Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: health – Page 401

I had to take a second review of this since I posted it, and right away I see something quite interesting that folks have overlooked for a while. Will keep you posted.

Scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health have built a new tool to monitor the way cells attach to an adjoining substrate under a microscope.

Analyzing adhesion events can help researchers to understand the way diseases spread, tissues grow, and stem cells differentiate into many specific cell types. The technique provides high-resolution images that can monitor the interactions of cells across longer time periods than previously possible.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published details of their study in the November 2016 issue of the Progress in Quantum Electronics journal. The researchers demonstrated the method known as photonic crystal-enhanced microscopy (PCEM), on various types of cancer cells and stem cells, revealing that each cell type had its own exclusive adhesion properties.

Continue reading “Researchers Use Crystal Sensor to Study Crucial Cell Behavior” | >

Highly sophisticated robotics and ‘bio-printing’ are rapidly changing the face of modern surgery, significantly eliminating the risk of human error and in some cases even allowing doctors to perform procedures remotely, according to experts at Arab Health.

Dr Peter C.W. Kim, vice-president and associate surgeon-in-chief of the Joseph E. Roberts Jr. Centre for Surgical Care at Washington DC’s Children’s National — which has received millions of dollars in donations from the UAE’s government — noted that doctors will soon be able to 3D-print using bio-tissue, such as for an eardrum.

“What our engineers and researchers have done is not only design the plastic with it, but also graft cells onto it,” he said. “This is where we are going. You will (in the future) be able to have organs on the shelf. Instead of harvesting it, you can print it.”

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Allergic diseases are making one’s life more complicated and almost all treatment is only suppressing the symptoms. Fortunately, Stephen Miller of Northwestern University and Lonnie Shea of the University of Michigan can now mask allergen particles on their way into the body. This teaches the immune system not to attack the allergens in the future.

Their latest research published in the journal PNAS finally introduces a way to actually cure allergies altogether, instead of concealing symptoms with antihistamines such as Benadryl and Claritin…

Read the complete article:

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Answers to rejuvenation objections #1: The Tithonus Error.

We certainly agree on this one! Living longer when your body keeps falling apart would suck big time, but that is not what rejuvenation is about. In fact, it is about preventing that from happening, in the short and long runs alike.

I probably have made the above concept clear enough on the website as a whole, but then again dealing with it separately in the objections section may be a good idea. In case anyone hasn’t read the explanations on ageing and rejuvenation first and jumps directly to the answers to objections, they might not get the full picture and think we’re just trying to make people live longer without curing them of the ill health of old age.

The concern of more life in a sicker body is well illustrated by the greek myth of Tithonus. In short, Tithonus was a mortal who was in love with Eos, the titan of the dawn. She fancied him back, but they had a problem: As a deity, she was immortal, but Tithonus was not. One day he’d give up the ghost and their idilly would be broken. Thus, Eos pleaded with Zeus to make Tithonus immortal as well. Problem solved, right? Yeah, not really.

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Eeek.

(HealthDay)—Eight people who worked at several rat-breeding facilities in Illinois and Wisconsin have been infected with a virus not commonly found in the United States, federal health officials said Friday.

This is the first known outbreak of Seoul virus associated with pet rats in the United States, although there have been several outbreaks in wild rats, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Seoul virus is a member of the Hantavirus family of rodent-borne viruses and is carried by wild Norway rats worldwide. Most rats infected with the virus do not appear sick.

Continue reading “8 people infected in rare U.S. outbreak of rat virus” | >

In Brief:

  • Predictions from the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council, Melanie Walker, say we’ll soon enter a post-hospital world due to advances in personalized medicine, health monitoring, and nanotechnology.
  • New and evolving technologies in medical science convince Walker we’ll live in a society not dependent on hospitals by 2030.

As the world of medicine is increasingly changed by biology, technology, communications, genetics, and robotics, predicting the outlook of the next few decades of medicine becomes harder. But that is exactly what Melanie Walker of the World Economic Forum does, and she predicts a bright new future for healthcare.

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In Brief

  • By mimicking the way neurons fire in the hippocampus during natural memory creation, a brain implant was used to successfully plant memories in the brains of rats.
  • Though human implementation is far off, this breakthrough in cracking the hippocampus’ mathematical “memory code” has very important implications for health and research.

Memories are the faintest, most ethereal wisps of our neurophysiology — somehow, the firing of delicate synapses and the activation of neurons combine to produce the things we remember. The sum of our memories make us who we are; they are us, in every way, and without them we cease to be.

So it’s needless to say that there’s a pretty significant premium on discovering new ways to combat memory loss. Most of these involve physiological and biological methods, but some scientists, such as Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California, are beginning to turn toward technology. If any of these methods are successful, it would mean the possibility of perfect lifelong memory recall.

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