Lifeboat Foundation

Last week, Rice University in Houston announced that one of its assistant professors of bioengineering, Jerzy Szablowski, received a Young Faculty Award from DARPA to research non-genetic drugs that can “temporarily enhance the human body’s resilience to extreme cold exposure.”

Thermogenesis is the use of energy to create heat, and our bodies have two different ways of doing this. One is shivering, which we’re all familiar with. The other, which Szablowski simply calls non-shivering thermogenesis, involves burning off brown adipose tissue (BAT), or brow n fat.

This type of fat exists specifically to warm us up when we get cold; it stores energy and only activates in cold temperatures. Most of our body fat is white fat. It builds up when we ingest more calories than we burn and stores those calories for when we don’t get enough energy from food. An unfortunate majority of American adults have the opposite problem: too much white fat, which increases the risk of conditions like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Cellular reprogramming builds on the Nobel Prize-winning work of Shinya Yamanaka, who showed that adult cells could be transformed back into stem cells by exposing them to a specific set of genome-regulating proteins known as transcription factors. The Salk team’s innovation was to reduce the exposure times to the so-called Yamanaka factors, which they found could reverse epigenetic changes to the cells without reverting them to stem cells.

While the approach led to clear increases in lifespan in prematurely aging mice, the fact that no one had been able to replicate the result in healthy mice since then raised doubts about the approach. “Different groups have tried this experiment, and the data have not been positive so far,” Alejandro Ocampo, from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who carried out the original Salk experiments, told MIT Technology Review.

But now, Rejuvenate Bio claims that when they exposed healthy mice near the end of their lives to a subset of the Yamanaka factors, they lived for another 18 weeks on average, compared to just 9 weeks for those that didn’t undergo cellular reprogramming.

Aging is a complex process best characterized as the chronic dysregulation of cellular processes leading to deteriorated tissue and organ function. While aging cannot currently be prevented, its impact on lifespan and healthspan in the elderly can potentially be minimized by interventions that aim to return these cellular processes to optimal function. Recent studies have demonstrated that partial reprogramming using the Yamanaka factors (or a subset; OCT4, SOX2, and KLF4; OSK) can reverse age-related changes in vitro and in vivo. However, it is still unknown whether the Yamanaka factors (or a subset) are capable of extending the lifespan of aged wild type mice. Here, we show that systemically delivered AAVs, encoding an inducible OSK system, in 124-week-old mice extends the median remaining lifespan by 109% over wild-type controls and enhances several health parameters. Importantly, we observed a significant improvement in frailty scores indicating that we were able to improve the healthspan along with increasing the lifespan. Furthermore, in human keratinocytes expressing exogenous OSK, we observed significant epigenetic markers of age-reversal, suggesting a potential reregulation of genetic networks to a younger, potentially healthier state. Together, these results may have important implications for the development of partial reprogramming interventions to reverse age-associated diseases in the elderly.

All authors performed the work while employed at Rejuvenate Bio Inc. Rejuvenate Bio is a therapeutics company translating gene therapies to treat age-related diseases.

Nearly a year after it began, the worst avian-influenza outbreak in U.S. history is continuing to decimate poultry flocks across the Midwest and Colorado, frustrating efforts to keep the virus from affecting the nation’s egg prices and supply.

In South Dakota, the highly contagious bird flu, typically transmitted by the feces, mucus and saliva of wild birds, first hit commercial poultry farms in March 2022 and has continued to affect flocks. Within the last month, egg-laying hens and turkeys at several local farms were infected, leading to the deaths of more than 1.3 million poultry over that period, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Nearly four million poultry have died in the state since the start of the outbreak.

In 2020 I joined the private beta test of Open AI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which is an earlier version of ChatGPT. When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I started experimenting with it. For over two years I’ve been exploring the strengths and limits of this technology and assessing how this tool could be useful to me. I’m also interested how this new technology is being utilized by scientists and academics to make meaningful contributions to academic work and education.

A recent study demonstrated that ChatGPT was able to pass the US Medical Licensing Exam without any special training prior to the exam and was able to demonstrate a high level of insight in its explanations. The results suggest that ChatGPT may be able to assist with medical education.

I published the first article about my experiments with ChatGPT last week. The article entitled How The Evolution Of AI In Healthcare Aligns With Thomas Kuhn’s Structure has been viewed over 13,000 times, and has received and

Year 2019 face_with_colon_three

In a study that raises profound questions about the line between life and death, researchers have restored some cellular activity to brains removed from slaughtered pigs.

The brains did not regain anything resembling consciousness: There were no signs indicating coordinated electrical signaling, necessary for higher functions like awareness and intelligence.

Continue reading “‘Partly Alive’: Scientists Revive Cells in Brains From Dead Pigs” »

Basically many have theorized that these seeds coming from meteorites mean that essentially perhaps that life started from seeds like this. Going much deeper down the rabbit hole we actually are starting to see a grand design possibly by actually organisms that evolved into what we have now over millions of years which is actually weird because all earth would have been just a rock but this could be a grand architecture genetically even from the first seed to the biological singularity. This could Basically prove the existence of some entity that may have created humans and all life most like from this seed which means whether it is alien gods or God there will be so much more discover due to this complexity which can benefit all medicine and also genetic engineering 🤔 😉 😀

The fact the first of four surviving pieces was collected within 12 hours of landing, allowing little time for contamination, added to the meteorite’s value. Indeed, because the abundance of organic material in the meteorite was ten times lower than in other carbonaceous chondrites, they might not have been distinguishable from Earthly contamination had it not been retrieved so quickly. As it is, some of the amino acids found are quite rare on Earth, confirming their extraterrestrial origins.

The Winchcombe stones had a number of features never previously seen in meteorites, including low amino acid abundance for a carbonaceous chondrite but unusual ratios among the amino acids and PAHs that are present. Combined with the incomplete conversion of Winchcombe’s components into solid rock, this led the authors to speculate Winchcombe could represent a new class of meteorite that has not been studied before.

Continue reading “UK Meteorite That Fell To Earth Contains Building Blocks For Life” »

People suffering from schizophrenia can expect to die 15 years sooner than they ordinarily would. A new study has now found that this could be partly caused by advanced brain aging. The research findings were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Schizophrenia is associated with an increased risk of premature death, partially as a result of suicide or poor physical health. Studies to date have suggested that the high prevalence of disease, long-term cognitive decline and excess deaths in people with schizophrenia could in part be caused when their brain’s biological age overtakes the chronological age.

According to a few small-scale studies, this discrepancy called brain-predicted age difference (brain-PAD) has been found to be consistently higher in schizophrenic patients compared to healthy individuals. The studies have also shown that the gap between the two ages mainly widens during the first years after the onset of the illness.

Dr Miriam Stoppard writes how the ancient infection leprosy — once such a disfiguring disease that sufferers were exiled — could now help people’s health Leprosy is an ancient infection, common in biblical times, causing such disfiguring disease that sufferers were exiled to isolated colonies miles from anywhere.