Eighty years ago, the horse famously trounced Triple Crown winner War Admiral. Did genetics make him an unlikely success?
Read more
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,464
An Edmonton man battling a rare blood cancer is scheduled to have a potentially life-saving stem cell transplant later this week.
Bille Nguyen is set to receive his transplant in Calgary on Thursday, one day after his sister Susan donates her stem cells.
Read more
In early 2020, the FACET-II facility aims to open for use by scientists across the world. Plasma accelerators are compact accelerators that are more affordable. FACET-II will be the upgraded version of the current FACET facility. Where the aim of the upgrade is to get the electron beam brighter by about 100 or even 1000 times. FACET-II will be the home of experiments that will add to medical and x-ray science, and particle physics. Currently, potential users are submitting proposals for experiments they would like to carry out at FACET-II. A program advisory committee will evaluate the proposals and select the most exciting ones with the largest impact in science for the upcoming experimental runs.
Read more
In the spirit of Halloween, where ghouls, ghosts, and vampires walk among us, our perception of reality will soon transform as well, forever possessed by the specter of Transhumanism!
Last year, I wrote about how people could transform themselves into one of my favorite horror creatures—a real-life werewolf—using modern science and tech. This merely scratches the surface, however, in terms of how far an individual can go. In a Transhumanist future, you’ll be empowered to not only question the extent of your humanity but equally put those questions into action.
The route one would be able to take would be in abundance. Some will choose a cybernetic route, replacing their organs and limbs for artificial machines, and even potentially adding newer organs and limbs alongside the ones they already have. Others may choose a more biological route by using gene-editing tech and synthetic biology, enhancing themselves at the genetic level and using stem cell therapies to maintain their bodily health for prolong periods of time.
And then there are those who’ll attempt to move far beyond their biological or technological state. Technologies like nanotech, mind uploading, etc. will allow individuals to downscale their physical appearance—or, perhaps, do away with it altogether; to become beams of light cascading across the digital world, living under the embodiment of code. And wherever that code resides, that’ll be your exterior shell. If you were to upload yourself into a smart home, for example, you would become that home, haunted by your digital presence.
Read more
Tigers seem pretty straightforward: stripes, sharp claws, awe-inspiring grace wielded by hundreds of pounds of rippling muscle, fondness of sugary cereal, etc. But new research on the big cats’ DNA is the latest indication that underneath that striking orange and black pelage, not all tigers are the same. Scientists are now reporting that tigers are broken up into six distinct subspecies spread out across Asia.
In endangered species like tigers, pegging down the exact number of subspecies can be pretty important for conservation purposes. Being mindful of how the species is naturally divided up in the wild—and how populations may be evolving independently of one another—can allow conservationists to more effectively manage populations as cohesive units. Global tiger conservation has struggled with this since there’s been plenty of disagreement on how many subspecies even exist.
Read more
In this interview, Vera Gorbunova, Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester and a co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center, talks about our current understanding of the mechanisms behind the longevity and genome stability of exceptionally long-lived mammals and how this knowledge could be used to create therapies to extend healthy human lifespan.
The interview was made by Steve Hill and Elena Milova, members of the board of Lifespan.io.
►This video is presented by LEAF. Please support us by becoming a “Lifespan Hero”: http://lifespan.io/hero
Read more
It seems that opposition against anti-aging medicine may be slowly starting to crumble. For example, Lifespan.io’s current crowdfunding campaign is going extremely well, and journalists begin to talk about senolytics in positive terms, without any predictions of doom and gloom resulting from these upcoming drugs. Make no mistake—the pro-aging trance is still alive and well; for each journalist who puts time and effort into actually understanding senolytics and the health benefits that they are expected to bring to older people, there’s probably five who show little to no knowledge of the subject and rage against unspecified “immortality” technology and related impending catastrophes. This should tell us something about the kind of understanding they have of what they criticize—or how badly they need a clickbait piece to bring in visitors.
Today, the pro-aging trance is something that only rejuvenation advocates are aware of and battle against, but maybe, fifty years from now, it will be an interesting phenomenon of the past for psychologists to figure out. Maybe, on the YouTube of 2068, there will be videos making fun of it in pretty much the same way that some people today make fun of the old belief that hysteria was caused by stray uteruses wandering around women’s bodies.
The pro-aging trance is rather interesting indeed, as people who are subject to it tend to commit fallacies that they would never commit in other contexts. A very good example of this is the objection to inequality of access: this reasoning assumes that rejuvenation would not be available to everyone who needs it, for economical, political, or whatever reasons; understandably, this is perceived as a profound injustice, which pushes a fair number of people to make a leap and conclude that the best way to avoid this injustice is to never develop rejuvenation to begin with.
Read more