Lifeboat Foundation

This is a fairly common response to the discussion of extending healthy human lifespans. The idea that fear of dying is the only thing that motivates the advocates, supporters, and scientists working on rejuvenation biotechnology and ending age-related diseases.

These days, war is not really portrayed in a very good light. When we think about war, we think about genocide, mass murder, and slaughter, and we call for an end to it. The popular sentiment is that war is bad and we should just do away with it. However, once upon a time, things were rather different, and soldiers fighting wars were not seen as victims of mindless violence. Losing your life in battle was considered glorious and noble, and your family would be proud of you for fighting in the name of your country, your God, or whatever. People who were afraid of dying and refused to fight were regarded as cowards, most certainly not as pacifists of a strong moral fiber, and were possibly executed; being a conscientious objector was not yet a thing, and human rights weren’t either.

This is sheer madness to us, but back in the day, it was entirely normal. Most of us will probably think people must have been crazy to let themselves be fooled into believing such nonsense, but that’s the power of propaganda for you.

Continue reading “The Life Extension is ‘Just a Fear of Death’ Argument” »

Researchers at Caltech have induced a range of sensations in the arm of a paralyzed man. The breakthrough comes courtesy of electrodes implanted in the brain, which stimulated the neurons to produce different feelings depending on the type of electrical signals. The team says the research could eventually lead to advanced prosthetic limbs that allow users to feel realistic sensations through them.

Plenty of exciting research is being conducted to help paralyzed people regain control of and feeling in their limbs. The NeuroLife system has helped a quadriplegic man move his arms again using just his thoughts, allowing him to perform a number of actions. Electrical nerve stimulation, both with and without electrode implants, has helped several people voluntarily move their legs again, often for the first time in years.

In this new study, Caltech researchers implanted two tiny arrays of electrodes into the somatosensory cortex, the small region of the brain responsible for the body’s sensations of movement or position, as well as cutaneous sensations such as touch, pressure and vibration.

Take any two cells from your body and there’s a good chance their genetic sequences will be a match. That is, unless you happen to have what’s referred to in the medical literature as a ‘tetragametic chimerism’ – a condition that causes separate fertilised embryos to merge into a single body.

Once thought to be rare among humans, there’s good reason to suspect we might be seeing a lot more of it in the future.

The truth is, nobody is really certain how many humans have cells in their body that once belonged to a sibling.

Continue reading “Some People Are Their Own Identical Twins, And The Science Behind That Is Fascinating” »

It’s time to rethink the quest to control aging, death, and disease—and the fear of mortality that fuels it.

I went to medical school, at least in part, to get to know death and perhaps to make my peace with it. So did many of my doctor friends, as I would find out. One day—usually when you’re young, though sometimes later—the thought hits you: You really are going to die. That moment is shocking, frightening, terrible. You try to pretend it hasn’t happened (it’s only a thought, after all), and you go about your business, worrying about this or that, until the day you put your hand to your neck—in the shower, say—and … What is that? Those hard lumps that you know, at first touch, should not be there? But there they are, and they mean death. Your death, and you can’t pretend anymore.

I never wanted to be surprised that way, and I thought that if I became a doctor and saw a lot of death, I might get used to it; it wouldn’t surprise me, and I could learn to live with it. My strategy worked pretty well. Over the decades, from all my patients, I learned that I would be well until I got sick and that although I could do some things to delay the inevitable a bit, whatever control I had was limited. I learned that I had to live as if I would die tomorrow and at the same time as if I would live forever. Meanwhile, I watched as what had been called “medical care”—that is, treating the sick—turned into “health care,” keeping people healthy, at an ever-rising cost.

Continue reading “Your Body Is a Teeming Battleground” »

Alzheimer’s gene is neutralised in human brain cells for the first time.

Just two copies of this gene can increase your risk 12-fold.

This one’s kinda hard to swallow so take a deep breath, open your minds, and pretend it’s 2100. I CONTACT is essentially a mouse fitted to your eyeball. The lens is inserted like any other normal contact lens except it’s laced with sensors to track eye movement, relaying that position to a receiver connected to your computer. Theoretically that should give you full control over a mouse cursor. I’d imagine holding a blink correlates to mouse clicks.

The idea was originally created for people with disabilities but anyone could use it. Those of us too lazy to use a mouse now have a free hand to do whatever it is people do when they sit at the computer for endless hours. I love the idea but there is a caveat. How is the lens powered? Perhaps in the future, electrical power can be harnessed from the human body, just not in a Matrix creepy-like way.

Designers: eun-gyeong gwon & eun-jae lee.

Continue reading “Contact Lens Kinda Makes You Cyborgy” »

More than half of your body is not human, say scientists.

Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves — our microbiome — is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.

Fluorescent dye not only highlights but also kills cancer stem cells.

Korean and Singaporean scientists have recently proposed a new probe to detect cancer stem cells, and it might be an effective seek-and-destroy weapon against a variety of cancer types.

In a paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie earlier this month, the researchers describe a fluorescent dye that they created to highlight cancer stem cells, and, as it turns out, the dye does more than that—it may actually be lethal to the cells it binds to [1].

Continue reading “New cancer stem cell marker also kills off cancer cells” »

Imagine a single particle, only one-tenth the diameter of a bacterium, whose miniscule jiggles induce sustained vibrations in an entire mechanical device some 50 times larger. By taking clever advantage of the interplay between light, electrons on the surface of metals, and heat, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time created a plasmomechanical oscillator (PMO), so named because it tightly couples plasmons—the collective oscillations of electrons at the surface of a metal nanoparticle—to the mechanical vibrations of the much larger device it’s embedded in.

The entire system, no bigger than a red blood cell, has myriad technological applications. It offers new ways to miniaturize mechanical oscillators, improve communication systems that depend on the modulation of light, dramatically amplify extremely weak mechanical and electrical signals and create exquisitely sensitive sensors for the tiny motions of nanoparticles.

NIST researchers Brian Roxworthy and Vladimir Aksyuk described their work in a recent issue of Optica.