Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,757

With Immortality On The Horizon, Will Humanity Be Able To Survive The Technological Transition?

Mimetic Evolution or the collective will of humanity to imitate the most successful achievements of nature with technology, has finally set in. At this dawn of artificial intelligence humanity is trying to not only find its place again, but to do the inevitable, the inescapable – merging with the technology we created. We have to be the artificial intelligence by incorporating the transcendent aspects of an artificiality that otherwise could easily become a mastermind, both in control of us and out of control.

Yes, it will begin slowly with AI helping us to achieve dreams of humanity, ways for us to live longer and healthier. Just ask what the many biotech companies focus on and the answer unanimously will be putting an end to aging.

The idea of eternal youth and immortality is a blessing, albeit a mixed one. We learned that progress never stops and it isn’t plausible to think that we now revert back and suddenly stop working on machine learning and connected devices as well as connected thinking.

False Positives in Senescent Cell Detection

As your body ages, increasing amounts of your cells enter a state of cellular senescence. These cells no longer divide or support the tissues of which they are a part, and they emit a cocktail of harmful chemical signals that encourage other nearby cells to also enter the same senescent state.

The presence of senescent cells contributes to decreasing tissue function, increases chronic inflammation, and can even raise the risk of cancer and other age-related diseases.

Senescent cells normally destroy themselves via a programmed process called apoptosis and are removed by the immune system; however, the immune system declines with age, and increasing numbers of these senescent cells escape this disposal process and accumulate.

While sugar impairs memory and learning skills, eating chocolate improves brain function

Researchers at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) conducted a study in 2012 on rats and found that a diet high in fructose hinders learning skills and memory and also slow down the brain. The researchers found that rats who over-consumed fructose had damaged synaptic activity in the brain, meaning that communication among brain cells was impaired.

Study’s lead author Dr. Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a statement that “Insulin is important in the body for controlling blood sugar, but it may play a different role in the brain. Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body.”

In addition to the damaging effects on cognition and mood, sugar also has drug-like effects in the reward system of the brain. Neuroscientist Nicole Avena presented the effect of sugar on our brains and bodies in TED-Ed’s animated installment.

Forever Labs preserves young stem cells to prevent your older self from aging

Forever Labs, a startup in Y Combinator’s latest batch, is preserving adult stem cells with the aim to help you live longer and healthier.

Stem cells have the potential to become any type of cell needed in the body. It’s very helpful to have younger stem cells from your own body on hand should you ever need some type of medical intervention, like a bone marrow transplant as the risk of rejection is greatly reduced when the cells are yours.

Mark Katakowski spent the last 15 years studying stem cells. What he found is that not only do we have less of them the older we get, but they also lose their function as we age. So, he and his co-founders Edward Cibor and Steve Clausnitzer started looking at how to bank them while they were young.

China rushes into embryo selection

China’s five year plan to eliminate birth defects by preimplantation genetic diagnosis of embryos.

Gene-editing with CRISPR has been in the headlines over the past month and touted as a way of eliminating genetic diseases. But the cruder and cheaper technique of preimplantation genetic diagnosis does the same. And it is exploding in China. According to a feature in Nature, fertility doctors there “have been pursuing a more aggressive, comprehensive and systematic path towards its use there than anywhere else”.

The government’s current five-year plan for economic development has made reproductive medicine, including PGD, a priority. In 2004, only four clinics in the whole country were licensed to perform PGD; now there are 40.

Very little ethical push-back exists.

Scientists remotely hacked a brain, controlling body movements

Imagine someone remotely controlling your brain, forcing your body’s central processing organ to send messages to your muscles that you didn’t authorize. It’s an incredibly scary thought, but scientists have managed to accomplish this science fiction nightmare for real, albeit on a much small scale, and they were even able to prompt their test subject to run, freeze in place, or even completely lose control over their limbs. Thankfully, the research will be used for good rather than evil… for now.

Don’t Miss : Comcast’s surprisingly good wireless plans now available nationwide

The effort, led by physics professor Arnd Pralle, PhD, of the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, focused on a technique called “magneto-thermal stimulation.” It’s not exactly a simple process — it requires the implantation of specially built DNA strands and nanoparticles which attach to specific neurons — but once the minimally invasive procedure is over, the brain can be remotely controlled via an alternating magnetic field. When those magnetic inputs are applied, the particles heat up, causing the neurons to fire.

This Powerful New Painkiller Could Be The Unexpected Ticket to Replacing Opioids

Researchers have developed a new class of pain relief that acts on an obscure nerve pathway, opening the way to a medication just as concerns have deepened around the US opioid addiction and overdose epidemic.

While any marketable pharmaceutical based on the discovery would still need to go through the long process of clinical testing, the compound appears to work as well as other opioid-alternatives, requiring a smaller dose and remaining effective for a longer period.

The research led by scientists from The University of Texas has identified a group of molecules that bind with a pair of nerve receptors, one of which has been a mystery until recently.

Vitamin C helps genes to kill off cells that would cause cancer

By Aylin Woodward

Injections of vitamin C could be a way to help fight blood cancer. Experiments in mice suggest that the nutrient helps tell out-of-control cells to stop dividing and die.

Some blood cancers, including acute and chronic leukaemia, often involve mutations affecting a gene called TET2. This gene usually helps ensure that a type of stem cell matures properly to make white blood cells, and then eventually dies. But when TET2 mutates, these cells can start dividing uncontrollably, leading to cancer. Mutations in TET2 are involved in around 42,500 cancers in the US a year.