Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,109

Every single member of the UN doubled-down today on a commitment to provide universal health coverage to their citizens. The fact that the US will be among them is perhaps evidence of how disconnected these declarations can be from actual domestic political agendas.

Yet the issue is important, and it shows just how out of line the US approach to health care coverage is compared to the rest of the world. Only about half the world’s population has access to the kind of affordable health care services that don’t require crippling out-of-pocket costs. Most of those people are in mid- and low-income countries. Or they are in the wealthiest country on Earth: the US.

Bringing universal health care to everyone is one of the “sustainable development goals,” the ambitious to-do list for UN member countries to complete by 2030. For the UN, universal health care means, “financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.”

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A tetraplegic man has been able to move all four of his paralyzed limbs by using a brain-controlled robotic suit, researchers have said.

The 28-year-old man from Lyon, France, known as Thibault, was paralyzed from the shoulders down after falling 40 feet from a balcony, severing his spinal cord, the AFP news agency reported.

He had some movement in his biceps and left wrist, and was able to operate a wheelchair using a joystick with his left arm.

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Treating prostate cancer through traditional means such as surgery or radiotherapy carries certain risks, with some patients experiencing impotence, urinary problems and bowel trouble, among other unwanted side effects. Safer and less invasive treatment options could soon be on the table, however, including a novel MRI-guided ultrasound technique that eliminated significant cancers in 80 percent of subjects in a year-long study.

The new technique is called MRI-guided transurethral ultrasound ablation (TULSA) and has been under development for a number of years. The minimally invasive technology involves a rod that enters the prostate gland via the urethra and emits highly controlled sound waves in order to heat and destroy diseased tissue, while leaving healthy tissue unharmed.

These waves come from 10 heating elements built into the length of the rod to treat the entire prostate gland. An algorithm controls which of these elements emit the sound waves at any one time, along with their shape, direction and strength. All of this takes place within an MRI scanner, allowing doctors to keep a close eye on which tissues are being heated and by how much.

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Up to 10% of global GDP could be stored on blockchains by 2025, according to the World Economic Forum. From product identifiers, medical records to land registries, academic degrees and insurance contracts, blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are already functioning in many sectors.

What blockchain promises is no less than the technological backbone of the 21st century’s renaissance of the social commons, giving back power to the people. In this century more than ever, power comes from data. Blockchain promises to give control of data back to the people. But this requires one element: trust in the technology, trust that it does what it’s supposed to do.

The paradox here is that blockchain removes the need to trust the intermediary – i.e., notaries, insurers and bankers – by requiring us to trust the technology. But how likely are we to trust the technology if it is breached repeatedly?

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The quest to live longer and healthier is not new. But the concept of reversing aging has recently stunned both the scienftific community and the public in general. Scientists have been able to reverse aging by 2.5 years to some participants in a groundbreaking experiment in the field of age reversal.

World leading scientists in the field of aging like David Sinclair think that aging is the ultimate disease that needs a cure. If scientsits were able to shed 2.5 years to the participants genomic age, the question raises itself, are we going to see an age reversal of a decade or more in the coming years?

#reverseaging #science #sciencetime

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Source: Fahy, G. M. et al. Aging Cell https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.13028 (2019)

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Researchers with Stanford University have published a study revealing that physical aging is not a smooth process, but rather something that happens in what they describe as a ‘herky-jerky trajectory.’ Using blood tests to look at specific proteins, the researchers found that human aging involves three distinct turning points, the first starting in one’s mid-thirties.

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In back-to-back papers in the December 4 Science Translational Medicine, scientists led by Daniela Kaufer, University of California, Berkeley, and Alon Friedman, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel, report that age-related cracks in the blood-brain barrier allow an influx of serum protein albumin into the brain, where they activate TGFβ receptors, overexcite neuronal networks, and impair cognition. Breaches correlated with localized slowing of cortical activity in epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease patients, and in mouse models of AD. Called paroxysmal slow-wave events, these activity changes correlated with cognitive impairment and interspersed with seizures in epilepsy patients.

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Dmitry Kaminskiy speaks as though he were trying to unload everything he knows about the science and economics of longevity—from senolytics research that seeks to stop aging cells from spewing inflammatory proteins and other molecules to the trillion-dollar life extension industry that he and his colleagues are trying to foster—in one sitting.

At the heart of the discussion with Singularity Hub is the idea that artificial intelligence will be the engine that drives breakthroughs in how we approach healthcare and healthy aging—a concept with little traction even just five years ago.

“At that time, it was considered too futuristic that artificial intelligence and data science … might be more accurate compared to any hypothesis of human doctors,” said Kaminskiy, co-founder and managing partner at Deep Knowledge Ventures, an investment firm that is betting big on AI and longevity.

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