Lifeboat Foundation

Healthcare professionals and infectious disease experts around the world agree that extensive testing is the best way to combat coronavirus. However, the extreme shortage of COVID-19 testing kits has made that impossible. The Public Health England (PHE) just announced it was planning to begin rolling out at-home COVID-19 testing kits in the coming days. These tests could tell people if they’ve been infected with COVID-19 in as little as 15 minutes.

Current coronavirus testing is time-consuming and expensive because it requires healthcare practitioners to collect samples from the patient and have them processed in a laboratory. The test promised by the UK government would look like a pregnancy test and needs just a drop of blood to diagnose the individual.

Several companies are working on at-home COVID-19 tests, but PHE didn’t say which test it planned to deploy. According to PHE, the unnamed test takes 15 minutes to work, and it will be available at pharmacies and online via retailers like Amazon. The test will detect antibodies in the user’s blood that indicate they have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It works with both Immunoglobulin M and Immunoglobulin G (IgM and IGG) type antibodies. IgM peaks early in an infection and IgG remains even after the infection has subsided.

Heart injury could be a common condition in patients hospitalized with Covid-19, according to a new study that also shows it’s linked to a greater risk of death among those patients.

The study, published in the medical journal JAMA Cardiology on Wednesday, found that among a group of Covid-19 patients hospitalized in Wuhan China, 19.7% suffered cardiac injury, which was found to be a risk factor for dying in the hospital.

Cardiac injury, also referred to as myocardial injury, occurs when there is damage to the heart muscle, and such damage can occur when blood flow to the heart is reduced — which is what causes a heart attack.

Science fiction has always been a medium for futuristic imagination and while different colored aliens and intergalactic travel are yet to be discovered, there is an array of technologies that are no longer figments of the imagination thanks to the world of science fiction. Some of the creative inventions that have appeared in family-favorite movies like “Back to the Future” and “Total Recall,” are now at the forefront of modern technology. Here are a few of our favorite technologies that went from science fiction to reality.

These modern-day technologies appeared in science fiction decades before their time.

People often criticize AI tested in “toy cases,” or datasets that may have limited significance in the real world. With COVID-19, that’s no longer the case.

:ooooo.

Unlocking the full potential of cannabis for agriculture and human health will require a co-ordinated scientific effort to assemble and map the cannabis genome, says a just-published international study led by University of Saskatchewan researchers.

In a major statistical analysis of existing data and studies published in the Annual Review of Plant Biology, the authors conclude there are large gaps in the scientific knowledge of this high-demand, multi-purpose crop.

Continue reading “Mapping the cannabis genome to improve crops and health” »

O,.,o.

Stanford scientists may have found a way to essentially return older cells to a more youthful state. The adult cells are treated with a mix of proteins from early embryonic development, which removes many of the molecular signs of aging. The cells closely resembled younger ones, and in mouse tests, older animals regained the muscle strength of youth.

Stem cells have the remarkable ability to differentiate into basically any other type of cell in the body. That’s not only important for healthy development of embryos, but it opens an intriguing possible treatment for replenishing lost cells to repair damage to organs and tissues.

Continue reading “Stem cell technique winds back aging in human cells” »

Researchers have developed the first computational model of a human cell and simulated its behavior for 15 minutes—the longest time achieved for a biological system of this complexity. In a new study, simulations reveal the effects of spatial organization within cells on some of the genetic processes that control the regulation and development of human traits and some human diseases.

The study, which produced a new computational platform that is available to any researcher, is published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

“This is the first program that allows researchers to set up a virtual human cell and change chemical reactions and geometries to observe cellular processes in real time,” said Zhaleh Ghaemi, a research scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and lead author of the study.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) — The father of a two-month-old infant in Shanghai has created a custom-built pod complete with an air purification system to keep his baby safe from the coronavirus outbreak.

Cao Junjie, 30, refashioned a cat carrier to make the sealable pod that includes an air-quality monitor displaying the concentration of carbon dioxide inside.

“Because of the epidemic, I spent a month making this baby safety pod for my kid … It can provide a safe and comfortable environment for the baby,” Cao told Reuters on Wednesday.

I believe people are dying because the response to this is surreal. You can spend over $1.5 Trillion on an F-35 that has been grounded more times than grass, yet this is happening 😳. Cheap test kits were offered by startups, nanotech protective gear was offered by an Israeli startup. Yet for some reason bailing out Mar a Lago makes more sense.

The shortage of safety gear at one Manhattan hospital is so dire that desperate nurses have resorted to wearing trash bags — and some blame the situation for the coronavirus death of a beloved colleague.