Certified Legendary Thread The Good News Thread

[Snake_Baker]

Scientists.

Again.

Brand New Renewable Technology Harnesses Electricity From The Cold, Dark Night

Physics, Astronomy, Space news,Nasa news ,Quantum Physics and Technology,

www.physics-astronomy.org

 

[Snake_Baker]

..........and again.

Sickle cell patient’s recovery after gene therapy heightens hopes for a cure

Jennelle Stephenson, 28, who was born with sickle cell disease, shared her experience of recovery after receiving genetic treatment as part of an NIH clinical t

www.nhlbi.nih.gov

 

[Sainteric]

Diabetes epidemic hitting straya
Mental health issues Never been higher
Suicide through the roof
Obciety an epidemic
Gaols full and offenders on home detention still perpetrating
Cancer an epidemic
Poverty at record levels
Gov debt highest ever
Life expectancy dropping massively
50 percent of species extinct in our short lives

The indigenous in 1788 lived longer than white man ever did. No war, no Gaols, no poverty, no homelessness, no cancer.

Yep, your post is rational and backed by fact. Yep life never been better.

I think that's a record the most lines without a bit of truth to any of it

 

[Snake_Baker]

Light-activated metal catalyst destroys cancer cells' vital energy source

by University of Warwick
September 23, 2019

A space-age metal that formed part of the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs could provide a new method of treating cancer tumors selectively using light.

Scientists at the University of Warwick in collaboration with colleagues in China, France, Switzerland and Heriot-Watt University have developed a technique that uses light to activate a cancer-killing compound of Iridium that attacks, for the first time, a vital energy source in cancer cells even under hypoxia, significantly opening up the range of cancers that can be treated using the technique. The technique is detailed in a paper published today (23 September 2019) in Nature Chemistry and could lead to another tool for clinicians to use in the fight against cancer, and potentially even vaccinate patients against future cancers.

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) uses light to kill cancer tumors in the body by activating a chemical compound called a photosensitizer, which creates species that can attack cancer cells in the presence of light. Using this method, clinicians can direct the light to specific regions of the cancer tumor and spare normal tissue from damage. Current methods mainly rely on the presence of oxygen and many tumors are 'hypoxic," which means that they are deficient in normal oxygen often due to poor blood supplies. The international team of scientists have now developed a compound of the metal Iridium that will kill cancer cells in culture even when oxygen concentration is low. The technique can treat any tumors where light can be administered, and would be particularly suited to treat bladder, lung, esophageal, brain and skin cancers. There are around 10,000 bladder cancer cases in the UK per year, of which about 5,000 might potentially benefit from this kind of treatment.

Professor Peter Sadler from the University of Warwick's Department of Chemistry said: "All the time in cancer treatment, clinicians are trying to fight resistance. Drugs can kill the cancer cells initially, but with repeated treatment the cells become resistant, they learn how to chemically modify the drug or counteract its mechanism of action. Researchers are looking for novel ways in which the cancer cell will die. If they have become resistant to other cancer drugs, they may not be resistant to this treatment because the way it kills the cancer cells is different. "There is an increasing interest in reducing the side effects of cancer treatment as much as possible and anything that can be selective in what it targets will help with that. The compound that we have developed would not be very toxic at all, we would give it to the cancer cells, allow a little time for it to be taken up, then we would irradiate it with light and activate it in those cells. We would expect killing of those cancer cells to occur very quickly compared with current methods."

Once light-activated, the Iridium compound attacks the energy producing machinery in the cancer cells—a vital co-enzyme called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) - and catalytically destroys that co-enzyme or changes it into its oxidized form. This upsets the energy-producing machinery in a cancer cell and effectively cuts off the tumor's power source. Our bodies need coenzyme nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) to generate energy. Cancer cells have a very high requirement for NADH, because they need a lot of energy to divide and multiple rapidly. The researchers even found that the compound still works in the presence of oxygen, by converting it into a 'toxic' type of oxygen that will kill the cancer cells.

The team of scientists also noted that as the cancer cells die, they change their chemistry in such a way that they will generate an immune reaction in the body, what is known as an immunotherapeutic response. This suggests that those treated by this technique might be immunized against attack by that cancer, and will be investigated further in future research.

- Professor Vas Stavros (University of Warwick) commented: "The power of light to change the reactivity of chemical molecules dramatically within a thousandth of a millionth of a second can now be harnessed to treat resistant cancers."

- Professor Martin Paterson (Heriot-Watt University) commented: "This breakthrough illustrates the power of modern computation to understand the effects of light on chemical molecules to provide drugs of the future with truly unique mechanisms of action."

- Professor Hui Chao (Sun Yat-Sen University) commented: "Now we have a potential new drug which can not only selectively kill cancer cells with normal oxygen supplies, but also hypoxic cancer cells which often resist treatment by photodynamic therapy."

- Professor Peter Sadler added: "The ability of metal compounds to induce an immunogenic response in the body that may effectively vaccinate a person against future attack by cancer is an exciting development. It is very speculative, but we are looking further into the hallmarks of that. Importantly we were fortunate to have had 3 highly talented young Royal Society Newton International Fellows in our team working on this challenging interdisciplinary project, who will undeniably contribute towards the future of this crucially important research."

Iridium was first discovered in 1803, and its name comes from the Latin for "rainbow." From the same family as platinum, it is hard, brittle, and is the world's most corrosion-resistant metal. Yellow in color, its melting point is more than 2400° Celsius. It is used in satellites and spacecraft due to its resistance to extreme environments, and is commonly believed to have been enriched in the earth's crust by a meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

 

[Snake_Baker]

Science..................yawn.......................again.

A Biomimetic Nanodecoy Traps Zika Virus To Prevent Viral Infection and Fetal Microcephaly Development

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b03913?utm_source=pubs_content_marketing&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=1019_MXA_ECBTweets&ref=pubs_content_marketing&utm_source=NL&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=ECBTweets&hootPostID=59ad7ed7378e3038ad226eb40651c7db

 

[Snake_Baker]

This will be hard to top

Fines Victoria crisis deepens, leaving massive hole in state budget

Millions of fines left outstanding as collections chaos takes toll state's bottom line.

www.theage.com.au

 

[Snake_Baker]

This actually deserves its own thread.

Prime editing: DNA tool could correct 89% of genetic defects

New technology - called prime editing - is like a "genetic word processor" able to re-write DNA.

www.bbc.com

 

[Snake_Baker]

Science.

AGAIN

 

[Snake_Baker]

‘Artificial leaf’ successfully produces clean gas

The new device in action. (Virgil Andrei)

A widely-used gas that is currently produced from fossil fuels can instead be made by an ‘artificial leaf’ that uses only sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and which could eventually be used to develop a sustainable liquid fuel alternative to petrol.

The carbon-neutral device sets a new benchmark in the field of solar fuels, after researchers at the University of Cambridge demonstrated that it can directly produce the gas – called syngas – in a sustainable and simple way. Rather than running on fossil fuels, the artificial leaf is powered by sunlight, although it still works efficiently on cloudy and overcast days. And unlike the current industrial processes for producing syngas, the leaf does not release any additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The results are reported in the journal Nature Materials.

Syngas is currently made from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, and is used to produce a range of commodities, such as fuels, pharmaceuticals, plastics and fertilisers. “You may not have heard of syngas itself but every day, you consume products that were created using it. Being able to produce it sustainably would be a critical step in closing the global carbon cycle and establishing a sustainable chemical and fuel industry,” said senior author Professor Erwin Reisner from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, who has spent seven years working towards this goal.

The device Reisner and his colleagues produced is inspired by photosynthesis – the natural process by which plants use the energy from sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into food. On the artificial leaf, two light absorbers, similar to the molecules in plants that harvest sunlight, are combined with a catalyst made from the naturally abundant element cobalt. When the device is immersed in water, one light absorber uses the catalyst to produce oxygen. The other carries out the chemical reaction that reduces carbon dioxide and water into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, forming the syngas mixture.
As an added bonus, the researchers discovered that their light absorbers work even under the low levels of sunlight on a rainy or overcast day. “This means you are not limited to using this technology just in warm countries, or only operating the process during the summer months,” said PhD student Virgil Andrei, first author of the paper. “You could use it from dawn until dusk, anywhere in the world.”

The research was carried out in the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Sustainable SynGas Chemistry in the University’s Department of Chemistry. It was co-funded by the Austrian government and the Austrian petrochemical company OMV, which is looking for ways to make its business more sustainable. “OMV has been an avid supporter of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for the past seven years. The team’s fundamental research to produce syngas as the basis for liquid fuel in a carbon neutral way is ground-breaking,” said Michael-Dieter Ulbrich, Senior Advisor at OMV. Other ‘artificial leaf’ devices have also been developed, but these usually only produce hydrogen. The Cambridge researchers say the reason they have been able to make theirs produce syngas sustainably is thanks the combination of materials and catalysts they used. These include state-of-the-art perovskite light absorbers, which provide a high photovoltage and electrical current to power the chemical reaction by which carbon dioxide is reduced to carbon monoxide, in comparison to light absorbers made from silicon or dye-sensitised materials. The researchers also used cobalt as their molecular catalyst, instead of platinum or silver. Cobalt is not only lower-cost, but it is better at producing carbon monoxide than other catalysts.

The team is now looking at ways to use their technology to produce a sustainable liquid fuel alternative to petrol.

Syngas is already used as a building block in the production of liquid fuels. “What we’d like to do next, instead of first making syngas and then converting it into liquid fuel, is to make the liquid fuel in one step from carbon dioxide and water,” said Reisner, who is also a Fellow of St John’s College. Although great advances are being made in generating electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind power and photovoltaics, Reisner says the development of synthetic petrol is vital, as electricity can currently only satisfy about 25% of our total global energy demand. “There is a major demand for liquid fuels to power heavy transport, shipping and aviation sustainably,” he said. “We are aiming at sustainably creating products such as ethanol, which can readily be used as a fuel,” said Andrei. “It’s challenging to produce it in one step from sunlight using the carbon dioxide reduction reaction. But we are confident that we are going in the right direction, and that we have the right catalysts, so we believe we will be able to produce a device that can demonstrate this process in the near future.”

The research was also funded by the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Reference: Virgil Andrei , Bertrand Reuillard and Erwin Reisner. ‘Bias-free solar syngas production by integrating a molecular cobalt catalyst with perovskite-BiVO4 tandems.’ Nature Materials (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-019-0501-6

‘Artificial leaf’ successfully produces clean gas

A widely-used gas that is currently produced from fossil fuels can instead be made by an ‘artificial leaf’ that uses only sunlight, carbon dioxide and water,

www.cam.ac.uk

 

[Snake_Baker]

Science.

Again

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/10/31/long-awaited-cystic-fibrosis-drug-could-turn-deadly-disease-into-manageable-condition/?fbclid=IwAR01G0ILTod7oXDLIvVet4b93AcIvXiaOoXFEVzpNMzgeYl4ZWdi3uXbko0

 

[Snake_Baker]

Growth Is the Ultimate Weapon in Ending Child Labor

humanprogress.org

 

[FireKrakouer]

Science. Again!

 

[its free real estate]

Science.

Again

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/10/31/long-awaited-cystic-fibrosis-drug-could-turn-deadly-disease-into-manageable-condition/?fbclid=IwAR01G0ILTod7oXDLIvVet4b93AcIvXiaOoXFEVzpNMzgeYl4ZWdi3uXbko0

The cystic fibrosis thing is such a massive break through. A friend of mine when she was born wasn’t expected to live past 15. Now she has two kids, and can basically expect to live as long and meaningful life as anyone else.

 

[Carringbush2010]

This warmed my heart no end! Fantastic news.

What an absolute champion this woman is. Australian of the year next year should be in conversation.

I hope and have faith that the bulk of the human populous are just as generous.

7.30

www.abc.net.au

Please share other similar champion human stories! Sorely needed!

 

[Shane Heard]

I bought a tub of ice cream and lotto tickets for my 75 year old neighbor.

She was happy. Saved her the trip.

 

[FireKrakouer]

Australia's Sikh community. You could see them on the frontlines during the bushfires, supplying hot meals for free to firefighters and stranded locals. Now they're delivering meals for free to anyone who needs them in my area due to covid.

 

[freowho]

Those Sikh photos look like the Bairnsdale footy ground. I was in the line waiting 3 hours for an evacuation payment. It was all very kind but way over the top. Every 5 minutes someone would walk past, Sikh, Army, Red Cross etc offering curry, water, soft drink, bag of lollies. Some people were accepting everything, loading up the car and then getting back in line.

 

[FireKrakouer]

Those Sikh photos look like the Bairnsdale footy ground. I was in the line waiting 3 hours for an evacuation payment. It was all very kind but way over the top. Every 5 minutes someone would walk past, Sikh, Army, Red Cross etc offering curry, water, soft drink, bag of lollies. Some people were accepting everything, loading up the car and then getting back in line.

Yup that's Bairnsdale. It's beautiful how truly selfless these folks are. You can find them on Facebook under "Sikh Volunteers Australia". I'm sick of all the depressing news so seeing some photos from pages like this is good for the soul.

 

[Goosecat]

Brine utilisation for cooling and salt production in wind-driven seawater greenhouses: Design and modelling

Brine disposal is a major challenge facing the desalination industry. Discharged brines pollute the oceans and aquifers. Here is it proposed to reduce…

www.sciencedirect.com