Lifeboat Foundation

When tweaking its architecture, the adult brain works like a sculptor—starting with more than it needs so it can carve away the excess to achieve the perfect design. That’s the conclusion of a new study that tracked developing cells in an adult mouse brain in real time.

New brain cells began with a period of overgrowth, sending out a plethora of neuronal branches, before the brain pruned back the connections. The observation, described May 2, 2016 in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that new cells in the adult brain have more in common with those in the embryonic brain than scientists previously thought and could have implications for understanding diseases including autism, intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia.

“We were surprised by the extent of the pruning we saw,” says senior author Rusty Gage, a professor in Salk’s Laboratory of Genetics and holder of the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease.

A new analysis indicates that a type of psychotherapy delivered by videoconference may help prevent some of the long-term memory issues caused by chemotherapy. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings point to a noninvasive way to help cancer survivors manage some of the negative effects of their treatment.

It’s estimated that approximately half of cancer patients who receive chemotherapy develop long-lasting changes in memory function such as trouble remembering conversational content or steps in a task. While the memory problems tend to be mild, they diminish quality of life in areas of job performance and family and social life well beyond cancer treatment. The causes of this problem and reasons why it does not affect every survivor remain unknown, and there is currently limited research on treatments for it.

A team led by Robert Ferguson, PhD, who is currently at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute but was at the Eastern Maine Medical Center and Lafayette Family Cancer Center in Bangor, Maine, while conducting this research, developed a cognitive-behavioral therapy called “Memory and Attention Adaptation Training” (MAAT), which helps cancer survivors to increase awareness of situations where memory problems can arise and to develop skills to either prevent memory failure or to compensate for memory dysfunction.

Silicon Valley’s newest valley member; wonder if Google or eBay will send a “Welcome Basket” to the FDA?

Helmy Eltoukhy’s company is on a roll. The start-up is a leading contender in the crowded field of firms working on “liquid biopsy” tests that aim to be able to tell in a single blood draw whether a person has cancer.

Venture investors are backing Guardant Health to the tune of nearly $200 million. Leading medical centers are testing its technology. And earlier this month, it presented promising data on how well its screening tool, which works by scanning for tiny DNA fragments shed by dying tumor cells, worked on an initial group of 10,000 patients with late-stage cancers.

Continue reading “FDA new sheriff in town in Silicon Valley” »

What would you say if I told you that aging happens not because of accumulation of stresses, but rather because of the intrinsic properties of the gene network of the organism? I’m guessing you’d be like: surprised .

So, here’s the deal. My biohacker friends led by Peter Fedichev and Sergey Filonov in collaboration with my old friend and the longevity record holder Robert Shmookler Reis published a very cool paper. They proposed a way to quantitatively describe the two types of aging – negligible senescence and normal aging. We all know that some animals just don’t care about time passing by. Their mortality doesn’t increase with age. Such negligibly senescent species include the notorious naked mole rat and a bunch of other critters like certain turtles and clams to name a few. So the paper explains what it is exactly that makes these animals age so slowly – it’s the stability of their gene networks.

What does network stability mean then? Well, it’s actually pretty straightforward – if the DNA repair mechanisms are very efficient and the connectivity of the network is low enough, then this network is stable. So, normally aging species, such as ourselves, have unstable networks. This is a major bummer by all means. But! There is a way to overcome this problem, according to the proposed math model.

Continue reading “10 responses to ‘Hacking Aging’” »

A study performed at IRB Barcelona offers an explanation as to why the genetic code stopped growing 3,000 million years ago. This is attributed to the structure of transfer RNAs—the key molecules in the translation of genes into proteins. The genetic code is limited to 20 amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—the maximum number that prevents systematic mutations, which are fatal for life. The discovery could have applications in synthetic biology.

Nature is constantly evolving—its limits determined only by variations that threaten the viability of species. Research into the origin and expansion of the genetic code are fundamental to explain the evolution of life. In Science Advances, a team of biologists specialised in this field explain a limitation that put the brakes on the further development of the genetic code, which is the universal set of rules that all organisms on Earth use to translate genetic sequences of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) into the amino acid sequences that comprise the proteins that undertake cell functions.

Headed by ICREA researcher Lluís Ribas de Pouplana at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and in collaboration with Fyodor A. Kondrashov, at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and Modesto Orozco, from IRB Barcelona, the team of scientists has demonstrated that the genetic code evolved to include a maximum of 20 amino acids and that it was unable to grow further because of a functional limitation of transfer RNAs—the molecules that serve as interpreters between the language of genes and that of proteins. This halt in the increase in the complexity of life happened more than 3,000 million years ago, before the separate evolution of bacteria, eukaryotes and archaebacteria, as all organisms use the same code to produce proteins from genetic information.

Continue reading “Discovery of a fundamental limit to the evolution of the genetic code” »

Ask an Information Architect, CDO, Data Architect (Enterprise and non-Enterprise) they will tell you they have always known that information/ data is a basic staple like Electricity all along; and glad that folks are finally realizing it. So, the same view that we apply to utilities as core to our infrastructure & survival; we should also apply the same value and view about information. And, in fact, information in some areas can be even more important than electricity when you consider information can launch missals, cure diseases, make you poor or wealthy, take down a government or even a country.

What is information? Is it energy, matter, or something completely different? Although we take this word for granted and without much thought in today’s world of fast Internet and digital media, this was not the case in 1948 when Claude Shannon laid the foundations of information theory. His landmark paper interpreted information in purely mathematical terms, a decision that dematerialized information forever more. Not surprisingly, there are many nowadays that claim — rather unthinkingly — that human consciousness can be expressed as “pure information”, i.e. as something immaterial graced with digital immortality. And yet there is something fundamentally materialistic about information that we often ignore, although it stares us — literally — in the eye: the hardware that makes information happen.

As users we constantly interact with information via a machine of some kind, such as our laptop, smartphone or wearable. As developers or programmers we code via a computer terminal. As computer or network engineers we often have to wade through the sheltering heat of a server farm, or deal with the material properties of optical fibre or copper in our designs. Hardware and software are the fundamental ingredients of our digital world, both necessary not only in engineering information systems but in interacting with them as well. But this status quo is about to be massively disrupted by Artificial Intelligence.

Continue reading “How AI will make information akin to electricity” »

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have used chemicals to transform skin cells into heart cells and brain cells, instead of adding external genes — making this accomplishment a breakthrough, according to the scientists.

Continue reading “Scientists turn skin cells into heart and brain cells using only drugs — no stem cells required” »

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These artificial muscles could revolutionize medical implants.

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The world’s smallest robots: rise of the nanomachines.

Continue reading “The World’s Smallest Robots: Rise of the Nanomachines” »