Lifeboat Foundation

Henry Ford’s Model T was famously made partly from hemp bioplastic and powered by hemp biofuel. Now, with battery-powered vehicles starting to replace those that use combustion engines, it has been found that hemp batteries perform eight times better than lithium-ion. Is there anything that this criminally-underused plant can’t do?

The comparison has only been proven on a very small scale. (You weren’t expecting a Silicon Valley conglomerate to do something genuinely groundbreaking were you? They mainly just commercialise stuff that’s been invented or at least funded by the state.) But the results are extremely promising.

Fasting-mimicking diets delay tumor progression and sensitize a wide range of tumors to chemotherapy, but their therapeutic potential in combination with non-cytotoxic compounds is poorly understood. Here we show that vitamin C anticancer activity is limited by the up-regulation of the stress-inducible protein heme-oxygenase-1. The fasting-mimicking diet selectivity reverses vitamin C-induced up-regulation of heme-oxygenase-1 and ferritin in KRAS-mutant cancer cells, consequently increasing reactive iron, oxygen species, and cell death; an effect further potentiated by chemotherapy. In support of a potential role of ferritin in colorectal cancer progression, an analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas Database indicates that KRAS mutated colorectal cancer patients with low intratumor ferritin mRNA levels display longer 3- and 5-year overall survival. Collectively, our data indicate that the combination of a fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C represents a promising low toxicity intervention to be tested in randomized clinical trials against colorectal cancer and possibly other KRAS mutated tumors.

But Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer scientist who has for decades warned against blindly automating tasks with computers, thinks fully automated cars and the tech industry’s vision for a robotic future is misguided. Even dangerous. Robots should collaborate with humans, he believes, rather than replace them.

A computer scientist argues that the quest for fully automated robots is misguided, perhaps even dangerous. His decades of warnings are gaining more attention.

Three critically ill patients at Baptist Hospital in Miami were the first in the U.S. to be successfully treated with stem cells.

The patients were suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, and doctors infused them intravenously with cells derived from the lining of umbilical cords.

These are called mesenchymal stem cells and within days after the infusion, the patients who needed 100% oxygen on ventilator support, saw their requirement slashed in half. This significant reduction was also accompanied by a drop in inflammatory markers, meaning that the harmful inflammation crippling the lungs was not only arrested but reversed, according to Baptist Health South

Continue reading “New Stem Cell Therapy for COVID-19 Patients Is Successful” »

Here’s a new chapter in the story of the miniaturization of machines: researchers in a laboratory in Singapore have shown that a single atom can function as either an engine or a fridge. Such a device could be engineered into future computers and fuel cells to control energy flows.” Think about how your computer or laptop has a lot of things inside it that heat up. Today you cool that with a fan that blows air. In nanomachines or quantum computers, small devices that do cooling could be something useful,” says Dario Poletti from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

This work gives new insight into the mechanics of such devices. The work is a collaboration involving researchers at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) and Department of Physics at the National University of Singapore (NUS), SUTD and at the University of Augsburg in Germany. The results were published in the peer-reviewed journal npj Quantum Information on 1 May.

Engines and refrigerators are both machines described by thermodynamics, a branch of science that tells us how energy moves within a system and how we can extract useful work. A classical engine turns energy into useful work. A refrigerator does work to transfer heat, reducing the local temperature. They are, in some sense, opposites.

DNA damage is common to our cells, but when we’re young our bodies can fix it pretty easily. Unfortunately we lose that ability over time, leading to many of the symptoms of aging that we know all too well. A new study from MIT has found that reactivating a certain enzyme improves repair of DNA damage in neurons, which helps Alzheimer’s patients and others with cognitive decline.

Previous studies by the team have shown that an enzyme called HDAC1 seems to be involved in DNA repair in neurons. For the new study, the researchers examined what happens when HDAC1 doesn’t do its job.

The team engineered mice to be deficient in HDAC1, and monitored their health compared to normal mice. Things looked good during the animals’ youth – there were no differences in DNA damage or behavior between the two groups. But as they aged, the decline became clear.

Circa 2015

A decidedly renewable resource has some very profitable uses.

Circa 2014 o.o

It’s a much better option than desalination.

Engineers found a way to stabilize a drone that only uses two propellers.