Lifeboat Foundation

A research group working at Uppsala University has succeeded in studying ‘translation factors’ – important components of a cell’s protein synthesis machinery – that are several billion years old. By studying these ancient ‘resurrected’ factors, the researchers were able to establish that they had much broader specificities than their present-day, more specialized counterparts.

In order to survive and grow, all cells contain an in-house protein synthesis factory. This consists of ribosomes and associated translation factors that work together to ensure that the complex protein production process runs smoothly. While almost all components of the modern translational machinery are well known, until now scientists did not know how the process evolved.

The new study, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, took the research group led by Professor Suparna Sanyal of the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology on an epic journey back into the past. A previously published study used a special algorithm to predict DNA sequences of ancestors of an important translation factor called elongation factor thermo-unstable, or EF-Tu, going back billions of years. The Uppsala research group used these DNA sequences to resurrect the ancient bacterial EF-Tu proteins and then to study their properties.

Researchers from University of Copenhagen have investigated what happened to a specific kind of plasma—the first matter ever to be present—during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Their findings provide a piece of the puzzle to the evolution of the universe, as we know it today.

About 14 billion years ago, our universe changed from being a lot hotter and denser to expanding radically—a process that scientists have named the Big Bang.

And even though we know that this fast expansion created particles, atoms, stars, galaxies and life as we know it today, the details of how it all happened are still unknown.

To answer this question, an internal team of scientists, consisting of researchers affiliated with the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, and researchers from Nanjing University decided to modify both the Insulin and the rapamycin pathways of a group of C.elegans worms, expecting to see a cumulative result of a 130% increase in lifespan. However, instead of seeing a cumulative effect in lifespan, the worms lived five times longer than they normally would.

“The synergistic extension is really wild. The effect isn’t one plus one equals two, it’s one plus one equals five. Our findings demonstrate that nothing in nature exists in a vacuum; in order to develop the most effective anti-aging treatments we have to look at longevity networks rather than individual pathways.” – Jarad Rollins of Nanjing University.

What could this mean for human regenerative medicine? Humans are not worms, however on a cellular level they do possess very similar biology. Both the insulin pathway and the rapamycin pathway are what is known as ‘conserved’ between humans and C.elegans, meaning that these pathways have been maintained in both organisms. In the distant past, both humans and C.elegans had a common ancestor, in exactly the same way as humans and Chimpanzees have a common ancestor. Evolution has changed our bodies significantly over the millions of years that humans and C.elegans have diverged from one another, but a lot of our fundamental biological functions remain largely unchanged.

Archaea are more than just oddball lifeforms that thrive in unusual places — they turn out to be quite widespread. Moreover, they might hold the key to understanding how complex life evolved on Earth. Many scientists suspect that an ancient archaeon gave rise to the group of organisms known as eukaryotes, which include amoebae, mushrooms, plants and people — although it’s also possible that both eukaryotes and archaea arose from some more distant common ancestor.

As scientists learn more about enigmatic archaea, they’re finding clues about the evolution of the complex cells that make up people, plants and more.

www.iBiology.org.

Dr. Kate Adamala describes what synthetic cells are and how they can teach us the fundamental principles of life.

Continue reading “Kate Adamala (U of M) 1: Synthetic Cells: Building Life to Understand It” »

We think of earthly life as evolving from the sea. But newly discovered microscopic “ball” fossils — found in ancient lake sediments in Scotland — suggest that evolution from single-celled to multicellular organisms might have occurred in lakes.

Humans are distinguished from other species by several aspects of cognition. While much comparative evolutionary neuroscience has focused on the neocortex, increasing recognition of the cerebellum’s role in cognition and motor processing has inspired considerable new research. Comparative molecular studies, however, generally continue to focus on the neocortex. We sought to characterize potential genetic regulatory traits distinguishing the human cerebellum by undertaking genome-wide epigenetic profiling of the lateral cerebellum, and compared this to the prefrontal cortex of humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaque monkeys. We found that humans showed greater differential CpG methylation–an epigenetic modification of DNA that can reflect past or present gene expression–in the cerebellum than the prefrontal cortex, highlighting the importance of this structure in human brain evolution. Humans also specifically show methylation differences at genes involved in neurodevelopment, neuroinflammation, synaptic plasticity, and lipid metabolism. These differences are relevant for understanding processes specific to humans, such as extensive plasticity, as well as pronounced and prevalent neurodegenerative conditions associated with aging.

Citation: Guevara EE, Hopkins WD, Hof PR, Ely JJ, Bradley BJ, Sherwood CC (2021) Comparative analysis reveals distinctive epigenetic features of the human cerebellum. PLoS Genet 17: e1009506. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.

Editor: Takashi Gojobori, National Institute of Genetics, JAPAN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UudjpTgB3K8&feature=share

0:00 — Title.
0:35 — Into.
1:15 — Super People of The Future.
1:46 — Neal VanDeree ‘Living Long Healthy Lives Will be Possible’ — https://www.churchofperpetuallife.org/ — https://www.youtube.com/user/COPL18
3:24 — Dr. Bill Andrews ‘Super Wonderful Future’ — https://www.sierrasci.com/
6:27 — Selim Bakırcı ‘1000 years long life’
6:58 — Rodrigo Guinea ‘Great Responsibility’ — https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodguinea/
9:22 — Significant Research.
9:40 — Significant Research — Liz Parrish — https://bioviva-science.com/
10:44 — Significant Research — Brent Nally — https://longevityplan.net/ — https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentnally/ — https://www.youtube.com/user/BrentAltonNally.
13:10 — Significant Research — Cain Hillier — https://www.linkedin.com/in/cain-hillier-50571a18a/
14:43 — Significant Research — Chris Curwen — https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-curwen-67144b169/
17:16 — The Threshold Times.
18:41 — The Threshold Times — Brent Nally.
21:35 — The Threshold Times — Chris Curwen
24:25 — The Threshold Times — Liz Parrish.
26:21 — The Threshold Times — Nicolas Chernavsky
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-chernavsky-25265835/ — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUASjdn96BRlGVytmbDgRRA
27:00 — The Threshold Times — Josh Martin.
27:42 — The Threshold Times — Cain Hillier.
28:50 — The Threshold Times — Vikram Pandya — https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikrampandya/
31:24 — Ageing Is a Disease.
32:49 — Ageing Is a Disease — Neal VanDeree.
34:09 — Ageing Is a Disease — Dr. Bill Andrews.
37:48 — Ageing Is a Disease — Liz Parrish.
39:28 — Ageing Is a Disease — Brent Nally.
42:10 — Ageing Is a Disease — Aaron King.
44:44 — Ageing Is a Disease — Lukas Vismantas — https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-vismantas/?originalSubdomain=dk.
46:07 — Ageing Is a Disease — Cain Hillier.
48:02 — Ageing Is a Disease — Chris Curwen.
50:23 — Ageing Is a Disease — Nicolas Chernavsky.
52:49 — The Big Times.
54:40 — The Big Times — Dr. Bill Andrews.
56:52 — The Big Times — Liz Parrish.
59:16 — The Big Times — Brent Nally.
01:03:50 — The Big Times — Nicholas Mohnacky — https://www.bundleiq.com/ — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohnacky/
01:05:00 — The Big Times — Bolek Kerous — https://www.linkedin.com/in/bolekkerous/ — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSpv8MA3xPskco9qdIBeNuQ
01:08:24 — The Big Times — Nicolas Chernavsky.
01:08:58 — The Big Times — Chris Curwen.
01:09:48 — The Big Times — Nicolas Chernavsky.
01:11:19 — The Big Times — Jeremy Rumble — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-rumble-42910b38/
01:12:22 — The Big Times — Jakub Czubak — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakub-czubak-603624a9/
01:14:20 — The Big Times — Josh Martin.
01:14:50 — The Big Times — Nicolas Chernavsky.
01:20:15 — The Big Times — Brent Nally.
01:22:09 — Ending.

Omitting natural disasters like an asteroid smashing Earth or a volcano eruption we can say that improving human health and condition is the most important safety case/concern and the fundamental thing to consider and accomplish on our way to be super cosmic humanity. Significant health improvements will free us from all diseases, allow us to develop superhuman intelligence, let us totally self-realize, and consequently, help realize the infinity in the matter for the common good. However intensively we focus on intelligence, it is not possible to experience its natural consequence or the next level of its advancement/evolution if there is no good health. Coherent and consistent collective mind continuum experience is not possible without super health (Healthy life that is free from the danger of uncontrollable death). Our bodies are short-timed and not strong enough to hold up the Earth-Gravity-Geometry sized/adjusted thoughts that are necessary to naturally manage and effectively inhabit our planet.

Continue reading “Super Long HealthSpans: In The Making” »

Rees explained how his astronomy background meshes with his concern for humanity’s fate:

People often ask does being an astronomer have any effect on one’s attitude toward these things. I think it does in a way, because it makes us aware of the long-range future. We’re aware that it’s taken about 4 billion years for life to evolve from simple beginnings to our biosphere of which we are a part, but we also know that the sun is less than halfway through its life and the universe may go on forever. So we are not the culmination of evolution. Post-humans are going to have far longer to evolve. We can’t conceive what they’d be like, but if life is a rarity in the universe, then, of course, the stakes are very high if we snuff things out this century.

Bottom line: From nuclear weapons to biowarfare to cyberattacks, humanity has much to overcome. Martin Rees and Frederick Lamb discuss the obstacles we face as we look forward to humanity’s future on Earth.