Lifeboat Foundation

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning clinicians to remain on alert for measles cases due to a growing number of infections.

Between Dec. 1, 2023, and Jan. 23, 2024, there have been 23 confirmed cases of measles including seven cases from international travelers and two outbreaks with five or more infections each, according to an email sent this week.

Cases have been reported in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Washington, D.C. area so far.

Gene editing is revolutionizing the understanding of health and disease, providing researchers with vast opportunities to advance the development of novel treatment approaches. Traditionally, researchers used various methods to introduce double strand breaks (DSBs) into the genome, including transactivator-like effectors, meganucleases, and zinc finger nucleases. While useful, these techniques are limited in that they are time and labor intensive, less efficient, and can have unintended effects. In contrast, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-associated protein-9 (Cas9) system (CRISPR/Cas9) is among the most sensitive and efficient methods for creating DNA DSBs, making it the leading gene editing technology.

CRISPR/Cas9 is a naturally occurring immune protective process that bacteria use to destroy foreign genetic material.¹ Researchers repurposed the CRISPR/Cas9 system for genetic engineering applications in mammalian cells, exploiting the molecular processes that introduce DSBs in specific sections of DNA, which are then repaired to turn certain genes on or off, or to correct genomic errors with extraordinary precision.^2,3 This technology’s applications are far reaching, from cell culture and animal models to translational research that focuses on correcting genetic mutations in diseases such as cancer, hemophilia, and sickle cell disease.⁴

Researchers exploit plasmids, the small, closed circular DNA strands native to bacteria, as delivery vehicles in CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing protocols. Plasmids shuttle the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing components to target cells and can be manipulated to control gene editing activity, including targeting multiple genes at a time. Plasmids can also deliver gene repair instructions and machinery. For example, poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 (PARP1) is an enzyme that drives DNA repair and transcription.⁵ It is a critical aspect of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology in part because it helps repair the DSBs created by the CRISPR/Cas9 system. PARP1 CRISPR plasmids can edit, knockout, or upregulate PARP1 gene expression depending on the specific instructions encoded in the plasmid.

An exciting study reveals how exercise boosts brain power.

Summary: Recent research has revealed a significant link between exercise and improved cognitive performance, attributing this enhancement to increased dopamine levels. This discovery, involving sophisticated PET scans to monitor dopamine release in the brain during exercise, indicates that dopamine plays a vital role in boosting reaction times and overall brain function.

The study’s implications are far-reaching, suggesting potential therapeutic applications for conditions influenced by dopamine, like Parkinson’s disease and ADHD. The research underscores the importance of voluntary exercise for cognitive health, differentiating it from involuntary muscle stimulation.

It crept up slowly, almost imperceptibly. A vague rawness at the back of my throat. A thrumming malaise. On Thanksgiving Day, it lunged.

For two weeks, I was in the grip of an unusually malevolent respiratory illness. But I was in good company: Nationwide, the percentage of health care visits for flulike symptoms ticked up above the baseline at the start of November and has remained elevated ever since, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“All the respiratory viruses are back in full force,” Anne Liu, MD, a Stanford Medicine immunologist and infectious disease specialist confirmed. The main reasons, she said, are fairly straightforward: Social distancing and masking are not popular choices in the wake of the pandemic.

What brought the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter mission to and end and how did the Japanese Moon Snipper land on it’s head?

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People with unusually thin retinas are at greater risk of later developing bronchitis and other conditions, suggesting retinal scans could eventually become a component of routine health screening.

By Timmy Broderick

Many people are wired to seek and respond to rewards. Your brain interprets food as rewarding when you are hungry and water as rewarding when you are thirsty.

But addictive substances like alcohol and drugs of abuse can overwhelm the natural reward pathways in your brain, resulting in intolerable cravings and reduced impulse control.

A popular misconception is that addiction is a result of low willpower. But an explosion of knowledge and technology in the field of molecular genetics has changed our basic understanding of addiction drastically over the past decade. The general consensus among scientists and health care professionals is that there is a strong neurobiological and genetic basis for addiction.

Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by exclusively focusing on the term “spatial computing”; however, the marketing seems focused on identifying a few key use cases it thinks will best drive consumer interest.

The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which like its face computer cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it originally debuted. Apple initially focused on a lot of features the Apple Watch has now actually done away with entirely, including its Digital Touch stuff that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. In general, it was presented as a relatively robust and full-featured platform nearly on par with the iPhone in terms of future potential.

The intervening years and generations of Apple Watch have seen it grow considerably in terms of pure technical capability and specifications, yet the marketing and focus around the product from Apple’s side has been more economical, spending outsized effort at the areas that seemed to resonate best with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, safety.

Eleven astronauts and cosmonauts from around the world are living and working together aboard the International Space Station (ISS) today, January 22. The four Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) private astronauts met the seven Expedition 70 crew members on Saturday beginning two weeks of dual operations.

The Ax-3 crew spent the weekend getting familiar with space station systems and emergency procedures before starting Monday with a full schedule of science and media activities. Ax-3 Commander Michael López-Alegría joined Pilot Walter Villadei and studied how microgravity affects the biochemistry of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s to improve health on Earth and in space. The duo later inserted samples into a fluorescence microscope for a study seeking to prevent and predict cancer diseases to protect crews in space and humans on Earth.