Lifeboat Foundation

We can evolve bacteria, plants and animals. Is it ethical to evolve the human body? I say yes.

And it becomes a moral imperative because it’s going to be really hard to live on Mars if we don’t fundamentally modify the human body. Right? You go from one cell, mom and dad coming together to make one cell, in a cascade to 10 trillion cells. We don’t know, if you change the gravity substantially, if the same thing will happen to create your body. We do know that if you expose our bodies as they currently are to a lot of radiation, we will die. So as you’re thinking of that, you have to really redesign things just to get to Mars. Forget about the moons of Neptune or Jupiter.

Continue reading “What will humans look like in 100 years?” »

“Everyone is searching for a magic pill that will cure ageing,” explains Richard Siow, who heads up ageing research at King’s College London. “The truth is, lifestyle and diet changes are the most realistic way to extend your life. You can’t just adopt these as you get older. You need to start young – we’re ageing from the moment we’re born.”

Of course, diet and exercise alone won’t enable humans to achieve immortality. We profile the scientists and startups trying to hold back time.

San Francisco.

Gene-editing technology offers the potential to treat inherited disorders with selective edits and corrections to an afflicted individual’s genetic code. But with such molecular tinkering comes with the risk of unintended changes to the genome.

Biotech startup Trucode Gene Repair is developing technology that it claims can edit genes in a way that reduces the risk of these so-called “off-target effects.” The South San Francisco company is announcing Tuesday that it has raised $34 million to support its research. Trucode disclosed that its investors in the financing include Kleiner Perkins and GV.

Growing evidence supports the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of mammalian aging. Accordingly, changes in gene expression following the pluripotency transition, and subsequent transitions such as the embryonic–fetal transition, while providing tumor suppressive and antiviral survival benefits also result in a loss of regenerative potential leading to age-related fibrosis and degenerative diseases. However, reprogramming somatic cells to pluripotency demonstrates the possibility of restoring telomerase and embryonic regeneration pathways and thus reversing the age-related decline in regenerative capacity. A unified model of aging and loss of regenerative potential is emerging that may ultimately be translated into new therapeutic approaches for establishing induced tissue regeneration and modulation of the embryo-onco phenotype of cancer.

Keywords:

• acetyl-CoA
• aging
• AMPK
• dietary restriction
• DNA methylation
• epigenetics
• mTOR
• pluripotent stem cells
• regeneration

Aging is often defined as a progressive deterioration of an organism over time, wherein the risk of mortality increases exponentially with age in the postreproductive years. Although everyday environmental risks from predation or infectious disease (e.g., stochastic risks) necessarily lead to increased mortality over time, they are not considered core to the definition of the aging process per se [1,2]. Thus, an important criterion of aging is that it encompasses virtually every somatic tissue type, including the gonads (though not necessarily the germ-line cells themselves, given their role in potentially perpetuating the species) [3]. In order to distinguish the aging process from damage that occurs stochastically over time, Benjamin Gompertz described aging as a process leading to an exponential increase in mortality with time, that is, R_m = R₀e^at where ‘R_m’ represents the probability of mortality between ages ‘t’ and ‘t + 1’.

Over the weekend and through today, 12 more Ebola cases were confirmed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), lifting the overall outbreak total to 3,081.

In other developments, the DRC, with support from its global health partners, launched new infection prevention and control (IPC) efforts to curb healthcare-acquired infections.

Biometric mobile wallets — payment technologies using our faces, fingerprints or retinas — already exist. Notable technology companies including Apple AAPL, +2.62% and Amazon AMZN, +0.26% await a day when a critical mass of consumers is sufficiently comfortable walking into a store and paying for goods without a card or device, according to Sinnreich, author of “The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property.”

Removing the last physical barrier — smartphones, watches, smart glasses and credit cards — between our bodies and corporate America is the final frontier in mobile payments. “The deeper the tie between the human body and the financial networks, the fewer intimate spaces will be left unconnected to those networks,” Sinnreich said.

Biomedical engineers have created an elastic glue that can seal wounds in 60 seconds.

On Monday, Rhode Island health officials reported that a resident had died after contracting the Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) virus. The death marks the third fatality linked to EEE reported this year, and the second such case documented in less than a week.

The summer is winding down for many in the U.S., but this rare viral infection spread by mosquitoes is still claiming lives. Health officials first reported the resident’s case of EEE in late August, noting at the time that the person was in critical condition. It was the first case reported in Rhode Island since 2010. The resident, only disclosed to be in their 50s, died Sunday, making theirs the first EEE-related death documented in the state since 2007.

In the version of evolutionary theory most of us are familiar with, randomly occurring variation in traits, caused by mutations in our DNA, can be fixed in a population through natural selection. However, writing in Epigenetics journal, a team of Swedish researchers from Linköping University suggests that mutations that can be caused by environmental changes, not just random chance, might be responsible for species diversity.

Until quite recently, it was assumed that DNA mutations causing new gene variations occurred more or less randomly. While random mutations do occur, recent research has shown that genes can be altered by environmental influences too. According to a study published in Epigenetics journal, a particular type of mutation, linked to epigenetic changes, has, over time, led to new animal breeds—and could be responsible for whole new species.