Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,213

It’s extremely important to check yourself for ticks this summer.

Up to 14.5% of the global population may have already had Lyme disease, according to a new meta-analysis published in BMJ Global Health. The researchers behind the report analyzed 89 previously published studies to calculate the figure, which sheds a harrowing light on the worldwide toll of the tick-borne illness.

From 1991 to 2018, the incidence of Lyme disease in the United States nearly doubled, according to data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 1991, there were nearly four reported cases per 100,000 people; that number jumped to about seven cases per 100,000 people by 2018. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that about 470,000 Americans are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year.

The bacterium that most commonly causes Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi, is transmitted to humans via the bite of an infected black-legged tick, also known as a deer tick. These especially tiny ticks are often found in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast of the United States, per the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). Once a person has been infected, they may develop short-term, flu-like symptoms including fever, headache, and fatigue, as well as a signature bull’s-eye-shaped rash that appears in up to 80% of Lyme disease cases, according to the CDC. In rare instances, when Lyme is left untreated, a person may experience long-term, potentially life-threatening complications, including joint pain, severe headaches and neck stiffness, heart issues, and inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, among others.

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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and the most common cause of dementia, affecting more than 5.8 million individuals in the U.S. Scientists have discovered some genetic variants that increase the risk for developing Alzheimer’s; the most well-known of these for people over the age of 65 is the APOE ε4 allele. Although the association between APOE4 and increased AD risk is well-established, the mechanisms responsible for the underlying risk in human brain cell types has been unclear until now.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have discovered two important novel aspects of the gene: 1) human genetic background inherited with APOE4 is unique to APOE4 patients and 2) the mechanistic defects due to APOE4 are unique to human cells.

Our study demonstrated what the APOE4 gene does and which brain cells get affected the most in humans by comparing human and mouse models. These are important findings as we can find therapeutics if we understand how and where this risk gene is destroying our brain.

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At 79, he’s already outlived the CDC’s official life expectancy by two years and he has no intention of dying — or even slowing down — anytime soon. An active man, Scott jets between his homes in upstate New York and Florida, flies to exotic locations such as Panama City for business and still finds time for the odd cruise. His secret? A DIY regime of self-experimentation and untested therapies he believes will keep him going well past the next century.

Self-experimenters litter the history of medical science. Dentist Horace Wells dosed himself with nitrous oxide in 1,844 to see if it could kill pain, Nicholas Senn inflated his innards with hydrogen a few decades later to work out if it could diagnose a ruptured bowel, and more recently, Barry Marshall drank a solution containing H. pylori in 1985 to prove the bacterium caused ulcers.

These scientists risked their own health to make a medical breakthrough or prove a theory, but Scott is not a scientist. He’s an amateur enthusiast, also known as a biohacker. Biohackers engage in DIY biology, experimenting on themselves to enhance their brain and body. And many of them — like Scott — see longevity as the ultimate prize.

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Researchers at the University of Houston are reporting a first-of-its-kind technology that not only repairs heart muscle cells in mice but also regenerates them following a heart attack, or myocardial infarction as its medically known.

Published in The Journal of Cardiovascular Aging 0, the groundbreaking finding has the potential to become a powerful clinical strategy for treating heart disease in humans, according to Robert Schwartz, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of biology and biochemistry at the UH College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

The new technology developed by the team of researchers uses synthetic messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to deliver mutated transcription factors — proteins that control the conversion of DNA into RNA — to mouse hearts.

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The talk is provided on a Free/Donation basis. If you would like to support my work then you can paypal me at this link:
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Or to support me longer term Patreon me at: https://www.patreon.com/waihtsang.

Unfortunately my internet link went down in the second Q&A session at the end and the recording cut off. Shame, loads of great information came out about FPGA/ASIC implementations, AI for the VR/AR, C/C++ and a whole load of other riveting and most interesting techie stuff. But thankfully the main part of the talk was recorded.

TALK OVERVIEW
This talk is about the realization of the ideas behind the Fractal Brain theory and the unifying theory of life and intelligence discussed in the last Zoom talk, in the form of useful technology. The Startup at the End of Time will be the vehicle for the development and commercialization of a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms.

We will show in detail how the theoretical fractal brain/genome ideas lead to a whole new way of doing AI and ML that overcomes most of the central limitations of and problems associated with existing approaches. A compelling feature of this approach is that it is based on how neurons and brains actually work, unlike existing artificial neural networks, which though making sensational headlines are impeded by severe limitations and which are based on an out of date understanding of neurons form about 70 years ago. We hope to convince you that this new approach, really is the path to true AI.

In the last Zoom talk, we discussed a great unifying of scientific ideas relating to life & brain/mind science through the application of the mathematical idea of symmetry. In turn the same symmetry approach leads to a unifying of a mass of ideas relating to computer and information science. There’s been talk in recent years of a ‘master algorithm’ of machine learning and AI. We’ll explain that it goes far deeper than that and show how there exists a way of unifying into a single algorithm, the most important fundamental algorithms in use in the world today, which relate to data compression, databases, search engines and also existing AI/ML. Furthermore and importantly this algorithm is completely fractal or scale invariant. The same algorithm which is able to perform all these functionalities is able to run on a micro-controller unit (MCU), mobile phone, laptop and workstation, going right up to a supercomputer.

The application and utility of this new technology is endless. We will discuss the road map by which the sort of theoretical ideas I’ve been discussing in the Zoom, academic and public talks over the past few years, and which I’ve written about in the Fractal Brain Theory book, will become practical technology. And how the Java/C/C++ code running my workstation and mobile phones will become products and services.

Continue reading “The Startup at the End of the Age : Creating True AI and instigating the Technological Singularity” | >

Inspired by your liver and activated by light, a chemical process developed in labs at Rice University and in China shows promise for drug design and the development of unique materials.

Researchers led by Rice chemist Julian West and Xi-Sheng Wang at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, are reporting their successful catalytic process to simultaneously add two distinct functional groups to single alkenes, drawn from petrochemicals that contain at least one carbon-carbon double bond combined with .

Better yet, they say, is that these alkenes are “unactivated”—that is, they lack reactive atoms near the double bond—and until now, have proven challenging to enhance.

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Flashes of what may become a transformative new technology are coursing through a network of optic fibers under Chicago.

Researchers have created one of the world’s largest networks for sharing —a field of science that depends on paradoxes so strange that Albert Einstein didn’t believe them.

The network, which connects the University of Chicago with Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, is a rudimentary version of what scientists hope someday to become the internet of the future. For now, it’s opened up to businesses and researchers to test fundamentals of quantum information sharing.

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For a few years now, spent grain, the cereal residue from breweries, has been reused in animal feed. This material could also be used in nanotechnology. Professor Federico Rosei’s team at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) has shown that microbrewery waste can be used as a carbon source to synthesize quantum dots. The work, done in collaboration with Claudiane Ouellet-Plamondon of the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), was published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal RSC Advances.

Often considered “artificial atoms,” are used in the transmission of light. With a range of interesting physicochemical properties, this type of nanotechnology has been successfully used as a sensor in biomedicine or as LEDs in next generation displays. But there is a drawback. Current quantum dots are produced with heavy and toxic metals like cadmium. Carbon is an interesting alternative, both for its biocompatibility and its accessibility.

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Australian scientists have taken the first step towards improved storage of human cells, which may lead to the safe storage of organs such as hearts and lungs.

The team’s discovery of new cryoprotective agents opens the door to many more being developed that could one day help to eliminate the need for organ transplant waiting lists. Their results are published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry B.

Cryopreservation is a process of cooling biological specimens down to very low temperatures so they can be stored for a long time. Storing cells through cryopreservation has had big benefits for the world—including boosting supplies at blood banks and assisting reproduction—but it is currently impossible to store organs and simple tissues.

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