doing research.

Engineers at the University of California say they have demonstrated how easy it would be to snoop on biotech companies making synthetic DNAll you need is an audio recording, they say. Place a smartphone near a DNA synthesizer, record the sound, run the recording across algorithms trained to discern the clicks and buzzes that particular machine makes, and you’ll know exactly what combination of DNA building blocks it is generating.

Researchers devise method for snooping on DNA synthesis using acoustic recordings. But is it a real threat?

Continue reading “How to Steal DNA With Sound” »

There’s a good chance that in the future, microscopic robots could be swimming and crawling their way through our bodies to deliver drugs or fight infections. While some of these have been capable of manipulating individual cells, researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a new way to get nano-scale probes inside cells, and precisely control them once they’re in there.

Thirty-three older adults between the ages of 58 and 95 applied the cream all over their bodies twice a day for 30 days. After a month, the researchers measured blood levels of three cytokines—interleukin-1 beta, interleukin-6, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alpha—that have all been implicated in age-related inflammatory diseases. Using the cream reduced the amount of all three cytokines compared to both the participants’ levels before using the cream and the levels of similarly aged adults who did not use the cream. In fact, using the cream lowered participants’ cytokine levels to be nearly equivalent with people in their 30s, suggesting that rejuvenating the skin can reverse “inflamm-aging.” The cream also improved skin hydration, lowered pH, and repaired the permeability barrier.

Skin is the body’s largest organ, and scientists at UC San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Administration (VA) Health Care System think it may be to blame for body-wide inflammation linked to numerous chronic diseases of aging. The good news is that properly caring for the skin with a moisturizing cream may lower inflammation levels and potentially prevent age-related diseases, according to a new clinical pilot study.

As humans get older, we experience a low-level of inflammation—dubbed “inflamm-aging”—driven by an increase in molecules in the blood called cytokines. This age-related inflammation has been linked to serious chronic diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Scientists initially thought that the inflammation stemmed from the immune system or the liver, but a group of dermatologists at UCSF have a different theory.

Continue reading “Skin Repair Eliminates ‘Inflamm-Aging’ Linked to Chronic Disease” »

Researchers are alarmed by “rogue human experimentation” using CRISPR in China.

Good for Amazon.

Amazon has removed the online listings for two books that claim to contain cures for autism, a move that follows recent efforts by several social media sites to limit the availability of anti-vaccination and other pseudoscientific material.

The books, “Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism” and “Fight Autism and Win,” which had previously been listed for sale in Amazon’s marketplace, were not available on Wednesday. The company confirmed that the listings had been removed, but declined to discuss why or whether similar books would be taken down in the future.

Continue reading “Amazon Pulls 2 Books That Promote Unscientific Autism ‘Cures’” »

“Our findings represent a dramatic divergence from the current dogma, which works primarily on the premise that neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine act solely through the activation of their membrane receptors in the brain to regulate brain cell activity,” says Ian Maze, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, and Pharmacological Sciences, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and senior author of the paper. “We found actions of these brain chemicals that are independent of neurotransmission but critically important to their overall signaling, suggesting that our current understanding of these molecules is incomplete and requires further investigation.”

Findings could fundamentally change how scientists interpret the biological activities of serotonin.

To keep pacemakers and insulin pumps secure.

In April of 2019 Google+ is going away. However, if you have stuff that you really want to save someone created a workaround. You can now move your content to Discourse.

Google+ is dead. Granted people have been saying that much for years now, but this time it’s really true. As of April, Google’s social media experiment will officially go the way of Reader, Buzz, Wave, Notebook, and all the other products that the search giant decided they were no longer interested in maintaining. Unfortunately in the case of Google+, the shutdown means losing a lot of valuable content that was buried in the “Communities” section of the service. Or at least that’s what we all thought.

Thanks to the efforts of [Michael Johnson], many of those Google+ communities now have a second chance at life. After taking a deep dive into the data from his own personal Google+ account, he realized it should be possible to write some code that would allow pulling the content out of Google’s service and transplanting it into a Discourse instance. With some more work, he was even able to figure out how to preserve the ownership of the comments and posts. This is no simple web archive; you can actually log into Discourse with your Google account and have all of your old content attributed to you.

Continue reading “Google+ Communities Won’t Go Down Without a Fight” »