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Scientists rejuvenate old hearts

In the study, 22-month-old rats — who were considered old — received stem cells from four-month-old rats.

Across the board, all of them experienced improved heart function, improved their exercise capacity by an average of 20 percent, and regrew hair faster than rats that didn’t receive the cells.

They also demonstrated longer heart cell telomeres.


Until now, scientists have tested the method to repair damage. But the Cedars-Sinai team in LA — who did the world’s first cardiac stem cell infusion in 2009 — have shown it can also reverse aging.

Congratulations to the AgeMeter campaign (https://www.lifespan.io/agemeter/) for blasting past the half way mark to 55%, and also congratulations to you all for helping fund this important biomarker system, supported by Drs. George Church, Aubrey de Grey, and David Sinclair

Let’s keep up the momentum and continue to show the world what power the crowd can have in standing up to age-related disease. # LifespanIO # CrowdfundTheCure.

New Nanochip technology that can reprogram cells to replace tissue or even whole organs

What I wonder here is if you could do this with uninjured cells, remaking the whole body with new cells.


The new technique, called tissue nanotransfection, is based on a tiny device that sits on the surface of the skin of a living body. An intense, focused electric field is then applied across the device, allowing it to deliver genes to the skin cells beneath it – turning them into different types of cells.

Proteostasis: How Misfolded Proteins Cause Age-related Diseases

Coming from a fusion of the words ‘protein’ (a molecule that a cell uses as a machine or scaffolding) and ‘stasis’ (meaning to keep the same), the term ‘proteostasis’ can essentially be simplified into “Each function reliant on proteins is running as it should. There are enough proteins to serve a function, and the concentrations of proteins are being maintained at healthy levels.”

Proteostasis is the process that cells perform in order to have all their proteins functioning properly; this, in turn, allows cells to work properly. Since cells are the building blocks of our bodies, when they work properly, we are healthy.

When proteostasis is not maintained, cells become dysfunctional and can die; this failure can lead to aging, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, inflammation, developmental defects, and other problems. The loss of proteostasis is thought to be a primary reason we age, and we discuss how this happens in more detail here.

Study Suggests Reaction Time Variability is an Aging Biomarker

There is a growing list of aging biomarkers available to researchers that help them measure how well someone is aging and assess how aging interventions are working in preclinical testing.

Some clinical biomarkers, such as DNA methylation and telomere length, are commonly used in labs. Other biomarkers, such as blood pressure, grip strength, heart rate variability, visual reaction time, and decision reaction time, are non-invasive and easy to test.

Currently, DNA methylation is generally regarded as the gold standard for aging biomarkers, although new techniques, such as cell functional age, are attempting to challenge that. The sensible choice, of course, would be to combine both methods to further improve the accuracy of results.

Comparing Reactions of different Groups to Nuclear Thermal Rocket enabled space colonization

Nextbigfuture wrote about the designs for an improved nuclear thermal rocket by John Bucknell. John has worked as a senior engineer on the SpaceX Raptor rocket. John provides high quality qualified work to his rocket designs and to his proposed space habitat.

Nextbigfuture comments had some technical observations about Project Timberwind and a comment from John himself that his design improves on flaws in the last major nuclear thermal rocket experiments. There were also comments and discussion about Star Trek and communism and O’Neill space stations.

Reddit futurology had two comments. One positive comment by the submitter and a negative comment complaining that the factual title was hype./a The title was trying to condense the concept that John’s habitat would have full Earth gravity and full radiation shielding. Colonies on the surface of Mars would have 38% of Earth gravity and colonies on the surface of the moon would have 16% of Earth gravity. Living in the current International space station is a microgravity environment with more radiation. It is well known that long term exposure to lower gravity is a problem. Muscles weaken bones thin out stress is placed on blood vessels Serious effort is needed to exercise while in low gravity to reduce effects and physiotherapy is needed to recover from the stays in orbit or on the Moon where there is low or no-gravity. Yet the title “Constructing full earth like conditions in Space with technology proven in the sixties” is claimed to be hype.

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