Lifeboat Foundation

New technology could add another layer of protection against the next pandemic by simply turning on a light. Researchers are exploring a new way of using ultraviolet light to make indoor air safer.

“It’s been known for 80 years or so that ultraviolet light can kill bacteria and inactivate viruses in the air so that they’re no longer infectious,” Don K. Milton, professor of occupational and environmental health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, told CBS News.

Conventional UV-C light has been used extensively in places like hospitals, homeless shelters and prisons. But that conventional UV light can damage the skin and eye, so should not be shined directly at people.

* Astrocytes play a variety of roles with neurons, but until now, scientists did not know that these cells carry electrical impulses.

* Applying new technology, Tufts University scientists recently discovered in mice that astrocytes are electrically active like neurons. Astrocytes play a variety of roles with neurons, but until now, scientists did not know that these cells carry electrical impulses.

Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that facilitate the transfer of electrical signals between neurons and support the blood-brain barrier. Scientists have long understood that astrocytes control these substances to support neuronal health.

Continue reading “Researchers find new function performed by almost half of brain cells” »

Pharmaceutical intervention of aging requires targeting multiple pathways, thus there is rationale to test combinations of drugs targeting different but overlapping processes. In order to determine if combining drugs shown to extend lifespan and healthy aging in mice would have greater impact than any individual drug, a cocktail diet containing 14 ppm rapamycin, 1,000 ppm acarbose, and 1,000 ppm phenylbutyrate was fed to 20-month-old C57BL/6 and HET3 4-way cross mice of both sexes for three months. Mice treated with the cocktail showed a sex and strain-dependent phenotype consistent with healthy aging including decreased body fat, improved cognition, increased strength and endurance, and decreased age-related pathology compared to mice treated with individual drugs or control. The severity of age-related lesions in heart, lungs, liver, and kidney was consistently decreased in mice treated with the cocktail compared to mice treated with individual drugs or control, suggesting an interactive advantage of the three drugs. This study shows that a combination of three drugs, each previously shown to enhance lifespan and health span in mice, is able to delay aging phenotypes in middle-aged mice more effectively than any individual drug in the cocktail over a 3-month treatment period.

© 2022. The Author(s).

Conflict of interest statement.

The latest “machine scientist” algorithms can take in data on dark matter, dividing cells, turbulence, and other situations too complicated for humans to understand and provide an equation capturing the essence of what’s going on.

Despite rediscovering Kepler’s third law and other textbook classics, BACON remained something of a curiosity in an era of limited computing power. Researchers still had to analyze most data sets by hand, or eventually with Excel-like software that found the best fit for a simple data set when given a specific class of equation. The notion that an algorithm could find the correct model for describing any data set lay dormant until 2009, when Lipson and Michael Schmidt, roboticists then at Cornell University, developed an algorithm called Eureqa.

Their main goal had been to build a machine that could boil down expansive data sets with column after column of variables to an equation involving the few variables that actually matter. “The equation might end up having four variables, but you don’t know in advance which ones,” Lipson said. “You throw at it everything and the kitchen sink. Maybe the weather is important. Maybe the number of dentists per square mile is important.”

Continue reading “‘Machine Scientists’ Distill the Laws of Physics From Raw Data” »

In our global struggle to deal with COVID-19 and the existential threat that is climate change, there is a growing anti-intellectual, anti-science movement afoot.

Is 21st-century civilization following Rome and China as we turn to disinformation delivered by the technologies science has fostered?

For our inaugural episode of Let’s Talk Longevity, we want to figure out if we are anywhere near Longevity Escape Velocity. Defined as a hypothetical situation in which life expectancy is extended longer than the time that is passing, we decided the best conversation on it would be with its biggest advocate, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, and an equally well-known skeptic of the likelihood of it taking place, Dr. Charles Brenner. This debate did not need hosts!

Join us for the live Q&A on Twitter Spaces this Thursday, May 12th at 12 pm PDT
https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1ypKdEmgDANGW

Continue reading “On Longevity Escape Velocity with Aubrey de Grey & Charles Brenner” »

Cryostasis Revival by Robert Freitas is the first comprehensive technical exposition how to revive cryonics patients in the future. This 700+ page book with thousands of references, and technical color illustrations, is now available on Amazon in a limited textbook hardcover edition.

Cryostasis is an emergency medical procedure in which a human patient is placed in biological stasis at cryogenic temperatures. A cryopreserved patient can be maintained in this condition indefinitely without suffering additional degradation, but cannot yet be revived using currently available technology. This book presents the first comprehensive conceptual protocol for revival from human cryopreservation, using medical nanorobots. The revival methods presented in this book involve three stages: collecting information from preserved structure, computing how to fix damaged structure, and implementing the repair procedure using nanorobots manufactured in a nanofactory – a system for atomically precise manufacturing that is now visible on the technological horizon.

Researchers have identified distinct differences among the cells comprising a tissue in the retina that is vital to human visual perception. The scientists from the National Eye Institute (NEI) discovered five subpopulations of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE)—a layer of tissue that nourishes and supports the retina’s light-sensing photoreceptors. Using artificial intelligence, the researchers analyzed images of RPE at single-cell resolution to create a reference map that locates each subpopulation within the eye. A report on the research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“These results provide a first-of-its-kind framework for understanding different RPE cell subpopulations and their vulnerability to retinal diseases, and for developing targeted therapies to treat them,” said Michael F. Chiang, M.D., director of the NEI, part of the National Institutes of Health.

“The findings will help us develop more precise cell and gene therapies for specific degenerative eye diseases,” said the study’s lead investigator, Kapil Bharti, Ph.D., who directs the NEI Ocular and Stem Cell Translational Research Section.