Lifeboat Foundation

Last week, Rice University in Houston announced that one of its assistant professors of bioengineering, Jerzy Szablowski, received a Young Faculty Award from DARPA to research non-genetic drugs that can “temporarily enhance the human body’s resilience to extreme cold exposure.”

Thermogenesis is the use of energy to create heat, and our bodies have two different ways of doing this. One is shivering, which we’re all familiar with. The other, which Szablowski simply calls non-shivering thermogenesis, involves burning off brown adipose tissue (BAT), or brow n fat.

This type of fat exists specifically to warm us up when we get cold; it stores energy and only activates in cold temperatures. Most of our body fat is white fat. It builds up when we ingest more calories than we burn and stores those calories for when we don’t get enough energy from food. An unfortunate majority of American adults have the opposite problem: too much white fat, which increases the risk of conditions like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Basically many have theorized that these seeds coming from meteorites mean that essentially perhaps that life started from seeds like this. Going much deeper down the rabbit hole we actually are starting to see a grand design possibly by actually organisms that evolved into what we have now over millions of years which is actually weird because all earth would have been just a rock but this could be a grand architecture genetically even from the first seed to the biological singularity. This could Basically prove the existence of some entity that may have created humans and all life most like from this seed which means whether it is alien gods or God there will be so much more discover due to this complexity which can benefit all medicine and also genetic engineering 🤔 😉 😀

The fact the first of four surviving pieces was collected within 12 hours of landing, allowing little time for contamination, added to the meteorite’s value. Indeed, because the abundance of organic material in the meteorite was ten times lower than in other carbonaceous chondrites, they might not have been distinguishable from Earthly contamination had it not been retrieved so quickly. As it is, some of the amino acids found are quite rare on Earth, confirming their extraterrestrial origins.

The Winchcombe stones had a number of features never previously seen in meteorites, including low amino acid abundance for a carbonaceous chondrite but unusual ratios among the amino acids and PAHs that are present. Combined with the incomplete conversion of Winchcombe’s components into solid rock, this led the authors to speculate Winchcombe could represent a new class of meteorite that has not been studied before.

Continue reading “UK Meteorite That Fell To Earth Contains Building Blocks For Life” »

The ultraviolet nail polish drying devices used to cure gel manicures may pose more of a public health concern than previously thought. Researchers at the University of California San Diego studied these ultraviolet (UV) light emitting devices, and found that their use leads to cell death and cancer-causing mutations in human cells.

The devices are a common fixture in nail salons, and generally use a particular spectrum of UV light (340-395nm) to cure the chemicals used in gel manicures. While tanning beds use a different spectrum of UV light (280-400nm) that studies have conclusively proven to be carcinogenic, the spectrum used in the nail dryers has not been well studied.

“If you look at the way these devices are presented, they are marketed as safe, with nothing to be concerned about,” said Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of bioengineering as well as cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, and corresponding author of the study published Jan. 17 in Nature Communications. “But to the best of our knowledge, no one has actually studied these devices and how they affect human cells at the molecular and cellular levels until now.”

Summary: Researchers have developed a new family of nano-scale capsules capable of carrying CRISPR gene editing tools to different organs of the body before harmlessly dissolving. The capsules were able to enter the brains of mice and successfully edit a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gene therapies have the potential to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, but they face a common barrier — the blood-brain barrier.

Last year, Verve Therapeutics started the first human trial of a CRISPR treatment that could benefit most people—a signal that gene editing may be ready to go mainstream.

Researchers say a new CRISPR gene editing therapy may help treat heart disease. The scientists also found evidence the therapy can help repair damaged tissue immediately after a heart attack.

We live in an era of renewed space exploration, where multiple agencies are planning to send astronauts to the Moon in the coming years. This will be followed in the next decade with crewed missions to Mars by NASA and China, who may be joined by other nations before long. These and other missions that will take astronauts beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the Earth-Moon system require new technologies, ranging from life support and radiation shielding to power and propulsion. And when it comes to the latter, Nuclear Thermal and Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NTP/NEP) is a top contender!

NASA and the Soviet space program spent decades researching nuclear propulsion during the Space Race. A few years ago, NASA reignited its nuclear program for the purpose of developing bimodal nuclear propulsion – a two-part system consisting of an NTP and NEP element – that could enable transits to Mars in 100 days. As part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program for 2023, NASA selected a nuclear concept for Phase I development. This new class of bimodal nuclear propulsion system uses a “wave rotor topping cycle” and could reduce transit times to Mars to just 45 days.

Continue reading “New Nuclear Rocket Design to Send Missions to Mars in Just 45 Days” »

The ultraviolet nail polish drying devices used to cure gel manicures may pose more of a public health concern than previously thought. Researchers at the University of California San Diego have studied these ultraviolet (UV) light emitting devices, and found that their use leads to cell death and cancer-causing mutations in human cells.

The devices are a common fixture in nail salons, and generally use a particular spectrum of UV light (340-395nm) to cure the chemicals used in gel manicures. While tanning beds use a different spectrum of UV light (280-400nm) that studies have conclusively proven to be carcinogenic, the spectrum used in the nail dryers has not been well studied.

“If you look at the way these devices are presented, they are marketed as safe, with nothing to be concerned about,” said Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of bioengineering as well as cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, and corresponding author of the study published in Nature Communications. “But to the best of our knowledge, no one has actually studied these devices and how they affect human cells at the molecular and cellular levels until now.”

Since the success of the COVID-19 vaccine, RNA therapies have been the object of increasing interest in the biotech world. These therapies work with your body to target the genetic root of diseases and infections, a promising alternative treatment method to that of traditional pharmaceutical drugs.

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have been successfully used in drug delivery for decades. FDA-approved therapies use them as vehicles for delivering messenger RNA (mRNA), which prompts the cell to make new proteins, and small interfering RNA (siRNA), which instruct the cell to silence or inhibit the expression of certain proteins.

The biggest challenge in developing a successful RNA therapy is its targeted delivery. Research is now confronting the current limitations of LNPs, which have left many diseases without an effective RNA therapy.