Lifeboat Foundation

AI-enabled imaging of the retina’s network of veins and arteries can accurately predict cardiovascular disease and death, without the need for blood tests or blood pressure measurement, finds research published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

As such, it paves the way for a highly effective, non-invasive screening test for people at medium to high risk of circulatory disease that doesn’t have to be done in a clinic, suggest the researchers.

Circulatory diseases, including cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, heart failure and stroke, are major causes of ill health and death worldwide, accounting for 1 in 4 UK deaths alone.

Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker (https://nancybrinker.com/) is Founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (https://www.komen.org/) and Co-Founder of the Promise Fund of Florida (https://www.promisefundofflorida.org/).

Amb. Brinker is a three-time Ambassador and New York Times best-selling author who is regarded as the leader of the global breast cancer movement. Her journey began with a promise to her dying sister, Susan G. Komen, that she would do everything possible to end the shame, pain, fear, and hopelessness caused by this disease. In one generation, the organization that bears Susan’s name has changed the world.

Continue reading “Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker — Leading A Global Movement To End Breast Cancer” »

Ground-breaking research at Tel Aviv University successfully eradicated glioblastoma, a deadly form of brain cancer. The researchers achieved the result by developing a strategy based on their finding of two crucial mechanisms in the brain that promote tumor growth and survival: one shields cancer cells from the immune system, while the other provides the energy needed for rapid tumor growth. The research discovered that astrocytes, which are brain cells, regulate both methods, and that when they aren’t there, tumor cells die and are eliminated.

Rita Perelroizen, a Ph.D. student, served as the study’s lead researcher. She collaborated with Professor Eytan Ruppin of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States and was supervised by Dr. Lior Mayo of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv. The study was recently published in the journal Brain and was highlighted with scientific commentary.

Continue reading “Groundbreaking Method ‘Starves’ Highly-Lethal Cancer Tumors of Energy, Eradicating Them” »

Our brains are among the most complex objects in the known universe. Deciphering how they work could bring tremendous benefits, from finding ways to treat brain diseases and neurological disorders to inspiring new forms of machine intelligence.

But a critical starting point is coming up with a parts list. While everyone knows that brains are primarily made up of neurons, there are a dazzling array of different types of these cells. That’s not to mention the various kinds of glial cells that make up the connective tissue of the brain and play a crucial supporting role.

That’s why the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative has just announced $500 million in funding over five years for an effort to characterize and map neuronal and other types of cells across the entire human brain. The project will be spearheaded by the Allen Institute in Seattle, but involves collaborations across 17 other institutions in the US, Europe, and Japan.

Continue reading “A $500 Million International Project Will Create the Most Detailed Map of the Brain Ever” »

There needs to be a radical change to biological wetware in order to handle viruses. What is needed is either nanoparticles or an immunity to all diseases. Crispr is the main path for the biological singularity but it needs to be perfected first as the human body is still a black box due to restrictions. I do believe that mass spectrometry will essentially be key to see the inner world of human biology. Then crispr can make new parts essentially to evolve past our current limits. But either way the biological singularity is needed for survival of human beings for better health.

The coronavirus revealed flaws in the nation’s pandemic plans. The spread of monkeypox shows that the problems remain deeply entrenched.

Such robotic schools could be tasked with locating and recording data on coral reefs to help researchers to study the reefs’ health over time. Just as living fish in a school might engage in different behaviours simultaneously — some mating, some caring for young, others finding food — but suddenly move as one when a predator approaches, robotic fish would have to perform individual tasks while communicating to each other when it’s time to do something different.

“The majority of what my lab really looks at is the coordination techniques — what kinds of algorithms have evolved in nature to make systems work well together?” she says.

Many roboticists are looking to biology for inspiration in robot design, particularly in the area of locomotion. Although big industrial robots in vehicle factories, for instance, remain anchored in place, other robots will be more useful if they can move through the world, performing different tasks and coordinating their behaviour.

Summary: Oxytocin, a hormone connected with bonding and love, could help to heal damage following a heart attack. Researchers found oxytocin stimulates stem cells from the heart’s outer layer and migrates into the middle layer where it develops into muscle cells that generate heart contractions. This could be used to promote the regeneration of heart cells following a heart attack.

Source: Frontiers.

The neurohormone oxytocin is well-known for promoting social bonds and generating pleasurable feelings, for example from art, exercise, or sex. But the hormone has many other functions, such as the regulation of lactation and uterine contractions in females, and the regulation of ejaculation, sperm transport, and testosterone production in males.

In a recent study published in The Lancet Microbe, researchers assessed the role of gut bacterial microbiome assembly and the gut mycobiome in relation to health, pathology, and clinical applications.

Studies have built a framework for investigating how gut fungi are connected to—or perhaps cause—different diseases and how to alter gut fungi to treat diseases by revealing the landscape of gut mycobiome composition in humans. Importantly, available mycobiome discoveries are not extensively applied to clinical practice, and gut fungi are still widely ignored in the context of treatments based on the microbiota.

According to studies conducted on mice, altering the intestinal fungi through oral administration of antifungal medications worsened allergic rhinitis and colitis, indicating that an imbalance in the gut mycobiome may play a role in the pathogenesis of intestinal as well as extra-intestinal diseases. Similar comparisons between the gut mycobiomes of healthy people and patients with various intestinal and extra-intestinal disorders have been documented in many studies.

Continue reading “The compositional and functional diversity of the gut fungal microbiome” »

Without altering the genetic code in the DNA, epigenetic modifications can change how genes are expressed, affecting an organism’s health and development. The once radical idea that such changes in gene expression can be inherited now has a growing body of evidence behind it, but the mechanisms involved remain poorly understood.

A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows how a common type of epigenetic modification can be transmitted via sperm not only from parents to offspring, but to the next generation (“grandoffspring”) as well. This is called “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance,” and it may explain how a person’s health and development could be influenced by the experiences of his or her parents and grandparents.

The study, published the week of September 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), focused on a particular modification of a histone protein that changes the way DNA is packaged in the chromosomes. This widely studied epigenetic mark (called H3K27me3) is known to turn off or “repress” the affected genes and is found in all multicellular animals—from humans to the nematode worm C. elegans used in this study.