Lifeboat Foundation

But not all parents may want to know the results.

Because of how much it impairs the ability to breathe, a seemingly simple injury—a broken rib—is the second leading cause of trauma deaths. A team of Penn State surgeons and a biomedical engineer have invented a better way to help broken ribs heal.

There are 6,000 tweets sent a second. In the time you have read this sentence, 42,000 tweets will have been sent. At an average of 34 characters per tweet that’s 1,428,000 characters.

A new study suggests that printing drugs on a QR code that patients can scan with their phones could pave the way for personalized medicine.

As a group, simple creatures following simple rules can display a surprising amount of complexity, efficiency, and even creativity. Known as swarm intelligence, this trait is found throughout nature, but researchers have recently begun using it to transform various fields such as robotics, data mining, medicine, and blockchains.

Ants, for example, can only perform a limited range of functions, but an ant colony can build bridges, create superhighways of food and information, wage war, and enslave other ant species—all of which are beyond the comprehension of any single ant. Likewise, schools of fish, flocks of birds, beehives, and other species exhibit behavior indicative of planning by a higher intelligence that doesn’t actually exist.

Continue reading “How Swarm Intelligence Is Making Simple Tech Much Smarter” »

Rewriting Life

This new company wants to sequence your genome and let you share it on a blockchain.

People will be able to earn cryptocurrency in exchange for letting pharma companies use their data.

Continue reading “This new company wants to sequence your genome and let you share it on a blockchain” »

Summary: Clues to the naked mole rat’s remarkable cancer-fighting abilities have been uncovered by researchers at the University of Rochester in a new study. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

With their wrinkled, hairless bodies, naked mole rats won’t be winning any beauty contests.

However, they do win longevity contests.

Continue reading “The key to a naked mole rat’s cancer-free life?” »

Summary: Researchers discover what may be the key to stopping uncontrolled inflammation and the damage it causes in a multitude of chronic diseases. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

A discovery by researchers at the University of Queensland (UQ) could be the key to stopping the damage caused by uncontrolled inflammation in a range of chronic diseases including Alzheimer’s and liver disease.

Queensland scientists have uncovered how an inflammation process automatically switches off in healthy cells, and are now investigating ways to stop it when it runs amok. The finding may lead to a way to turn off chronic low-grade inflammation without interfering with the body’s natural defenses against infection.

Continue reading “Researchers discover off-switch to inflammation machine at the root of our chronic diseases” »

Summary: Researchers at the University of California discovered a key way that cancer manipulates the genetic code using DNA methylation that has important implications for the treatment of cancers. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Up until now, scientists haven’t fully understood how DNA methylation causes changes in our genetic code that enable cancer to thrive.

Now, a team led by associate professor Jikui Song at the University of California Riverside have deciphered the crystal structure of an enzyme that plays a crucial role in DNA methylation that allows tumors to survive and grow.

Continue reading “Researchers crack secret code to genetic changes causing our cancer” »