Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have developed a soft neural implant that can be wirelessly controlled using a smartphone. It is the first wireless neural device capable of indefinitely delivering multiple drugs and multiple colour lights, which neuroscientists believe can speed up efforts to uncover brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, addiction, depression, and pain. A team under Professor Jae-Woong Jeong from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST and his collaborators have invented a device that can control neural circuits using a tiny brain implant controlled by a smartphone. The device, using Lego-like replaceable drug cartridges and powerful, low-energy Bluetooth, can target specific neurons of interest using drugs and light for prolonged periods. This study was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

“This novel device is the fruit of advanced electronics design and powerful micro and nanoscale engineering,” explained Professor Jeong. “We are interested in further developing this technology to make a brain implant for clinical applications.”

Patience proved the key ingredient to what researchers are saying may be an important discovery about how complex life evolved. After 12 years of trying, a team in Japan has grown an organism from mud on the seabed that they say could explain how simple microbes evolved into more sophisticated eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are the group that includes humans, other animals, plants, and many single-celled organisms. The microbe can produce branched appendages, which may have helped it corral and envelop bacteria that helped it—and, eventually, all eukaryotes—thrive in a world full of oxygen.

“This is the work that many people in the field have been waiting for,” says Thijs Ettema, an evolutionary microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The finding has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but on Twitter, other scientists reviewing a preprint on it have already hailed it as the “paper of the year” and the “moon landing for microbial ecology.”

The tree of life has three major branches—bacteria and archaea make up two, both of which are microbes that lack nuclei and mitochondria, distinct membrane-bound compartments to store DNA or generate energy, respectively. Those components, or organelles, characterize cells of the third branch, the eukaryotes. The prevailing thinking is that roughly 2 billion years ago, a microbe belonging to a group called the Asgard archaea absorbed a bacterium called an alphaproteobacterium, which settled inside and became mitochondria, producing power for its host by consuming oxygen as fuel. But isolating and growing Asgard archaea has proved a challenge, as they tend to live in inhospitable environments such as deep-sea mud. They also grow very slowly, so they are hard to detect. Most evidence of their existence so far has been fragments of DNA with distinctive sequences.

Scientists agree that CRISPR holds great promise in giving researchers unprecedented power to snip out abnormal stretches of DNA, But there are still significant questions about how safe and effective CRISPR gene editing will be once it’s unleashed in the human body. CRISPR works well enough in the lab, in a dish of human cells, but as with any technology, there are glitches. Some studies have shown that the gene editing goes awry once in a while, splicing incorrect places in the genome. Then there is the bigger question of what longer term, unanticipated effects man-made edits to the human genome might have… (READ MORE)

The black mouse on the screen sprawls on its belly, back hunched, blinking but otherwise motionless. Its organs are failing. It appears to be days away from death. It has progeria, a disease of accelerated aging, caused by a genetic mutation. It is only three months old.

I am in the laboratory of Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spaniard who works at the Gene Expression Laboratory at San Diego’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and who next shows me something hard to believe. It’s the same mouse, lively and active, after being treated with an age-reversal mixture. “It completely rejuvenates,” Izpisúa Belmonte tells me with a mischievous grin. “If you look inside, obviously, all the organs, all the cells are younger.”

Izpisúa Belmonte, a shrewd and soft-spoken scientist, has access to an inconceivable power. These mice, it seems, have sipped from a fountain of youth. Izpisúa Belmonte can rejuvenate aging, dying animals. He can rewind time. But just as quickly as he blows my mind, he puts a damper on the excitement. So potent was the rejuvenating treatment used on the mice that they either died after three or four days from cell malfunction or developed tumors that killed them later. An overdose of youth, you could call it.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme longevity and aging Ambassador and Founder of Bioquark interviews Bill Faloon, Director and Co-Founder, Life Extension Foundation and Founder of The Church Of Perpetual Life.

Ira Pastor Comments:

Continue reading “Bill Faloon: A Life Long Quest To Reverse Human Aging!” »

Alkahest, a California-based biotech start-up, has just revealed some compelling early results from an ongoing Phase 2 trial into the efficacy of its novel formulation of plasma proteins derived from young blood, developed to slow, or even stop, the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

The tardigrades were part of a “lunar library” that Spivack’s foundation had put together. According to Wired, the package was about the size of a DVD and contained human DNA—including Spivack’s own—as well as 30 million pages of information on mankind’s knowledge and thousands of dehydrated tardigrades.

Tardigrades are known as one of the toughest creatures on Earth. They are microscopic, measuring about 0.012 to 0.020 inches in length, and can withstand temperatures of up to 304 degrees Fahrenheit and can survive being frozen alive. One tardigrade is known to have survived being frozen for 30 years. They can also live without water for up to a decade by shriveling up and placing themselves in a state of suspended animation—a trait DARPA is currently studying in the hope of preserving soldiers injured on the battlefield.

In addition to having access to large colonies of monkeys and other species, animal researchers in China face less public scrutiny than counterparts in the United States and Europe. Ji, who says his primate facility follows international ethical standards for animal care and use, notes that the Chinese public has long supported monkey research to help human health. “Our religion or our culture is different from that of the Western world,” he says. Yet he also recognizes that opinions in China are evolving. Before long, he says, “We’ll have the same situation as the Western world, and people will start to argue about why we’re using a monkey to do an experiment because the monkey is too smart, like human beings.”

This story, one in a series, was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

BEIJING, GUANGZHOU, JIANGMEN, KUNMING, AND SHANGHAI—Early one February morning, researchers harvest six eggs from a female rhesus macaque—one of 4000 monkeys chirping and clucking in a massive outdoor complex of metal cages here at the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research. On today’s agenda at the busy facility, outside Kunming in southwest China: making monkey embryos with a gene mutated so that when the animals are born 5 months later, they will age unusually fast. The researchers first move the eggs to a laboratory bathed in red light to protect the fragile cells. Using high-powered microscopes, they examine the freshly gathered eggs and prepare to inject a single rhesus sperm into each one. If all goes well, the team will introduce the genome editor CRISPR before the resulting embryo begins to grow—early enough for the mutation for aging to show up in all cells of any offspring.

Continue reading “China’s CRISPR push in animals promises better meat, novel therapies, and pig organs for people” »

“Over the past 50 years [America has] gone from institutionalizing people with mental illnesses, often in subhuman conditions, [in state mental health hospitals] to incarcerating them at unprecedented and appalling rates—putting recovery out of reach for millions of Americans […] On any given day, between 300,000 and 400,000 people with mental illnesses are incarcerated in jails and prisons across the United States, and more than 500,000 people with mental illnesses are under correctional control in the community.” [1] Mental Health America (MHA) supports effective, accessible mental health treatment for all people who need it who are confined in adult or juvenile correctional facilities or under correctional control. People with mental health and substance use conditions also need an effective classification system to protect vulnerable prisoners and preserve their human rights. [2] Notwithstanding their loss of their liberty, prisoners with mental health and substance use conditions retain all other rights, and these must be zealously defended.

Background

In the past decade, America has been locking up increasing numbers of individuals with mental health conditions. [3] MHA is both concerned by and opposed to the increasing use of criminal sanctions and incarceration, replacing the state mental hospitals with much more drastic curtailment of personal liberty and preclusion of community integration and community-based treatment. [4] Prisoners with mental health conditions are especially vulnerable to the difficult and sometimes deplorable conditions that prevail in jails, prisons, and other correctional facilities. Overcrowding often contributes to inadequacy of mental health services and to ineffective classification and separation of prisoner classes. It can both increase vulnerability and exacerbate mental illnesses. For these and other reasons, MHA supports maximum reasonable diversion. [5].