Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Basel in Switzerland and Institut Universitaire de Technologie in France has that found that embryonic kidney cells engineered to produce insulin when exposed to caffeine were able to reduce glucose levels in mouse models. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their efforts and how well it worked in the mouse models.

People with diabetes suffer from higher than normal levels of glucose in the blood, which can lead to a host of health problems. Current treatments include drugs that make cells more sensitive to insulin, or injection of insulin to make more of it available to cells that need it. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a new way to get more insulin into the body when it is needed most.

Instead of adding insulin externally, the researchers engineered embryonic kidney cells to produce it—but only when they were exposed to caffeine. The team chose caffeine because it has been so extensively studied and because the majority of people consume caffeinated beverages, such as coffee and soft drinks. They point out that caffeine is also a substance that appears very rarely in other foods, making its ingestion easy to regulate. The engineered cells were covered with a material that protected them from the immune system and were then put into a device that was implanted into the abdomens of mice that had been engineered to have diabetes. The researchers note that glucose levels tend to spike after people (and mice) eat sugar or food material that the body converts to sucrose. Thus, the optimal time for giving the mice caffeine would be after eating.

Continue reading “Kidney cells engineered to produce insulin when caffeine is present in the body” »

Eating foods high in salt is known to contribute to high blood pressure, but does that linear relationship extend to increased risk of cardiovascular disease and death? Recent cohort studies have contested that relationship, but a new study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and their colleagues using multiple measurements confirms it. The study suggests that an inaccurate way of estimating sodium intake may help account for the paradoxical findings of others.

“Sodium is notoriously hard to measure,” said Nancy Cook, ScD, a biostatistician in the Department of Medicine at BWH. “Sodium is hidden—you often don’t know how much of it you’re eating, which makes it hard to estimate how much a person has consumed from a dietary questionnaire. Sodium excretions are the best measure, but there are many ways of collecting those. In our work, we used multiple measures to get a more accurate picture.”

Sodium intake can be measured using a spot test to determine how much salt has been excreted in a person’s urine sample. However, sodium levels in urine can fluctuate throughout the day so an accurate measure of a person’s sodium intake on a given day requires a full 24-hour sample. In addition, sodium consumption may change from day to day, meaning that the best way to get a full picture of sodium intake is to take samples on multiple days.

Continue reading “Accurate measurements of sodium intake confirm relationship with mortality” »

An international team of researchers has discovered evidence of 27 previously unknown viruses in bees. The finding could help scientists design strategies to prevent the spread of viral pathogens among these important pollinators.

“Populations of bees around the world are declining, and viruses are known to contribute to these declines,” said David Galbraith, research scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb and a recent Penn State graduate. “Despite the importance of bees as pollinators of flowering plants in agricultural and natural landscapes and the importance of viruses to bee health, our understanding of bee viruses is surprisingly limited.”

To investigate viruses in bees, the team collected samples of DNA and RNA, which is responsible for the synthesis of proteins, from 12 bee species in nine countries across the world. Next, they developed a novel high-throughput sequencing technique that efficiently detected both previously identified and 27 never-seen-before viruses belonging to at least six new families in a single experiment. The results appear in the June 11, 2018, issue of Scientific Reports.

Driverless vehicles could eliminate millions of jobs in the future, from cabbies to truckers to food delivery workers. But the companies that are hoping to hasten the adoption of this disruptive technology don’t want to seem callous to this brewing labor crisis, so they are joining forces to study the “human impact” of robot cars.

The Partnership for Transportation Innovation and Opportunity (PTIO) is a newly formed group comprised of most of the major companies that are building and testing on self-driving cars. This includes legacy automakers like Ford, Toyota, and Daimler; tech giants like Waymo (née Google), Uber, and Lyft; and logistics providers like FedEx and the American Trucking Association. The new organization is being formed as a 501©(6), which allows it to accept donations like a nonprofit and lobby government like a chamber of commerce.

RIPPA, a fully autonomous robot, can cover five acres a day on a solar charge — finding and exterminating pests and weeds on every single plant over the equivalent of four football fields. Are robots like RIPPA the future of farming?

RIPPA stands for “Robot for Intelligent Perception and Precision Application”.

Continue reading “RIPPA The Farm Robot Exterminates Pests And Weeds” »

She retired from NASA on Friday after blazing a trail for countless female astronauts.

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, the 58-year-old from Iowa farm country who spent a record-breaking 665 days in space, retired from the space agency on Friday.

“I have hit my radiation limit,” Whitson told Business Insider during a recent interview. “So not going into space with NASA anymore.”

Continue reading “The incredible career of NASA’s Peggy Whitson, who applied to become an astronaut 10 times before she broke the American record for space travel” »

During Hurricane Katrina and other severe storms that have hit New Orleans, power outages, flooding and wind damage combined to cut off people from clean drinking water, food, medical care, shelter, prescriptions and other vital services.

In a year-long project, researchers at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories teamed up with the City of New Orleans to analyze ways to increase community resilience and improve the availability of critical lifeline services during and after severe weather.

The team used historical hurricane scenarios to model how storms cause localized flooding, disrupt the electrical system and cut off parts of the community from lifeline services. Sandia researchers then developed a tool to analyze and identify existing clusters of businesses and community resources in areas less prone to inundation—such as gas stations, grocery stores and pharmacies that could be outfitted with microgrids to boost resilience.

The connection between food and memory is one of those fundamentally human experiences we can all relate to. A compelling new study from the University of Southern California has revealed an intriguing explanation behind this phenomenon, and it illustrates how strongly the “second brain” in our gut communicates with our brain.

Inside our gastrointestinal tract lies a massive mesh of neurons often referred to as our “second brain.” While this neuronal control system primarily works to independently manage our digestive system, it also has been found to directly communicate with the brain via a long nerve, called the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve has been found to mediate a great deal of metabolic communication between the gut and the brain. For example, one recent study revealed how feeding behavior, modulated by activity in the hippocampus, is directly activated by vagal nerve stimulation, mediated by signals from the gastrointestinal tract.

Replacing potatoes or rice with pulses can lower your blood glucose levels by more than 20 per cent, according to a first-ever University of Guelph study.

Prof. Alison Duncan, Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences, and Dan Ramdath of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, found that swapping out half of a portion of these starchy side dishes for lentils can significantly improve your body’s response to the carbohydrates.

Replacing half a serving of rice with lentils caused blood glucose to drop by up to 20 per cent. Replacing potatoes with lentils led to a 35-per-cent drop.

Continue reading “Lentils significantly reduce blood glucose levels, study reveals” »