Lifeboat Foundation

A licensed drug normally used to treat abnormal levels of fatty substances in the blood could reduce infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus by up to 70 percent, reveals a study in the laboratory by an international collaboration of researchers.

The research team, led by the University of Birmingham and Keele University in the UK and the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Italy, has demonstrated that fenofibrate and its active form (fenofibric acid) can significantly reduce SARS-COV-2 infection in human cells in the laboratory. Importantly, reduction of infection was obtained using concentrations of the drug which are safe and achievable using the standard clinical dose of fenofibrate. Fenofibrate, which is approved for use by most countries in the world including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), is an oral drug currently used to treat conditions such as high levels of cholesterol and lipids (fatty substances) in the blood.

The team is now calling for clinical trials to test the drug in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, to be carried out in addition to two clinical trials also currently underway in such patients in research being led by the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in the US and Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

The Pfizer coronavirus vaccine may be linked to a form of eye inflammation called uveitis, according to a multicenter Israeli study led by Prof. Zohar Habot-Wilner from Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center.

The research was conducted at Rambam Health Care Campus, Galilee Medical Center, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Kaplan Medical Center and Sourasky. It was accepted for publication by the peer-reviewed ophthalmology journal Retina.

Habot-Wilner, head of the Uveitis Service at the hospital, found that 21 people (23 eyes) who had received two shots of the Pfizer vaccine developed uveitis within one to 14 days after receiving their first shot or within one day to one month after the second.

Researchers remain perplexed as to why some patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, remain asymptomatic while other patients develop severe disease symptoms. This question is once again at the front of mind as the Delta variant spreads across the country. In a new retrospective study, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) discovered a specific and sensitive biomarker in blood samples that predicts which patients will develop COVID-19 symptoms. Their results, published online on July 9 in Scientific Reports, show that reduced levels of a specific lipid, sphingosine, are significantly associated with developing COVID-19 symptoms. Conversely, elevated levels of sphingosine, as well as a protein involved in its production, acid ceramidase (AC), are associated with asymptomatic infections.

“We developed this project at a time when there wasn’t a successful vaccine,” said Besim Ogretmen, Ph.D., director of the Lipidomics Shared Resource at Hollings Cancer Center and leader of the Hollings Developmental Cancer Therapeutics Research Program. “We wanted to contribute to the field and know which patients who were exposed to this virus would be symptomatic versus asymptomatic.”

Over the past 16 months several waves of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the U.S. have resulted in more than 35 million cases and almost 630000 deaths. Despite the development of multiple safe and effective vaccines, we are currently experiencing another wave of infections.

Circa 2020

The basic idea behind all nuclear power plants is the same: Convert the heat created by nuclear fission into electricity. There are several ways to do this, but in each case it involves a delicate balancing act between safety and efficiency. A nuclear reactor works best when the core is really hot, but if it gets too hot it will cause a meltdown and the environment will get poisoned and people may die and it will take billions of dollars to clean up the mess.

The last time this happened was less than a decade ago, when a massive earthquake followed by a series of tsunamis caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan. But a new generation of reactors coming online in the next few years aims to make these kinds of disasters a thing of the past. Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they’ll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium individually wrapped in protective shells. It’s called triso fuel, and it’s like a radioactive gobstopper.

Continue reading “Nuclear ‘Power Balls’ May Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past” »

In a major breakthrough, scientists have created time crystals which continuously and repeatedly change their state over time, without either absorbing or dissipating any energy, thus becoming true perpetual motion machines.

Researchers have discovered one of the oldest and best-preserved brains in the fossil record. A 310-million-year-old horseshoe crab was found with its complete brain intact, thanks to a previously unknown preservation method.

The majority of our knowledge of ancient creatures comes from bones – soft tissues don’t fossilize very well. Some mechanisms are better than others at preserving these fragile tissues though, most famously amber. Scientists can then scan amber-encased creatures to image their brains and other organs.

But that record only goes back so far. The oldest amber inclusions date back about 230 million years ago, to the Triassic period. Burgess Shale-type deposits, however, extend as far back as 520 million years ago, to the early Cambrian. These mudstone deposits can also preserve soft tissues as carbon films – most commonly the gut, but on rare occasions imprints of parts of the nervous system can be found.

Upon an otherwise unruly landscape of choppy sea and craggy peaks, the salmon farms that dot many of Norway’s remote fjords impose a neat geometry. The circular pens are placid on the surface, but hold thousands of churning fish, separated by only a net from their wild counterparts. And that is precisely the conundrum. Although the pens help ensure the salmon’s welfare by mimicking the fish’s natural habitat, they also sometimes allow fish to escape, a problem for both the farm and the environment.

In an attempt to prevent escaped fish from interbreeding with their wild counterparts and threatening the latter’s genetic diversity, molecular biologist Anna Wargelius and her team at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway have spent years working on ways to induce sterility in Atlantic salmon. Farmed salmon that cannot reproduce, after all, pose no threat to the gene pool of wild stocks, and Wargelius has successfully developed a technique that uses the gene-editing technology Crispr to prevent the development of the cells that would otherwise generate functioning sex organs.

Continue reading “A sterile solution: How Crispr could protect wild salmon” »

The space-faring firm’s satellite internet service promises connections with high speed and low latency — and data suggests the rollout pace is now increasing.

Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.