Lifeboat Foundation

By and Targeting Metabesity to examine the links between metabesity, Longevity and the USA’s current health shortfalls, including low health-adjusted life expectancy (“HALE”) and the large gap between HALE and life expectancy, despite its extremely high per-capita healthcare expenditures, and to chart policy recommendations to neutralize this vast health vs wealth deficit.

€œMetabesity and Longevity: USA Special Case Study € is an 85-page open-access analytical report produced jointly by Aging Analytics Agency and Targeting Metabesity to examine the links between metabesity, Longevity and the USA €™s current health shortfalls, including low health-adjusted life expectancy ( €œHALE €) and the large gap between HALE and life expectancy, despite its extremely high per-capita healthcare expenditures, and to chart policy recommendations to neutralize this vast health vs wealth deficit.

Link to Special Case Study: https://aginganalytics.com/longevity-usa/

Continue reading “‘Metabesity and Longevity: USA Special Case Study’ is an 85-page open-access analytical report produced jointly” »

Each year, heart attacks kill almost 10 million people around the world, and more than 6 million die from stroke. A heart attack is caused by clots that block arterial blood flow. Tissues are deprived from blood-borne oxygen. Under these conditions, the affected tissues undergo a rapid necrosis. But why? Scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, the University of Lyon and the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (Inserm), France, have discovered that the synthesis of a lipid called deoxydihydroceramide provokes necrosis. This lipid accumulates in the absence of oxygen and blocks cellular functions. By inhibiting its synthesis in a mouse suffering a heart attack, the biologists were able to reduce the tissue damage by 30 percent. These results, published in Nature Metabolism, suggest a new model of treatment for victims of heart attack or stroke.

“But what causes necrosis under these conditions?” asked Howard Riezman, professor in the Department of Biochemistry of the Faculty of Science at UNIGE and Director of the NCCR Chemical Biology. Not all animals are so sensitive to the absence of oxygen—worms can live three days without oxygen, some turtles can live several months, and certain bacteria indefinitely.

“That is why we sought to find the link between the lack of oxygen and tissue necrosis in mammals,” said the scientist.

We’re continuing to release talks from Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019, our highly successful two-day conference that featured talks from leading researchers and investors, bringing them together to discuss the future of aging and rejuvenation biotechnology.

Dr. Peter Fedichev, co-founder of GERO, discussed biomarkers in the context of mouse research, particularly physiological frailty and blood cell counts. He introduced a new index, the Dynamic Frailty Index, and explained it in detail, including the advantages that it has over conventional frailty models and epigenetic clocks. He also explained the differences between humans and mice, most notably the fact that interventions that work in mice do not always apply to human beings.

Brain-machine interface enthusiasts often gush about “closing the loop.” It’s for good reason. On the implant level, it means engineering smarter probes that only activate when they detect faulty electrical signals in brain circuits. Elon Musk’s Neuralink—among other players—are readily pursuing these bi-directional implants that both measure and zap the brain.

But to scientists laboring to restore functionality to paralyzed patients or amputees, “closing the loop” has broader connotations. Building smart mind-controlled robotic limbs isn’t enough; the next frontier is restoring sensation in offline body parts. To truly meld biology with machine, the robotic appendage has to “feel one” with the body.

Continue reading “Moving Beyond Mind-Controlled Limbs to Prosthetics That Can Actually ‘Feel’” »

The 17” x 14” X-ray film, gels, and blots are widely used in DNA research. However, DNA laser scanners are costly and unaffordable for the majority of surveyed biotech scientists who need it. The high-tech breakthrough analytical personal scanner (PS) presented in this report is an inexpensive 1 lb hand-held scanner priced at 2–4% of the bulky and costly 30–95 lb conventional laser scanners. This PS scanner is affordable from an operation budget and biotechnologists, who originate most science breakthroughs, can acquire it to enhance their speed, accuracy, and productivity. Compared to conventional laser scanners that are currently available only through hard-to-get capital-equipment budgets, the new PS scanner offers improved spatial resolution of 20 microns, higher speed (scan up to 17” x 14” molecular X-ray film in 48 s), 1–32,768 gray levels (16-bits), student routines, versatility, and, most important, affordability.

In work that combines a deep understanding of the biology of soft-bodied animals such as earthworms with advances in materials and electronic technologies, researchers from the United States and China have developed a robotic device containing a stretchable transistor that allows neurological function.

Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, said the work represents a significant step toward the development of prosthetics that could directly connect with the peripheral nerves in biological tissues, offering neurological function to artificial limbs, as well as toward advances in soft neurorobots capable of thinking and making judgments. Yu is corresponding author for a paper describing the work, published in Science Advances.

He is also a principal investigator with the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston.

As noted by Dan Ariely, who is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, this “worry that tugs at the corners of our minds is set off by the fear of regret…that we’ve made the wrong decision about how to spend our time.”

Why do such fears rule our day? Perhaps due to the fact that our lives are severely limited, and thus our experiences are confined by an hourglass. Would we reminisce of our past decisions so often if life weren’t so short?

FOMO — the Fear of Missing Out — has been an anxiety of ours since birth. Will our future endeavors provide us a cure or will we continue living and expiring with this constant psychological state?

Continue reading “The Transhuman Condition of ‘FOMO’ — The Fear of Missing Out” »

US biotechnology company called Bioquark has been given permission to recruit 20 clinically dead patients and attempt to bring their central nervous systems back to life. They hope to eliminate patients’ need to rely on machines by reanimating parts of the upper spinal cord, where the lower brain stem is located, to potentially energize vital body functions like breathing and heartbeats.

Trial participants will have been declared certified dead and kept alive solely through life support machines. “This represents the first trial of its kind and another step towards the eventual reversal of death in our lifetime,” said CEO of Bioquark Inc., Ira Pastor.

The team, who has been granted ethical permission from an Institutional Review Board at the National Institutes of Health in the US and India to begin trials on 20 subjects, is looking to recruit patients for its ReAnima Project as soon as possible.

Detection of rare cells in blood and other bodily fluids has numerous important applications including diagnostics, monitoring disease progression and evaluating immune response. For example, detecting and collecting circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in blood can help cancer diagnostics, study their role in the metastatic cascade and predict patient outcomes. However, because each millilitre of whole blood contains billions of blood cells, the rare cells (such as CTCs) that occur at extremely low concentrations (typically lower than 100‑1000 cells per millilitre) are very difficult to detect. Although various solutions have been developed to address this challenge, existing techniques in general are limited by high cost and low throughput.

Researchers at UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering have developed a new cytometry platform to detect rare cells in blood with high throughput and low cost. Published in Light: Science and Applications, this novel cytometry technique, termed magnetically modulated lensless speckle imaging, first uses magnetic bead labelling to enrich the target cells. Then the enriched liquid sample containing magnetic bead-labelled target cells is placed under an alternating magnetic field, which causes the target cells to oscillate laterally at a fixed frequency. At the same time, a laser diode illuminates the sample from above and an image sensor positioned below the sample captures a high-frame-rate lensless video of the time-varying optical pattern generated by the sample. The recorded spatiotemporal pattern contains the information needed to detect the oscillating target cells.

The researchers built a compact and low-cost prototype of this computational lensless cytometer using off-the-shelf image sensors, laser diodes and electromagnets, and used a custom-built translation stage to allow the imager unit to scan liquid sample loaded in a glass tube. The prototype can screen the equivalent of ~1.2 mL of whole blood sample in ~7 min, while costing only ~$750 and weighing ~2.1 kg. Multiple parallel imaging channels can also be easily added to the system to further increase sample throughput.