Lifeboat Foundation

Biomarkers of ageing based on DNA methylation data enable accurate age estimates for any tissue across the entire life course. Horvath and Raj review the development of these ‘epigenetic clocks’ and how they link to biological ageing.

UNSW scientists in collaboration with European scientists demonstrated that the “DNA”, or spectra, of more than 340,000 stars in the Milky Way could aid them to search the siblings of the Sun, now scattered across the sky.

Scientists actually are working on project GALAH, the survey observations for the ambitious galactic archaeology project- which launched in late 2013 as part of a quest to uncover the formulation and evolution of galaxies. Scientists gathered the data from HERMES spectrograph at the Australian Astronomical Observatory’s (AAO) 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope near Coonabarabran in NSW to collect spectra for the 340,000 stars.

The data shows that how the Universe went from having just hydrogen and helium soon after the Big Bang to being loaded with every one of the components show now on Earth that is fundamental forever.

Y Combinator announces the first wave of support for biotech startups working on aging.

Earlier this year, the Y Combinator (YC) community showed interest in supporting biotechnology focused on healthspan and age-related disease. The YC community is an influential part of the Bay Area technology-focused industry in California. It was great to hear that it was planning to support biotech startups working on aging through its YC Bio program.

The first area we’re going to focus on is healthspan and age-related disease—we think there’s an enormous opportunity to help people live healthier for longer, and that it could be one of the best ways to address our healthcare crisis.

Continue reading “YC Bio Providing Lab Space for Biotech Startups Working on Aging” »

Jerome Groopman discusses the results of a trial described in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which twenty-two patients with beta thalassemia, a common and devastating blood disorder, were treated with gene therapy.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Surgeons pack donated organs on ice while racing them to transplant patients but it may be time for a warmer approach. British researchers said Wednesday that keeping at least some livers at body temperature instead may work better.

The livers keep functioning until they’re transplanted thanks to a machine that pumps them full of blood and nutrients. It’s a life-support system for the organs, and similar machines are being explored for lung and heart transplants, too.

The transplant community isn’t ditching affordable ice chests for the far pricier approach just yet. But proponents hope that storing organs in a way that mimics the body might eventually increase the number of transplants — by keeping precious donations usable for longer periods, and allowing use of some that today get thrown away.

Continue reading “Warming, not cooling, donated livers may improve transplants” »

We all knew this was going to happen eventually. But this is a seriously dangerous time for this kind of technology to come out, given the state of the country’…s complete lack of ability to apparently discern truth from blatant self-serving lies. I wonder how many of these it would take to start a war, how many of these it would take to start a revolution.

Barack Obama appears to say, “Stay woke, bitches.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) — SpaceX said all systems and weather were “go” for blast-off on Wednesday of its first high-priority science mission for NASA, a planet-hunting space telescope whose launch was delayed for two days by a rocket-guidance glitch.

FILE PHOTO: NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, U.S., is shown in this artist’s rendering image obtained on April 9, 2018. Courtesy Chris Meaney/Goddard Space Flight Center/NASA/Handout via REUTERS.

In the new Netflix series ‘Lost in Space’, the Robinson family land on an unknown planet described as a ‘Goldilocks planet’ by both Maureen Robinson and one of the show’s writers, Burk Sharpless. The term ‘Goldilocks planet’ refers to planets in the ‘habitable zone’ of their solar system.

And just like that, humanity draws one step closer to the singularity, the moment when the machines grow so advanced that humans become obsolete: A robot has learned to autonomously assemble an Ikea chair without throwing anything or cursing the family dog.

Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they’ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts—two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3D camera—to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands.

To start, the researchers give the pair of robot arms some basic instructions—like those cartoony illustrations, but in code. This piece goes first into this other piece, then this other, etc. Then they place the pieces in a random pattern front of the robots, which eyeball the wood with the 3D camera. So the researchers give the robots a list of tasks, then the robots take it from there.

Continue reading “A Robot Does the Impossible: Assembling an Ikea Chair Without Having a Meltdown” »