Lifeboat Foundation

Neuroscientist David J. Linden is dying.

But the impending end of his life doesn’t mean he’s done learning about the human mind just yet. Linden was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a piece in The Atlantic, he writes: “I may be dying, but I’m still a science nerd.”

During a routine echocardiogram, doctors noticed something sticking up next to Linden’s heart that they thought was a hiatal hernia or a benign growth called a teratoma, he says. After the tumor was removed, a biopsy found it was a form of malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma that had grown into the wall of his heart — making it impossible to remove.

Researchers at Université de Montréal have created a nanoantenna to monitor the motions of proteins. Reported this week in Nature Methods, the device is a new method to monitor the structural change of proteins over time—and may go a long way to helping scientists better understand natural and human-designed nanotechnologies.

“The results are so exciting that we are currently working on setting up a start-up company to commercialize and make this nanoantenna available to most researchers and the pharmaceutical industry,” said UdeM chemistry professor Alexis Vallée-Bélisle, the study’s senior author.

2 big points from this. 1. Plasma dilution does reverse aging but a bit and the next question will be can it be done over and over to make you younger in steps. 2. She mentions wrapping up human test results and hopes to give the results at some point.

At the EARD 2021 conference, Dr. Irina Conboy discusses the rejuvenating effects of plasma dilution in old mice. Dr. Conboy also explains why she believes that the path of rejuvenation is through tissue maintenance and repair, not preventing tissue damage.

Continue reading “Dr. Irina Conboy — Rejuvenating Effects of Plasma Dilution” »

A simple roadside weed may hold the key to understanding and predicting DNA mutation, according to new research from University of California, Davis, and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany.

The findings, published January 12 in the journal Nature, radically change our understanding of evolution and could one day help researchers breed better crops or even help humans fight cancer.

Mutations occur when DNA is damaged and left unrepaired, creating a new variation. The scientists wanted to know if mutation was purely random or something deeper. What they found was unexpected.

All memory storage devices, from your brain to the RAM in your computer, store information by changing their physical qualities. Over 130 years ago, pioneering neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal first suggested that the brain stores information by rearranging the connections, or synapses, between neurons.

Since then, neuroscientists have attempted to understand the physical changes associated with memory formation. But visualizing and mapping synapses is challenging to do. For one, synapses are very small and tightly packed together. They’re roughly 10 billion times smaller than the smallest object a standard clinical MRI can visualize. Furthermore, there are approximately 1 billion synapses in the mouse brains researchers often use to study brain function, and they’re all the same opaque to translucent color as the tissue surrounding them.

01:55 Future of Medicine.
14:06 Future of healing.
27:14 Future of Diagnosis.
38:08 Future of Babies.
49:36 Future of Drugs.

What Happens Next examines the future as we confront massive technological transformations in central aspects of daily life. In this episode, we focus on water, food, work, driving, meat, and fact.

Continue reading “The Future of Medicine: CRISPR, Drug Prices & Gene Therapy” »

A new technology solution that will provide low-power systems for use in bionic eyes, has been jointly developed by academics from the Harbin Institute of Technology in China and Northumbria University.

Working in partnership with a research group led by Professor PingAn Hu from the Harbin Institute, Northumbria’s Professor Richard Fu described their newly developed method for controlling the artificial synaptic devices used in bionic retinas, robots, and visual prostheses, as a “significant breakthrough.”

The team discovered that injecting elements of the soft metal, indium, into a two-dimensional (2D) material called molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), could improve electrical conductivity and reduce power consumption of the optical synapses used in the development of bionic eyes.

A combination of soon-to-be released Biotechnology is expected to extend of lifespans almost tenfold with the help through emerging technologies such as CRISPR or Senolytics. These Anti Aging treatments are meant to stop and even reverse the aging process so that anyone could get young and healthy again. Many companies such as SENS or Jeff Bezos, but even countries like Japan are working on it to deal with an aging population.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 A new Beginning for Longevity.
00:44 Direct Gene Editing.
02:32 Anti Aging Vaccines.
04:44 Longevity Gene Therapy.
07:39 How does Aging work?
09:49 Last Words.
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#longevity #biotech #futurology

New kidney research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine is raising concerns that long-term use of drugs commonly prescribed to treat high-blood pressure and heart failure could be contributing to kidney damage.

Patients should continue taking the medications, which include the well-known and widely used ACE inhibitors, the researchers say. But the scientists are urging studies to better understand the drugs’ long-term effects.

Our studies show that renin-producing cells are responsible for the damage. We are now focusing on understanding how these cells, which are so important to defend us from drops in blood pressure and maintain our well-being, undergo such transformation and induce kidney damage. What is needed is to identify what substances these cells make that lead to uncontrolled vessel growth.