Lifeboat Foundation

Before delving into the prospects of the Fifth Industrial Revolution, let’s reflect on the legacy of its predecessor. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterised by the fusion of digital, physical, and biological systems, has already transformed the way we live and work. It brought us AI, blockchain, the Internet of Things, and more. However, it also raised concerns about automation’s impact on employment and privacy, leaving us with a mixed legacy.

The promise of the Fifth Industrial Revolution.

The Fifth Industrial Revolution represents a quantum leap forward. At its core, it combines AI, advanced biotechnology, nanotechnology, and quantum computing to usher in a new era of possibilities. One of its most compelling promises is the extension of human life. With breakthroughs in genetic engineering, regenerative medicine, and AI-driven healthcare, we are inching closer to not just treating diseases but preventing them altogether. It’s a vision where aging is not an inevitability, but a challenge to overcome.

The therapy—developed at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC)—relies on both the immune system to fight key aspects of Alzheimer’s, plus modified cells that zero in on the brain protein plaques that are a hallmark of the disease.

In patients with Alzheimer’s, amyloid-beta protein forms plaques that prevent nerve cells from signaling each other. One theory is that this might cause irreversible memory loss and behavior changes characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.

The new study was recently published in the journal Molecular Neurodegeneration. Researchers used genetically modified immune-controlling cells called Tregs to target amyloid-beta.

“Epigenetic changes determine whether genes are turned on or off, and can potentially reverse disease, broadening the therapeutic landscape to find potential cures previously thought impossible.”

Company co-founded by Alex Aravanis and Feng Zhang targets epigenetic code to reprogram cells to a healthy state.

While dementia is much more common in older adults, hundreds of thousands of people are diagnosed with young-onset dementia (YOD) each year – and an extensive new study sheds some considerable new light on why.

Most previous research in this area has looked at genetics passed down through generations, but here, the team was able to identify 15 different lifestyle and health factors that are associated with YOD risk.

“This is the largest and most robust study of its kind ever conducted,” says epidemiologist David Llewellyn from the University of Exeter in the UK.

Summary: Scientists are using epigenetic clocks to reveal our biological age, a true marker of health.

A new study delves into the immune system’s role in understanding and improving the accuracy of these clocks. Their innovative approach sheds light on the relationship between immune cell composition and biological age, with a focus on the balance between naïve and memory immune cells.

This research has significant implications for aging insights, health interventions, and targeted cancer treatments.

In this study, we conducted behavioral experiments and measured survival rates in local caves to minimize the impacts of factors other than light. Although energy-costly eyes were highly reduced or lost in cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders, which spend their entire life cycles in the complete absence of light, our results demonstrated that they could detect light, and light cues may be used to avoid the perilously dry environment outside the cave. The annotation of core PPGs based on transcriptomic data suggests that cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders have retained a nearly complete set of PPGs as in the entrance spiders. The molecular evolutionary analysis showed strong purifying selection on PPGs of cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders. Therefore, our study provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that the phototransduction system of cave-dwelling eyeless Leptonetela spiders may have been under purifying selection rather than being a phylogenetic relic. Our results thus refute the neutral hypothesis.

Leptonetela spiders are small cryptozoic spiders that build sheet webs for capturing prey in twilight or lightless environment, such as leaf litter, rotting logs, rock crevices, and caves (31). Light is suggested to be the primary selective force driving the evolution of eyes of cave animals, thus, eyes are often reduced or lost as cave preadaptation in many litter-dwelling arthropods (36–38). Leptonetela spiders have lost anterior median eyes that are generally involved in identifying and stalking prey in spiders, likely due to their twilight or lightless habitats. In addition, cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders living in lightless deep caves exhibit various degrees of eye reduction (highly reduced or eyeless) compared to their entrance spider relatives that have six intact eyes. Thus, Leptonetela spiders provided an ideal system for studying the evolution of eyes and visual systems.

This study provides evidence demonstrating negative phototaxis in cave-dwelling spiders, a highly diverse group that plays a critical role in cave ecosystems as top predators (23). Negative phototaxis has frequently been found in other subterranean animals. For example, the cave-dwelling carrion beetle Ptomaphagus hirtus that has highly reduced eyes nonetheless displays strongly negative phototaxis and maintains a reduced but functional phototransduction system, as shown by transcriptomic data (13). However, Langille et al. (14) reported that five of six subterranean water beetles completely lacked phototactic responses, and the authors proposed negative phototaxis as a preadaptation to living in permanent darkness for ancestral cave-dwelling animals. We speculate that drought resistance may play an important role in the retention of PPGs in Leptonetela spiders.

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Scientific knowledge can progress rapidly, yet its social, economic, and political impacts often unfold at a painstakingly slow pace. The medicine of the 21st century draws upon genetic and embryological breakthroughs of the 19th century. Our current technology is firmly grounded in quantum physics, which was formulated a century ago. And the topic of the day, artificial intelligence (AI), traces its origins to the secret weapons research during World War II.

‌In 1935, the brilliant British mathematician, Alan Turing, envisioned a conceptual computer. His genius would later lead him to crack the Enigma code used by German submarines for secret communications during the war. Turing’s contributions extended beyond cryptography, as he introduced fundamental concepts of AI, including the training of artificial neural networks. Benedict Cumberbatch portrayed Turing in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, which earned a screenplay Oscar that year. All this historical context brings us to the heart of the current AI revolution.

‌AI uses neural networks, also known as artificial neural networks, which are comprised of multiple layers of artificial neurons. Each neuron receives numerous inputs from the lower layer and produces a single output to the upper layer, similar to the dendrites and axon of natural neurons. As information progresses through each layer, it gradually becomes more abstract, resembling the process that occurs in the visual cortex of our brains.

Aera Therapeutics, a startup launched by the CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang last year to solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in genetic medicine, has laid off a quarter of its staff, the company confirmed to STAT.

The layoffs come as the biotech market remains mired in a now nearly three-year-long downturn that has left startups struggling to attract both private and public funds. Aera attributed the layoffs to those headwinds and indicated it had axed a portion of the company dedicated to developing new gene-editing enzymes.

“In 2023, Aera launched to pursue an ambitious mission to develop transformative genetic medicines by harnessing enabling delivery technologies and precision payloads,” spokesman Dan Budwick said in a statement. “Although Aera remains in a strong cash position today, given the current biotech funding environment, we have chosen to take steps to focus our strategy and investments on the development of our novel delivery platforms, thereby further extending our cash runway.”