Lifeboat Foundation

Smartphones are revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses, thanks to add-ons and apps that make their ubiquitous small screens into medical devices, researchers say.

“If you look at the camera, the flash, the microphone… they all are getting better and better,” said Shwetak Patel, engineering professor at the University of Washington.

“In fact the capabilities on those phones are as great as some of the specialized devices,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting this week.

Continue reading “Smartphones are revolutionizing medicine” »

Church mentioned human trials in 2 years a few months ago. this is the first I have seen him say that in 10 years the reversal of aging will be a reality. That’ll make me 55. Hurry.

While discussing creating a hybrid elephant — wooly mammoth using CRISPR genome editing, Harvard’s George Church predicted that reversal of aging will be a reality within ten years.

Nextbigfuture suspects that this could mean clearly reversing aging in mice cells as a proof in principle in ten years. But evidence suggests Church does mean full and significant aging reversal in humans within ten years. In March of 2016 Church said, aging should be thought of as a program that might be reversed, noting, “If we could take one of my skin cells and turn it into an embryo-like cell and turn it back into a skin cell it has reset almost all of the developmental indications of age. We have 65 gene therapies that are being test in mice and larger animals. If they go well we will go straight into human trials. That could be as little as two years…

Continue reading “George Church indicates reversal of aging will be a reality within ten years” »

For those interested in life extension and bionic / cyborg type enhancements, this CMU Robotics Institute Seminar gives an overview of the background and current developments in artificial vision. José Alain Sahel MD is a world leading ophthalmologist with a lengthy bio and numerous honors and appointments.

In the future, if you’re going blind, these sight restoration technologies may be used to remediate your vision loss.

Three major ideas are covered. 1) Implanting arrays of tiny 3-color LEDs under a failed retina to stimulate still-okay cells, and 2) using gene therapy to express a novel photoreceptor, borrowed from algae, to restore a form of sight to failed cells. These can be done together. Lots of studies in mice, primates, and humans. Some coverage is also given to 3) directly implanting electronics in the brain to send complete images to vision centers, but this is still at an early stage.

Continue reading “Artificial Vision, Artificial Retina, Optogenetics, José Alain Sahel MD, CMU RI Seminar” »

Scientists are developing ways to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children. Should they stop before it’s too late?

Check out the CellAge campaign at Lifespan.io
https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/cellage-targeting-senescen…c-biology/

By Kelsey Tollefson | Executive Editor John Lenker

Space suits are iconic—a visual metaphor for the excitement of the original Space Race and mankind’s first forays off our planet. While many still associate space travel with the puffy white suits worn by astronauts in the 1960s, a proliferation of sci-fi movies in the intervening decades has opened our imaginations to a wider array of possibilities. Far from being fantastical, these new spacesuits reflect an evolved understanding of the considerations involved in protecting the human body from harsh environments outside Earth’s atmosphere.

Related: Under pressure: the past, present, and future spacesuit market.

Continue reading “Next-Gen Spacesuits and the Commercial Space Industry” »

The old joke in the US Natl. Labs is if you worked at ORNL, you glowed at night. Looks like DARPA has found a safer way to do it.

Timothy Blake, a postdoctoral fellow in the Waymouth lab, was hard at work on a fantastical interdisciplinary experiment. He and his fellow researchers were refining compounds that would carry instructions for assembling the protein that makes fireflies light up and deliver them into the cells of an anesthetized mouse. If their technique worked, the mouse would glow in the dark.

Not only did the mouse glow, but it also later woke up and ran around, completely unaware of the complex series of events that had just taken place within its body. Blake said it was the most exciting day of his life.

Continue reading “In a possible step forward for gene therapy, researchers made mice glow like fireflies” »

We have stated this for a while; time to make it commercially available.

Our bodies are full of immune cells that circle around the blood, ready to see off any invaders.

And soon they could be getting a helping hand from tiny disease-fighting robots.

Continue reading “Robots could be injected into the body to fight cancer” »

Nice. My friend Alex Zhavoronkov will appreciate this article.

Feb. 16 (UPI) — Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have found that targeting the internal circadian or biological clock of cancer cells can affect growth.

Most cells in the human body have an internal clock that sets a rhythm for activities of organs depending on the time of day. However, this internal clock in cancer cells does not function at all or malfunctions.

Continue reading “Study finds targeting biological clock in cells slows cancer” »