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Archive for the ‘life extension’ category: Page 608

Nov 29, 2015

Is Aging Modifiable?

Posted by in categories: innovation, life extension

Researchers have found that changing a single gene in worms leads to a 70 percent increase in life span. Can this be replicated one day in humans? Catch #Breakthrough at 9pm EDT on the National Geographic Channel tonight to learn about the future of aging.

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Nov 29, 2015

Beauty.AI Announces the First International Beauty Contest Judged by an Artificial Intelligence Jury

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, information science, life extension, robotics/AI

London, UK, November, 19, 2015 (PRWEB UK) 19 November 2015.

What matters in beauty is perception. Perception is how you and other people see you, and this perception is almost always biased. Still, healthy people look more attractive despite their age and nationality.

This has enabled the team of biogerontologists and data scientists, who believe that in the near future machines will be able to get a lot of vital medical information about people’s health by just processing their photos, to develop a set of algorithms that can accurately evaluate the criteria linked to perception of human beauty and health where it is most important – the human face. But evaluating beauty and health is not enough. The team’s challenge is to find effective ways to slow down ageing and help people look healthy and beautiful.

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Nov 28, 2015

PODCAST 50: Telomerase Gene Therapy

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Liz Parrish in another excellent interview. Bioviva is daring to push ahead and test telomerase therapy to see if it works.


Dr. Ed Park of Recharge Biomedical interviews LIz Parrish, CEO of BioViva and the first person to receive telomerase gene therapy. Clinical signs indicate this revolutionary therapy may be working.

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Nov 26, 2015

New startup aims to transfer people’s consciousness into artificial bodies so they can live forever

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, nanotechnology, robotics/AI

As advancements in technology continue at an ever-increasing pace, will there ever come a day when we’ll be able to use science to cheat death? Australian startup company Humai seems to think so; it claims to be working on a way to transfer a person’s consciousness into an artificial body after they’ve died.

“We want to bring you back to life after you die,” says Humai CEO Josh Bocanegra on the company’s website. “We’re using artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to store data of conversational styles, behavioral patterns, thought processes and information about how your body functions from the inside-out. This data will be coded into multiple sensor technologies, which will be built into an artificial body with the brain of a deceased human. Using cloning technology, we will restore the brain as it matures.”

In an interview with Australian Popular Science, Bocanegra said: “We’ll first collect extensive data on our members for years prior to their death via various apps we’re developing.” After death, the company will cryogenically freeze members’ brains until the technology is fully developed, at which point the brains will be implanted into an artificial body.

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Nov 25, 2015

The tardigrade genome has been sequenced, and it has the most foreign DNA of any animal

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, life extension, space

Scientists have sequenced the entire genome of the tardigrade, AKA the water bear, for the first time. And it turns out that this weird little creature has the most foreign genes of any animal studied so far – or to put it another way, roughly one-sixth of the tardigrade’s genome was stolen from other species. We have to admit, we’re kinda not surprised.

A little background here for those who aren’t familiar with the strangeness that is the tardigrade – the microscopic water creature grows to just over 1 mm on average, and is the only animal that can survive in the harsh environment of space. It can also withstand temperatures from just above absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, can cope with ridiculous amounts of pressure and radiation, and can live for more than 10 years without food or water. Basically, it’s nearly impossible to kill, and now scientists have shown that its DNA is just as bizarre as it is.

So what’s foreign DNA and why does it matter that tardigrades have so much of it? The term refers to genes that have come from another organism via a process known as horizontal gene transfer, as opposed to being passed down through traditional reproduction.

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Nov 25, 2015

Ray Kurzweil — The Future of Medicine

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, computing, health, life extension, nanotechnology, Ray Kurzweil, robotics/AI, singularity, transhumanism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9Ec7AvnufQ

Ray Kurzweil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Health_and_aging

Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

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Nov 25, 2015

Company Aims To Bring Back The Dead Within 30 Years

Posted by in categories: cryonics, life extension, nanotechnology, robotics/AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91M98WRqHJQ

Humai, a Los Angeles-based tech company, is hoping to bring back the dead within 30 years. A Los Angeles-based technology company has a goal of bringing dead people back to life within the next 30 years. Humai’s official website states that artificial intelligence and nanotechnology are being used to analyze human processes, and the creation of “an artificial body” is in the works. Once the artificial body has been perfected, the member’s brain, which will have been preserved through cryonics after death, will be implanted to direct movement and function. Helping the integration will be the extensive information the company gained while tracking each person for years during his or her life, according to the company’s founder and CEO Josh Bocanegra. An artificial intelligence app will retain the voice, personality, and behavioral patterns of each person and deploy as needed. This app is expected to launch among the membership by 2017. Aiding in this pursuit is the nanotechnology Humai is assisting in developing, which “will repair the cells destroyed in the brain after death.” The company, which employs five people total, is thus far self-funded but may be open to investments in the near future.

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Nov 23, 2015

Aubrey de Grey: Can We and Should We Give Ourselves Indefinite Youth? Oh Yes

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

The marginalization of anti-aging research is our most shameful humanitarian failure.

Aging is a hot topic among the chattering classes these days. What with biotech companies like Calico and Human Longevity Inc. being founded with the mission to defeat aging, and venerable institutions such as Prudential proclaiming the imminence of superlongevity on billboards, there’s no denying that this is a time of great interest in our oldest and deepest-held dream — to escape from the tyranny of inexorable and ultimately fatal physiological decline.

But hang on — is the buzz around aging really reflective of what’s being done to realize this goal? The briefest dispassionate analysis reveals a different story altogether. The proportion of government spending allocated in the industrialized world to diseases and disabilities of old age is appropriately high, but it is overwhelmingly dedicated to the transparently quixotic approach of attacking those ailments directly — as if they were infections — rather than attacking their lifelong accumulating causes.

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Nov 20, 2015

Survival of the richest: how London’s super-rich are trying to buy immortality

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business, health, life extension

You’ve got the Lamborghini and the Learjet, the houses and quite possibly the palaces; Erdem designs your dresses and you’ve got heaps of diamonds. What next? Well, adornment can only take you so far: what good is that Lech heli-skiing pad when your knees are shot? What’s the point in building a multibillion-pound business when you’re unwittingly courting a heart attack? As technology evolves ever more rapidly, ultra high net worth individuals are turning their attention inward, investigating how to stall the ageing process, and spending serious money to load their dice against death.

Across the road from Harrods sits Omniya clinic, a calm, contemporary white space amid the hustle of Knightsbridge. At street level it is a luxuriously reimagined pharmacy, whose curated selection includes recent launches from Hollywood’s favourite ‘cosmeceutical’ brands Zo Skin Health and Dr Levy. ‘I wanted to create a place that brings the newest advancements in medical and regenerative health to London,’ says co-founder Danyal Kader, a former lawyer, radiant with bien-être. He was so depressed by the difficulty of finding the best medical treatment for his father, who suffers from a heart condition, that he decided to create his own one-stop conduit to wellness. ‘We optimise the lives our clients can lead, body, mind and soul.’ To this end, he has brought together a team of leading specialists who analyse the health of their clients in the most minute and sophisticated detail — a kind of space-age human MOT.

One of these is cellular ageing specialist Dr Mark Bonar. As his title suggests, Bonar is passionate about the very specific degradations that happen in the cells of the body as we age — and still more excited about the new ways he can use to slow such deterioration. Consider, for example, telomeres. ‘Telomeres are the caps on the ends of our DNA,’ Bonar explains. ‘A bit like the plastic on the end of a shoe lace, they prevent the ends from fraying. By measuring their length in the lab we can determine how well the body is ageing’ — for instance, if at 30, you show the wear and tear you’d expect in a 40-year-old. ‘The length can also inform you about your risk of various kinds of disease such as breast or bowel cancer.’

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Nov 19, 2015

Presidential Candidate Suggests We Microchip Syrian Refugees

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, geopolitics, life extension, transhumanism

A new article on my campaign with a provocative headline, but most of the story is nice. I’ll be speaking in Florida on Saturday as part of the Immortality Bus tour. We visited Alabama’s largest megachurch yesterday:


His name sounds funny to Americans, but presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan says it’s totally normal in Hungary, from where his parents hail. Istvan himself was born in Los Angeles and worked for National Geographic for years — a job that led him to explore science, particularly the concept of transhumanism, which posits that people will merge with technology.

Today, Istvan continues to write for Vice, Psychology Today, Gizmod o, and more — when he’s not campaigning across the country and promoting the Transhumanist Party platform, which promises better lives — and hopefully immortality — through science. Istvan will speak this Saturday at the Church of Perpetual Life in Hollywood, which promotes the same ideals and which New Times featured in a cover story earlier this year.

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