Lifeboat Foundation

Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in the US at over 600,000 deaths per year. Cancers that form solid tumors such as in the breast, brain, or skin are particularly hard to treat. Surgery is typically the first line of defense for patients fighting solid tumors. But surgery may not remove all cancerous cells, and leftover cells can mutate and spread throughout the body. A more targeted and wholistic treatment could replace the blunt approach of surgery with one that eliminates cancer from the inside using our own cells.

Dennis Discher, Robert D. Bent Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and postdoctoral fellow Larry Dooling provide a new approach in targeted therapies for solid tumor cancers in their study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Their therapy not only eliminates cancerous cells, but teaches the immune system to recognize and kill them in the future.

Scientists have taken a significant step forward in the study of the properties of quarks and gluons, the particles that make up atomic nuclei, by resolving a long-standing issue with a theoretical calculation method known as “axial gauge.” MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

The experiments are the first of their kind and could lead to new advances in computing.

A team at the University of Chicago.

Founded in 1,890, the University of Chicago (UChicago, U of C, or Chicago) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan, the school holds top-ten positions in various national and international rankings. UChicago is also well known for its professional schools: Pritzker School of Medicine, Booth School of Business, Law School, School of Social Service Administration, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

The latest recruit at SpaceX is a software engineer who passed its “technically challenging” and “fun” interview process.

What’s different about Kairan Quazi is that he’s just 14 years old.

He said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday: “I will be joining the coolest company on the planet as a software engineer on the Starlink engineering team. One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.”

One might say that C was replaced by C++, which was later replaced by Python. Now we have prompt engineering to replace Python.

Year 2021 😗😁

MIT engineers, in collaboration with scientists at Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, have developed a new way to grow tiny replicas of the pancreas, using either healthy or cancerous pancreatic cells. Their new models could help researchers develop and test potential drugs for pancreatic cancer, which is currently one of the most difficult types of cancer to treat.

Using a specialized gel that mimics the extracellular environment surrounding the pancreas, the researchers were able to grow pancreatic “organoids,” allowing them to study the important interactions between pancreatic tumors and their environment. Unlike some of the gels now used to grow tissue, the new MIT gel is completely synthetic, easy to assemble and can be produced with a consistent composition every time.

Continue reading “Engineers grow pancreatic ‘organoids’ that mimic the real thing” »

Year 2019 😗😁

Hepatology and drug development for liver diseases require in vitro liver models. Typical models include 2D planar primary hepatocytes, hepatocyte spheroids, hepatocyte organoids, and liver-on-a-chip. Liver-on-a-chip has emerged as the mainstream model for drug development because it recapitulates the liver microenvironment and has good assay robustness such as reproducibility. Liver-on-a-chip with human primary cells can potentially correlate clinical testing. Liver-on-a-chip can not only predict drug hepatotoxicity and drug metabolism, but also connect other artificial organs on the chip for a human-on-a-chip, which can reflect the overall effect of a drug. Engineering an effective liver-on-a-chip device requires knowledge of multiple disciplines including chemistry, fluidic mechanics, cell biology, electrics, and optics.

A group of scientists has discovered new laws governing the flow of fluids by conducting experiments on an ancient technology: the drinking straw. This newfound understanding has the potential to enhance fluid management in medical and engineering contexts.

“We found that sipping through a straw defies all the previously known laws for the resistance or friction of flow through a pipe or tube,” explains Leif Ristroph, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and an author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. “This motivated us to search for a new law that could work for any type of fluid moving at any rate through a pipe of any size.”

The movement of liquids and gases through conduits such as pipes, tubes, and ducts is a common phenomenon in both natural and industrial contexts, including in scenarios like the circulation of blood or the transportation of oil through pipelines.

Usually, the two characterizations of a material are mutually exclusive: something is either stiff, or it can absorb vibrations well—but rarely both. However, if we could make materials that are both stiff and good at absorbing vibrations, there would be a whole host of potential applications, from design at the nanoscale to aerospace engineering.

A team of researchers from the University of Amsterdam has now found a way to create materials that are stiff, but still good at absorbing vibrations—and equally importantly, that can be kept very light-weight.

Continue reading “Buckle up: A new class of materials is here” »