Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,486

Today, we have an update from the MitoSENS team over at the SENS Research Foundation. As some of you may recall, MitoSENS was the first project we hosted on our research fundraising platform Lifespan.io back in August 2015. The project was successfully funded and raised $46,128, which was 153% of the funds needed. The extra funds were used to increase the scope of the project, which resulted in a paper being published in the prestigious Oxford Journal.

Since then, the team has been busy working on transferring the other mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, and they have given us an update to let everyone know how things are progressing at the lab. Dr. Matthew “Oki” O’Connor had the following to say about progress and the future.

Hi, everyone! Time for another exciting mito update. This time, we’ve got 2 teasers for you. The first is that we’re preparing a story about a new trick that we’ve discovered to improve the allotopic expression of mito genes. We’re still confirming that we’re 100% sure that we’re right before writing up the manuscript and making an announcement, but we’re very close. Yes, that means we’re getting it to work on more genes. Stay tuned!

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SpaceX’s CEO shrugs off 20 years of NASA research.

SORRY, ELON. To be ready for human occupants, Elon Musk has long called Mars a “fixer-upper of a planet.” But according to a new NASA-sponsored study, a better description might be a “tear-down.” The scientists behind that project say it’s simply not possible to terraform Mars — that is, change its environment so that humans can live there without life support systems — using today’s technology.

BUILDING AN ATMOSPHERE. Mars has a super thin atmosphere; a human unprotected on the surface of Mars would quickly die, mostly because there’s not enough atmospheric pressure to prevent all your organs from rupturing out of your body (if you survived a little longer, you could also suffocate from lack of oxygen, freeze from low temperatures, or get fried from too much ultraviolet radiation).

This study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, considers how difficult it would be to increase the atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet enough so that humans can walk on Mars’s surface without a pressurized suit and, ideally, without a breathing apparatus.

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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease with characterization of deficits in progressive memory loss, cognitive and behaviour functions. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a predromal stage of AD, displaying cognitive deficit but neither marked functional impairment nor satisfying established clinical criteria for dementia or probable AD. However, not all MCI patients may eventually progress to AD (progressive MCI, pMCI)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2013.10.

(2014)." href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-31794-8#ref-CR2" id="ref-link-section-d1856e5935"]2, and some remain unchanged (stable MCI, sMCI), or are recovered from. Therefore, differential diagnosis of MCI types and earlier diagnosis of AD and prediction of disease evolution are difficult

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New research published in PLOS One has found that virtual reality use impairs physical and cognitive performance while trying to balance.

“I became interested in this topic because virtual reality headsets have recently become widely available, with great potential to make rehabilitation more enjoyable and varied for patients,” said study author Steven M. Peterson of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

“While many studies have explored upper-limb activities, I wanted to understand how immersive and mentally challenging a virtual reality headset is when the user is walking around and not seated. We decided to test the realism of virtual reality by looking for stress at high heights because just the perception of heights can affect how people walk and how cautious they are.”

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Promising approach to deliver personalized and non-invasive brain stimulation in clinical settings.

BrainsWay’s Brain Stimulation Device Receives FDA Approval to Treat Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (IEEE Spectrum):

In 2013, Jerusalem-based BrainsWay began marketing a new type of brain stimulation device that uses magnetic pulses to treat major depressive disorder.

Now, thanks to positive results in a study of 100 patients, the company has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market the device for a second psychiatric condition—obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) …

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He says this has been done successfully with mice. They have mice live twice as long. They are testing aging reversal in dogs in 2018–2019. Human treatments could be available on a general basis by 2025.

George Church is developing better and better organs using pigs. They are working to slow or reverse the aging in the organs to be used for transplant.

He says this has been done successfully with mice. They have mice live twice as long. I mean that that humans could live 160 years if that were linear.

The longest-lived vertebrate. One of the longest-lived vertebrates is this koi fish that lived 226 years.

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