Lifeboat Foundation

The WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases developed the guide to help boost public health by using crowdsourcing, where a group of experts and non-experts solve a problem and then share the solution with the public.

Researchers can get too close to their subject and a layman’s intuition can achieve medical breakthroughs, as World Health Organisation crowdsourcing initiatives continue to show.

A discussion about why life extension isn’t selfish.

The topic of life extension is much more debated these days than before. As a result, more people who are not in the field talk about it, and they don’t always do so in praising terms. Articles written by outsiders tend to be conservative at best and fear-mongering at worst, mainly focusing on the potential downsides of life-extending technologies without paying much attention, if any, to the benefits, as if there weren’t any to begin with.

One accusation that is often thrown at life extensionists is that they would be selfish for wanting to extend their lives. It is all too easy to say that all that life extensionists think about is their own benefit while disregarding the common good, but it’s not too difficult to see how this is entirely wrong.

Continue reading “Life Extension Is Not Selfish” »

The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And then, of course, the more Goop was criticized: by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous — no, now it was dangerous. And elsewhere people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site — among them those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn’t find help in mainstream medicine.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the magazine and a writer for The Times’s culture desk. She last wrote for the magazine about the author Jonathan Franzen.

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Continue reading “How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million” »

Skin is your largest organ. There are about 2 square metres (22 square feet) of it enveloping you right now, and it’s not the shape we thought it was.

In fact, scientists have just discovered an entirely new geometric shape previously unknown to science or mathematics, and it looks like it’s been hiding in your skin all along. By which we mean, in epithelial cells, the building blocks of the structural tissue forming our external (and internal) skin layers.

These epithelial cells are some of the most important cells early in life, helping to build structures in developing embryos that ultimately become all our different bodily organs.

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Hopefully in the future, when somebody tells you they will be making an appointment with a surgeon for an augment, they will come back smarter. The world will be a better place for it.

Reprinted with permission from the author.

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This is the next generation of robotic prosthetics. Here’s how they work.

Watch the full TED Talk here: http://bit.ly/2LQErPg

The ranks of the ebolavirus genus have grown for the first time in a decade, with the identification of a new strain in free-tailed bats in Sierra Leone. It is not yet known if it is harmful to humans, but its discovery will assist scientists trying to better understand how the virus hides between outbreaks, and by extension help our efforts to better contain them.

A new interview on LEAF with biogerontologist Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães.

Today, we have an interview with Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães, the biogerontologist who created and runs senescence.info. In the unlikely event that his name is new to you, we had another interview with him last year, which you can check out here.

How do you think we age; are we programmed to die, do we wear out, or is the truth a mixture of both?

Continue reading “An Interview With Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães” »