Lifeboat Foundation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jplaE-CO0hQ

28 November 2017

Rejuvenation is a medical discipline focused on the practical reversal of the aging process.
Rejuvenation is distinct from life extension. Life extension strategies often study the causes of aging and try to oppose those causes in order to slow aging. Rejuvenation is the reversal of aging and thus requires a different strategy, namely repair of the damage that is associated with aging or replacement of damaged tissue with new tissue. Rejuvenation can be a means of life extension, but most life extension strategies do not involve rejuvenation.

Continue reading “How We Will Cure The Diseases of Ageing — with Aubrey de Grey” »

A group of Spanish researchers, including Dr. Maria Blasco and others at the CNIO, have published a new study that examines the consequences of short telomeres and telomerase deficiency on the brain [1].

This study addresses an aspect of telomere attrition, one of the primary hallmarks of aging. Telomeres are repeating sequences of DNA (TTAGGG) that can can reach a length of 15,000 base pairs and appear at the ends of chromosomes, acting as protective caps. They prevent damage, stop chromosomes from fusing with each other, and prevent chromosomes from losing base pair sequences at their end during cell replication.

The past year or so has seen an energetic debate over whether or not new neurons are generated in the adult human brain, a process known as neurogenesis. This process is well known and well studied in mice, and thought to be very important in the resilience and maintenance of brain tissue. The human data has always been limited, however, due to the challenges inherent in working with brain tissue in living people, and it was assumed was that the mouse data was representative of the state of neurogenesis in other mammals. In this environment, the publication of a careful study that seemed to rule out the existence of neurogenesis in adult humans produced some upheaval, and spurred many other teams to assess the human brain with greater rigor than was previously the case.

So far, all of the following studies published so far do in fact show evidence of adult neurogenesis in humans. This is the better of the two outcomes, as the regenerative medicine community has based a great deal of work on the prospect of being able to upregulate neurogenesis in order to better repair injuries to the central nervous system, or partially reverse the decline of cognitive function in the aging brain. The study here is particularly reassuring, as it shows that even in very late life there are signs that new neurons are being generated in the brain.

A new therapy that appears to stop Parkinson’s disease “in its tracks” will begin phase-one clinical trials in humans next year.

The therapy, developed by researchers at the University of Queensland – and partly under-written by the Michael J Fox Foundation – is a world first because it stops the death of brain cells in Parkinson’s sufferers rather than managing symptoms.

Continue reading “World-first pill may stop Parkinson’s” »

Editors’ note: This is the first installment in a new series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write op-eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years in the future. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.

DNA tweaks won’t fix our problems.

Six months ago, a Chinese scientist announced that he had edited the genomes of two babies born last year. The germline edits with CRISPR-Cas9 supposedly changed the CCR5 gene to prevent HIV from invading immune cells. An analysis of records in the U.K. Biobank shows that having two copies of this mutation is associated with a 21 percent increase in mortality.

Amazing science, technology and medicine photography, how to explain a bad year to grad schools and a call to make research misconduct reports public.

In our day and age when the science and philosophy of information start to eclipse traditional disciplines on all fronts, the importance of asking the right kinds of questions in light of a new rhetoric cannot be overestimated. Hereafter you can find three videos with their transcripts related to D-Theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, that I cover extensively in my new book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution, as well as in my just-released ebook The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics.

Will We Transcend The Temporal Dimension?: If you’re like me who loves thought-provoking sci-fi literature and movies, Interstellar and Arrival are both about transcending temporality, one through physics and the other through language. Arguably, these two outlooks on TIME reflect our current understanding as the most plausible ways to overcome the grips of impermanence.

If we look back at evolutionary emergence on our planet, the simplest organisms like primordial mitochondria, the front-runners at the onset of biological life, were able to perceive and move towards nutrients and away from environmental threats in an essentially one-dimensional existence.

Continue reading “Can The Science and Philosophy of Information Solve The Problem of Time?” »

A California company says its experimental blood test was able to detect many types of cancer at an early stage and gave very few false alarms in a study that included people with and without the disease.

Grail Inc. gave results in a news release on Friday and will report them Saturday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. They have not been published in a journal or reviewed by other scientists.

Many companies are trying to develop early detection “liquid biopsy” tests that capture bits of DNA that cancer cells shed into blood.

Continue reading “Companies report progress on blood tests to detect cancer” »