Lifeboat Foundation

The coronavirus outbreak in China has had a foreseeable but unintended consequence. Truck drivers have refused to make deliveries into areas either identified as or suspected of harboring the disease.

This has interrupted not only the flow of minerals out of the affected areas but also the refining and manufacturing of metals, food, and fuel. Among the under-reported deficiencies thereby caused the most important ones for the global rare earths production and utilization industries is the interruption in the flow of chemical reagents necessary for refining rare earths and for producing metals, alloys, and magnets.

Critical materials-based supply chains may be hanging by a thread, the thread of the size of existing Chinese inventories. The coronavirus outbreak in China has had a foreseeable but unintended consequence.

Continue reading “The inevitable impact of the Coronavirus on the world’s rare earths supply” »

Scientists say they have used the gene editing tool CRISPR inside someone’s body for the first time — offering a new frontier for efforts to operate on DNA, the chemical code of life, to treat diseases.

A patient recently had it done at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland for an inherited form of blindness, according to the companies that make the treatment. The company would not give details on the patient or when the surgery occurred.

It may take up to a month to see if it worked to restore the patient’s vision. If the first few attempts seem safe, doctors plan to test it on 18 children and adults.

We would like to thank the many people who provided comments to our last coronavirus update at https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeboatfoundation/permalink/10158676889983455/.

You can comment on this update at https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeboatfoundation/permalink/10158683233098455/.

Here’s a lot of new information:

Continue reading “Coronavirus Update II” »

A team of scientists in China has linked quantum memories over more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) of fiber optic cable, beating the previous record by more than 40 times over. This feat is an important step toward a hack-proof internet, scientists said.

The internet we use today was truly a revolutionary invention. It connected the world with information and allowed us to share millions of photos of cute and cuddly cats. But the internet is also filled with hackers trying to intercept important or sensitive information. To fight back, physicists have come up with a solution, with a little help from Schrödinger’s cat, the famous, hypothetical dead-and-alive feline meant to expose the weird nature of subatomic particles.

When DARPA launched its Pandemic Preparedness Platform (P3) program two years ago, the pandemic was theoretical. It seemed like a prudent idea to develop a quick response to emerging infectious diseases. Researchers working under the program sought ways to confer instant (but short-term) protection from a dangerous virus or bacteria.

Today, as the novel coronavirus causes a skyrocketing number of COVID-19 cases around the world, the researchers are racing to apply their experimental techniques to a true pandemic playing out in real time. “Right now, they have one shot on goal,” says DARPA program manager Amy Jenkins. “We’re really hoping it works.”

The P3 program’s plan was to start with a new pathogen and to “develop technology to deliver medical countermeasures in under 60 days—which was crazy, unheard of,” says Jenkins. The teams have proven they can meet this ambitious timeline in previous trials using the influenza and Zika viruses. Now they’re being asked to pull off the same feat with the new coronavirus, which more formally goes by the name SARS-CoV-2 and causes the illness known as COVID-19.

Getting plenty of deep, restful sleep is essential for our physical and mental health. Now comes word of yet another way that sleep is good for us: it triggers rhythmic waves of blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that appear to function much like a washing machine’s rinse cycle, which may help to clear the brain of toxic waste on a regular basis.

The video above uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to take you inside a person’s brain to see this newly discovered rinse cycle in action. First, you see a wave of blood flow (red, yellow) that’s closely tied to an underlying slow-wave of electrical activity (not visible). As the blood recedes, CSF (blue) increases and then drops back again. Then, the cycle—lasting about 20 seconds—starts over again.

Continue reading “Discovering the Brain’s Nightly ‘Rinse Cycle’” »

“It’s hard to find a body part they can’t regenerate: the limbs, the tail, the spinal cord, the eye, and in some species, the lens, even half of their brain has been shown to regenerate,” Kentucky researcher Randal Voss said in the release.

“Just a few years ago, no one thought it possible to assemble a 30+GB genome,” said Kentucky biologist Jeramiah Smith. “We have now shown it is possible using a cost effective and accessible method, which opens up the possibility of routinely sequencing other animals with large genomes.”

With that capability, the team hopes to begin probing the full DNA sequence for insights into the axolotl’s regenerative abilities.

Continue reading “Scientists: Salamander DNA Could Regenerate Human Body Parts” »

“Receiving influenza vaccination may increase the risk of other respiratory viruses, a phenomenon known as virus interference…” “…Examining virus interference by specific respiratory viruses showed mixed results. Vaccine derived virus interference was significantly associated with coronavirus and human metapneumovirus; however, significant protection with vaccination was associated not only with most influenza viruses, but also parainfluenza, RSV, and non-influenza virus coinfections.”

Vaccine. 2020 Jan 10;38:350–354. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.10.005. Epub 2019 Oct 10.

PURPOSE: Receiving influenza vaccination may increase the risk of other respiratory viruses, a phenomenon known as virus interference. Test-negative study designs are often utilized to calculate influenza vaccine effectiveness. The virus interference phenomenon goes against the basic assumption of the test-negative vaccine effectiveness study that vaccination does not change the risk of infection with other respiratory illness, thus potentially biasing vaccine effectiveness results in the positive direction. This study aimed to investigate virus interference by comparing respiratory virus status among Department of Defense personnel based on their influenza vaccination status. Furthermore, individual respiratory viruses and their association with influenza vaccination were examined.

Continue reading “Influenza vaccination and respiratory virus interference among Department of Defense personnel during the 2017-2018 influenza season. — PubMed — NCBI” »

The Curiosity rover analyzes compounds by breaking them down into fragments. The upcoming European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover, however, could fill in the gaps with its Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA), which doesn’t use the same destructive technique as Curiosity.

What has Schulze-Makuch most excited is the possibility of finding differing ratios of heavy and light isotopes in compounds, the result of organisms breaking down elements and “a telltale signal for life,” according to the researcher.

“As Carl Sagan said ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,’” Schulze-Makuch said. “I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe.”