Lifeboat Foundation

Since antiquity, cultures on nearly every continent have discovered that certain plant leaves, when chewed or brewed or rubbed on the body, could relieve diverse ailments, inspire hallucinations or, in higher dosages, even cause death. Today, pharmaceutical companies import these once-rare plants from specialized farms and extract their active chemical compounds to make drugs like scopolamine for relieving motion sickness and postoperative nausea, and atropine, to curb the drooling associated with Parkinson’s disease or help maintain cardiac function when intubating COVID-19 patients and placing them on ventilators.

Now, Stanford engineers are recreating these ancient remedies in a thoroughly modern way by genetically reprogramming the cellular machinery of a special strain of yeast, effectively transforming them into microscopic factories that convert sugars and amino acids into these folkloric drugs, in much the same way that brewers’ yeast can naturally convert sugars into alcohol.

Low-temperature plasmas offer promise for applications in medicine, water purification, agriculture, pollutant removal, nanomaterial synthesis and more. Yet making these plasmas by conventional methods takes several thousand volts of electricity, says David Go, an aerospace and mechanical engineer at the University of Notre Dame. That limits their use outside high-voltage power settings.

In work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Go and a team of researchers conducted research that explores making plasma devices that can be operated without electrical power—they need only human or mechanical energy.

Their paper in Applied Physics Letters introduces a strategy the scientists call “energy-conversion plasma” as an alternative to producing “transient spark” discharges without the need for a very high-voltage power supply.

But the question a lot of us in Australia might have is, when there are plenty of other protein options, why should we bother eating insects?

Insects are delicious and nutritious and can be grown in shipping containers in the middle of cities and towns. Is it time Australians joined the 2 billion people around the world who eat insects daily?

These plants have evolved to absorb metal from the soil via Seeker.

Rabia Nusrat, an environmental engineering student, Global UGRAD alumni, in her final year at University of Engineering and Technology, UET, Lahore, Pakistan and the first ideaXme public interviewer, interviews Shayan Sohail Sarwar, Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia Innovator and Chief Technology Officer PakVitae.

PakVitae:

Continue reading “Forbes 30 under 30 Asia Innovators 2020 from Pakistan Create PakVitae for the World” »

In a recent study conducted in mice, researchers became one step closer to that understanding, discovering that exercise actually strengthens the brain’s resilience to stress. Exercise helps animals cope with stress by enabling an uptick in a crucial neural protein called galanin, the study suggests. This process influences stress levels, food consumption, cognition, and mood.

Leveraging this finding, researchers were able to genetically tweak even sedentary mice’s levels of galanin, shifts that lowered their anxious response to stress.

The study’s authors explain that this study helps pin down the biological mechanisms driving exercise’s positive effects on stress. While further human experiments are needed to confirm these findings, the researchers have practical advice for people looking to get these benefits: perform regular, aerobic exercise.

We also discovered that our protein is located at the plasma membrane, the boundary between the inside and outside of a cell. This is critical. We are putting stock in the idea that this transporter moves sucrose from the outside of cells and into the phloem. To perform this function, its location on the plasma membrane is a must.

MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory (PRL) scientists have characterized a sucrose transporter protein found in common beans. The recently discovered protein could help us understand how beans tolerate hot temperatures. The transporter, called PvSUT1.1, is reported in the journal Plant Direct.

During photosynthesis, bean leaves capture carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into sugars that fuel their growth and development. Most species transport these sugars throughout the plant in the form of sucrose.

Continue reading “Newly discovered sugar transporter might help beans tolerate hot temperatures” »

It was at this webcast that Musk unveiled the latest version of his company NeuraLink’s latest prototype, the Link VO.9 — a chip that would allow humans to control devices with their brains.

Musk said this could eventually help cure people with conditions like memory loss, hearing loss, paralysis, blindness, brain damage, depression and anxiety.

Viewers of the webcast met Gertrude, a pig that had the chip implanted in her brain two months ago. A graph shown onscreen showed the waves inside Gertrude’s brain, which fired when her brain communicated with her snout while she was eating.

Scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a novel method of using fruit peel waste to extract and reuse precious metals from spent lithium-ion batteries in order to create new batteries.

The team demonstrated their concept using orange peel, which recovered precious metals from battery waste efficiently. They then made functional batteries from these recovered metals, creating minimal waste in the process.

The scientists say that their waste-to-resource approach tackles both food waste and electronics waste, supporting the development of a circular economy with zero waste, in which resources are kept in use for as long as possible. An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of food waste and 50 million tonnes of e-waste are generated globally each year.