Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,671

Your Body Is a Teeming Battleground

It’s time to rethink the quest to control aging, death, and disease—and the fear of mortality that fuels it.

I went to medical school, at least in part, to get to know death and perhaps to make my peace with it. So did many of my doctor friends, as I would find out. One day—usually when you’re young, though sometimes later—the thought hits you: You really are going to die. That moment is shocking, frightening, terrible. You try to pretend it hasn’t happened (it’s only a thought, after all), and you go about your business, worrying about this or that, until the day you put your hand to your neck—in the shower, say—and … What is that? Those hard lumps that you know, at first touch, should not be there? But there they are, and they mean death. Your death, and you can’t pretend anymore.

I never wanted to be surprised that way, and I thought that if I became a doctor and saw a lot of death, I might get used to it; it wouldn’t surprise me, and I could learn to live with it. My strategy worked pretty well. Over the decades, from all my patients, I learned that I would be well until I got sick and that although I could do some things to delay the inevitable a bit, whatever control I had was limited. I learned that I had to live as if I would die tomorrow and at the same time as if I would live forever. Meanwhile, I watched as what had been called “medical care”—that is, treating the sick—turned into “health care,” keeping people healthy, at an ever-rising cost.

Contact Lens Kinda Makes You Cyborgy

This one’s kinda hard to swallow so take a deep breath, open your minds, and pretend it’s 2100. I CONTACT is essentially a mouse fitted to your eyeball. The lens is inserted like any other normal contact lens except it’s laced with sensors to track eye movement, relaying that position to a receiver connected to your computer. Theoretically that should give you full control over a mouse cursor. I’d imagine holding a blink correlates to mouse clicks.

The idea was originally created for people with disabilities but anyone could use it. Those of us too lazy to use a mouse now have a free hand to do whatever it is people do when they sit at the computer for endless hours. I love the idea but there is a caveat. How is the lens powered? Perhaps in the future, electrical power can be harnessed from the human body, just not in a Matrix creepy-like way.

Designers: eun-gyeong gwon & eun-jae lee.

New cancer stem cell marker also kills off cancer cells

Fluorescent dye not only highlights but also kills cancer stem cells.

Korean and Singaporean scientists have recently proposed a new probe to detect cancer stem cells, and it might be an effective seek-and-destroy weapon against a variety of cancer types.

In a paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie earlier this month, the researchers describe a fluorescent dye that they created to highlight cancer stem cells, and, as it turns out, the dye does more than that—it may actually be lethal to the cells it binds to [1].

Cancer stem cells in brief

Cancer stem cells (CSCs, also known as TICs, tumor-initiating cells) are exactly what they sound like; they are cancerous cells that exhibit stem cell-like abilities to self-renew and differentiate into the other cell types found in a given tumor. Discovered at the end of the 90s, these cells are the real culprit behind cancerous growth, being able to give rise to both to other CSCs and cells that, while non-tumorigenic themselves, are still part of a tumor—they descend from a cancer stem cell but do not have the same ability to divide uncontrollably. This is according to the CSC model of cancer; according to the stochastic model, it might be possible that every cell in a tumor has the ability to self-renew and differentiate, not only cancer stem cells, and the truth might be not so clear-cut, with some tumors following one model and others following the other [2].

New device modulates light and amplifies tiny signals

Imagine a single particle, only one-tenth the diameter of a bacterium, whose miniscule jiggles induce sustained vibrations in an entire mechanical device some 50 times larger. By taking clever advantage of the interplay between light, electrons on the surface of metals, and heat, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time created a plasmomechanical oscillator (PMO), so named because it tightly couples plasmons—the collective oscillations of electrons at the surface of a metal nanoparticle—to the mechanical vibrations of the much larger device it’s embedded in.

The entire system, no bigger than a , has myriad technological applications. It offers new ways to miniaturize mechanical oscillators, improve communication systems that depend on the modulation of , dramatically amplify extremely weak mechanical and electrical signals and create exquisitely sensitive sensors for the tiny motions of nanoparticles.

NIST researchers Brian Roxworthy and Vladimir Aksyuk described their work in a recent issue of Optica.

Alzheimer’s gene neutralised in human brain cells for the first time

S cientists have claimed an important breakthrough in the battle against Alzheimer’s after neutralising the most significant gene responsible for the disease for the first time.

A team in California successfully identified the protein associated with the high-risk apoE4 gene and then manage to prevent it damaging human neuron cells.

The study could open the door to a potential new drug capable of halting the disease, however the researchers have urged caution because so far their compound has only been tried on collections of cells in a laboratory.

Liver proteins help stem cells

Blood stem cells are produced in the bone marrow, yet new evidence from mice studies suggests that proteins produced in the liver help maintain the production of these critical stem cells from afar. Haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which differentiate into various blood cells, are largely produced and maintained by specialised cells that also reside in the bone marrow. However, emerging evidence hints that HSC behaviour is affected via long-range signals originating from a distant part of the body in mammals. To pinpoint the origins of these mysterious signals, researchers investigated which organs in mice produced a key protein called haematopoietic cytokine thrombopoietin which is known to help maintain HSCs, called haematopoietic cytokine thrombopoietin (TPO). The protein, it emerged, was enriched in osteoblasts, mesenchymal stromal cells, and the liver. The researchers found that knocking out TPO production in osteoblasts and mesenchymal stromal cells had little effect on the maintenance of HPCs. However, when they blocked production of TPO in liver cells, this resulted in a 24-fold reduction of HPCs in the bone marrow. The findings appear in the journal Science.

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