Lifeboat Foundation

As the COVID-19 cases continue to rise globally, the National Medical Products Administration of China has approved the first-ever antiviral medicine called Favilavir. This medicine is said to possibly treat the now-declared pandemic illness.

Over the weekend, Taizhou’s city government announced that Favilavir, which was initially formulated by a Chinese-owned pharmaceutical firm, is the first medicine authorized to stop the widespread of this fatal illness. At present, this drug is being promoted with the label, Avigan.

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Now a new manufacturing method dubbed “robotic blacksmithing” has the potential to revolutionize the way high-quality structural parts are made, resulting in a new class of customized and optimized products. I am part of a loose coalition of engineers developing this process, a technique I believe can help revive U.S. manufacturing.

Today’s Technologies

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A new method to accurately record brain activity at scale has been developed by researchers at the Crick, Stanford University and UCL. The technique could lead to new medical devices to help amputees, people with paralysis or people with neurological conditions such as motor neurone disease.

The research in mice, published in Science Advances, developed an accurate and scalable method to record brain activity across large areas, including on the surface and in deeper regions simultaneously.

Circa 2008

The DNA of a 4-year-old female Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon has been sequenced, according to a report by Joan U. Pontius, PhD, et al.

The hydra is named after the serpent monster from Greek myth, which regrows two heads each time one is cut off. But freshwater hydras have an even more impressive regenerating ability: an entire hydra can regrow from a small piece of tissue in only a few days.

Biologists are particularly excited by this ability, since many of the networks involved in the healing process developed early in the process of evolution, meaning that they are shared among many animals, including humans.

“In other organisms, like humans, once our brain is injured, we have difficulty recovering because the brain lacks the kind of regenerative abilities we see in hydra,” said researcher Abby Primack.

Futurist Dr. Ian Pearson believes that if you live to 2050, you may never die. Here is why.

The genetic information of an organism is stored within DNA. It contains the code for making other molecules that make all cells and organs of the body functional. Interestingly, only 1% of DNA makes up genes, of which proteins are produced via RNA intermediaries. There is much debate on the role of the remaining DNA, but different types of RNA are thought to be produced from it and direct the fate of the cell. Even though each cell of the body contains the same DNA, how they read and process DNA to make RNA can differ quite dramatically between single cells. This has especially been known for the transcriptome, which includes all RNA that are produced from genes, but not so much for other RNA.

“Genes have been the main focus of biological research for a long time,” says lead author of the study Haruka Ozaki. “We wanted to focus on what we call read coverage of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, which also includes RNA that are not products of genes. Although we can measure the amount of different RNA a single cell produces by scRNA-seq technologies, we wanted to come up with a new method that also visualizes specifically read coverage, because only then we can get a full picture of RNA biology and how it contributes to cell biology at the single-cell level.”

To achieve their goal, the researchers developed a new computational tool that they called Millefy uses existing scRNA-seq data to visualize read coverage of single cells as a heat map, illustrating differences between individual cells on a relative scale. The researchers first demonstrated the utility of Millefy in a well-established mouse embryonic stem cell model by showing heterogeneity of read coverage between developing cells. They then applied Millefy to cancer cells from patients with triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly aggressive type of breast cancer. Not only did Millefy show heterogeneity between cancer cells in general, but it revealed heterogeneity in a specific aspect of RNA biology that had previously been unknown.

Continue reading “Seeing is believing: Visualizing differences in RNA biology between single cells” »

The researchers of a new review have examined the relationship between cellular senescence and bone marrow cancers, looking at how senescence can ultimately fuel cancer development and how malignant cells induce senescence [1].

Well this is good news. Now they just need to pour every dime into the manufacturing and hurry the hell up.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first coronavirus diagnostic test that can be conducted entirely at the point of care.

The test from California-based Cepheid will deliver results in about 45 minutes — much faster than current tests that require a sample to be sent to a centralized lab, where results can take days.

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