Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 3,109

DARPA Has Made a Brain Implant That Boosts Your Memory

In what may seem like a Hollywood blockbuster, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has developed an implant that goes directly onto the human brain.

The agency wrote in a statement their device is showing promise with improving patient’s memory tests scores. It is “raising hope that such approaches may someday help individuals suffering from memory deficits as a result of traumatic brain injury or other pathologies.”

DARPA’s Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program presented their preliminary findings at the ‘Wait, What? A Future Technology Forum,’ which is also hosted by the agency at St. Louis.

Read more

A fast cell sorter shrinks to cell phone size

“The current benchtop cell sorters are too expensive, too un-safe, and too high-maintenance. More importantly, they have very low biocompatibility. The cell-sorting process can reduce cell viability and functions by 30–99 percent for many fragile or sensitive cells such as neurons, stem cells, liver cells and sperm cells. We are developing an acoustic cell sorter that has the potential to address all these problems.”

Researchers describe an acoustic cell sorter capable of the kind of high sorting throughput necessary to compete with commercial fluorescence activated cell sorters.

Read more

Alzheimer’s: One Disease? « Michael Fossel

Another excellent blog by Dr Michael fossel PhD, md. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other related diseases could be treated potentially using telomerase.

Alzheimer’s: One Disease?

Date posted: 25.08.2015.

Most of us have wondered about what causes Alzheimer’s. As commonly happens, we stumble badly when we make assumptions, even in asking questions, let alone in trying to answer those questions. The question “what causes Alzheimer’s?” presupposes that there is a single such disease (Alzheimer’s) and that we can define it well enough to ask about “its” cause. Neither of these is probably an accurate assumption. The reality is that there is considerable difficulty in agreeing on the “hallmarks” (the pathognomonic characteristics that define AD) and the “boundaries” between AD and other somewhat similar diseases on the differential diagnosis. Comparing Alzheimer’s to many other age-related neurological diseases can be humbling – and it should be. Small wonder we have so much trouble understanding the cause, let alone finding a cure when we don’t really know what we’re looking at.

Read more

Atlantis Rising: Why Floating Cities are the Next Frontier (Joe Quirk)

Is seasteading the wave of the future? Joe Quirk of the Seasteading Institute thinks floating cities will allow micro nations to compete for people — providing better life options and innovations. “Aquapreneurs,” says Quirk, can save humanity from disease, environmental harm and maybe even war.

Voice & Exit is a dynamic, transformative festival of the future. Exiters are dedicated to maximizing human flourishing for individuals, communities and our world.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” Buckminster Fuller reminds us. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” The Voice & Exit community is for those actively seeking to opt-out of models that don’t give rise to human flourishing to create those models that do.

We don’t predict the future, we create it.

Watch more talks and join the community at www.voiceandexit.com.

Read more

In The Genes: Longevity Secrets From Long-Lived Smokers

If you want to increase your risk of multiple diseases, then smoking is one of surest ways to do it; it can even accelerate aging. So how do some long-term smokers beat the odds?

Long-lived smokers are fascinating. Not only do they live a long time, but they also appear unaffected by their habit. For most of us, smoking has been confirmed to be ‘toxic’, but these outliers somehow overcome this. So how can these people reach old age despite having smoked most of their life? Scientists predicted they must have some unusual genes, and they were right.

Read more

Filling a void in stem cell therapy

Stem cells coming along nicely, Stanford demonstrate how creating artificial stem cell niches improve grafting and regeneration of bone and it should have a broad application for other tissues. Properly developed we could regenerate organs and tissues by injecting enough stem cells in these manufactured protective niches.

One could potentially take it a stage further and modify the stem cells with genes of interest to make them more robust. Ex-vivo cell manipulation is also considerably cheaper than in-vivo therapy.

New porous hydrogel could boost success of some stem cell-based tissue regeneration, researchers say.

Read more

Can A Healthy Gut Help You Live Longer?

Our gut and the microbiome play a crucial role in our health, but could better understanding of that role help us avoid disease and live longer?

The microbiome weighs 2–3 pounds and contains 10 times more cells than our own, but we’ve neglected our microbial tenants for a long time. These little denizens help us break down food, provide key nutrients and even play a role in inflammation and the integrity of our intestinal tract. It’s no surprise then that fermented foods and probiotics are gaining popularity as we become more aware of how important our gut is. Recent evidence even links poor digestive health to chronic inflammation and Parkinson’s disease.

New research suggests that both gut integrity, and the amount and type of bacteria that reside within it, can actually predict an individual’s health. They may even quicken or slow the pace of aging.

Read more

Curing Alzheimer’s

Dr Michael Fossel is a PhD and MD heading up telomerase research and therapy and has kindly written a blog article for Bioviva detailing the work both they and his company Telocyte are doing to fight back against Alzheimer’s.

How Alzheimer’s Can Be Prevented and Cured…

Michael Fossel, MD, PhD

As I said in my medical textbook on aging, “If age is a thief, then the greatest treasure we lose is ourselves.” We fear Alzheimer’s not simply because it takes away our health, but because it steals our souls.

Once, we thought it was simply “old age” that gradually killed the cells that carry information and memory. These are brain cells that make us who we are and define our consciousness.

Only in the past two decades, have we gradually come to realize that it’s not the neurons, which are merely the innocent bystanders in the tragedy,

but the microglial cells that cause the disease. It’s our microglia, not our neurons that steal our very souls.

Alzheimer’s disease begins in our glial cells. These cells together form.

90% of our brains, while neurons are only a small minority in the nervous system.

Continue reading “Curing Alzheimer’s” | >