Lifeboat Foundation

A total knee replacement is usually the result of the cartilage within the joint wearing out due to arthritis. Such surgeries are difficult to perform, require a good deal of rehabilitation, and too often result in sub-optimal outcomes. An implantable shock absorber has now been implanted for the first time in the United States to test whether it can delay the need for total knee replacements, and maybe even avoid such procedures completely in many patients.

The Calypso Knee System was developed by Moximed, a company based in Fremont, California, and surgeons at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are the first to try it out in the U.S. The device attaches to the sides of the femur and tibia bones, away from the joint itself and therefore doesn’t alter the anatomy of the fragile joint.

Continue reading “Implantable Knee Shock Absorber Embedded in First Patient in U.S.” »

Demonstrating the preservation of cells after a living organism is pronounced dead and revived is not a traditional bioart topic. But it is an important one. It is a crucial step for advances in the use of lowered temperatures for sustaining the efficacy of organs and organisms during medical procedures, and especially of preserving neurons for the science cryonics.

My recent bioart research is a breakthrough that will help to build momentum toward more advanced studies on information storage within the brain, as well as short-term behaviors of episodic, semantic, procedural, and working memory.

In this article, I will review how I became involved in this research, the guidance along the way, my initial training at 21st Century Medicine, pitching the research project to Alcor, and submitting my proposal to its Research Center (ARC). I will then take you into the lab, the process of trial and error in our first studies, developing a protocol based on olfactory imprinting and applying several cryopreservation methods, developing the migration index, and the rewards of working with a lab technician who became an admiral colleague.

Latest Treatment Options for Epilepsy.

You can freeze them, burn them, dry them out or even blast them into space, but humble tardigrades can survive it all.

As a demonstration of tardigrade power, a new experiment has shown that even locking the critters in a block of ice for three decades fails to deliver the ultimate knockout.

Japanese researchers successfully brought two tardigrades — often called “water bears” for their claws and head shape — back to life after being frozen for 30 years. A separate team of Japanese researchers with the 24th Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition discovered the eight-legged, microscopic pair of animals back in 1983 in a frozen sample of moss, which was kept below freezing to the present day.

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Journalist Ashlee Vance travels to Montreal, Canada to meet the founders of Lyrebird, a startup that is using AI to clone human voices with frightening precision.

Hello World is a Webby and Emmy-nominated video series from Bloomberg that invites the viewer to come on a journey across the globe to find the inventors, scientists and technologists shaping our future. Join journalist and best-selling author Ashlee Vance on a quest to find the freshest, weirdest tech creations and the beautiful freaks behind them.

Continue reading “This AI Can Clone Any Voice, Including Yours” »

Researchers have created “sponges” that would absorb excess cancer drugs before they spread through the body and cause negative side effects.

People die. All the time. From many causes, including old age, disease, accidents, murder. But researchers can learn from these deaths.

Heather Edgar, forensic anthropologist at The University of New Mexico Office of Medical Investigator (OMI) and associate professor of anthropology, is currently converting a dataset of whole body decedent CT scans into a searchable database that will be available to researchers.

The database will be stored on systems at the UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing, with the help of CARC network and storage specialist Hussein Al-Azzawi. It is being funded by a $702,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice.

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Fever is known to help power up our immune cells, and scientists in Shanghai have new evidence explaining how. They found in mice that fever alters surface proteins on immune cells like lymphocytes to make them better able to travel via blood vessels to reach the site of infection. Their work appears on January 15 in the journal Immunity.

“One good thing about fever is that it can promote lymphocyte trafficking to the site of infection, so you will have more immune cells in the infected region that will get rid of the pathogen,” says Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology (SIBCB) Professor and senior author JianFeng Chen.

To get to an infection, white blood cells need to adhere to the blood vessel and then transmigrate into the infected tissue or lymph node. During this step, molecules known as integrins are expressed on the surface of lymphocytes. Integrins are cell adhesion molecules that control lymphocyte trafficking during inflammation.

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Marijuana compound reduces mental decline in HIV patients.