Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: food – Page 230

Ira Pastor, ideaXme longevity and aging Ambassador and Founder of Bioquark interviews Bill Faloon, Director and Co-Founder, Life Extension Foundation and Founder of The Church Of Perpetual Life.

Ira Pastor Comments:

On the last several shows we have spent time on different hierarchical levels the biologic-architecture of the life, disease and aging process. We’ve spent some time talking about the genome, the microbiome, tissue engineering, systems biology, and dabbled a bit in the areas of quantum biology, organism hydro-dynamics, and even chronobiology.
As exciting and promising as all these research paths are, at the end of the day, in order for them to yield what many people are looking for, that is radically extended healthspans and lifespans, there needs to be an organized system of human translation build around them, integrating these various products, services and technologies, from supplements, to biologics, to functional foods, to cosmeceuticals, to various physio-therapeutic interventions, and so forth, as well as all the related supporting advocacy and education, as biologic aging is truly a multi-factorial, combinatorial process that is never going to be amenable to big pharma’s traditional “single magic bullet” philosophy that it promoted throughout the last century.

For today’s guest, I could think of no one better to talk with us about this topic and take us into the future on this front, than Bill Faloon, Director and Co-Founder, Life Extension Foundation (LEF), a consumer advocacy organization with over 100,000 members that funds research (investing million per year in researchers around the globe) and disseminates information to consumers about optimal health, and more recently in the area of actionable clinical interventions regarding human biologic age reversal, through a fascinating new project called the Age Reversal Network, defined as an open-source communications channel to exchange scientific information, foster strategic alliances, and support biomedical endeavors aimed at reversing degenerative aging.

Continue reading “Bill Faloon: A Life Long Quest To Reverse Human Aging!” | >

In addition to having access to large colonies of monkeys and other species, animal researchers in China face less public scrutiny than counterparts in the United States and Europe. Ji, who says his primate facility follows international ethical standards for animal care and use, notes that the Chinese public has long supported monkey research to help human health. “Our religion or our culture is different from that of the Western world,” he says. Yet he also recognizes that opinions in China are evolving. Before long, he says, “We’ll have the same situation as the Western world, and people will start to argue about why we’re using a monkey to do an experiment because the monkey is too smart, like human beings.”

This story, one in a series, was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

BEIJING, GUANGZHOU, JIANGMEN, KUNMING, AND SHANGHAI—Early one February morning, researchers harvest six eggs from a female rhesus macaque—one of 4000 monkeys chirping and clucking in a massive outdoor complex of metal cages here at the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research. On today’s agenda at the busy facility, outside Kunming in southwest China: making monkey embryos with a gene mutated so that when the animals are born 5 months later, they will age unusually fast. The researchers first move the eggs to a laboratory bathed in red light to protect the fragile cells. Using high-powered microscopes, they examine the freshly gathered eggs and prepare to inject a single rhesus sperm into each one. If all goes well, the team will introduce the genome editor CRISPR before the resulting embryo begins to grow—early enough for the mutation for aging to show up in all cells of any offspring.

But as often happens when eggs are retrieved, all does not go well. Only one egg in this morning’s batch is mature enough to fertilize. “We were a little unlucky today,” says Niu Yuyu, who with facility director Ji Weizhi runs the gene-editing research. The group can afford a little bad luck, though. Through a combination of patience, ingenuity, and enormous animal resources, the team has already used CRISPR to create an astonishing range of genome-edited monkeys to serve as models for studying human diseases.

Continue reading “China’s CRISPR push in animals promises better meat, novel therapies, and pig organs for people” | >

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel painted a gloomy picture of artificial intelligence in his NYT’s op-ed on Thursday, detailing the technology’s real value and purpose as primarily a military one.

“The first users of the machine learning tools being created today will be generals,” Thiel declared in his 1,200-word piece. “A.I. is a military technology.”

Thiel’s portrayal is a far cry from the optimistic view that many in Silicon Valley have embraced. Artificial intelligence has promised to give us the next, best Netflix recommendations, let us search the internet using our voices, and do away with humans behind the wheel. It’s also expected to have a huge impact in medicine and agriculture. But instead, Thiel says that AI’s real home is on the battlefield — whether that be in the physical or cyber worlds.

Read more | >

The question of what sets humans apart from other animals is one of the oldest philosophical puzzles. A popular answer is that only humans can understand that others also have minds like their own.

But new research suggests that — birds singled out by many cultures as a symbol of intelligence and wisdom — share at least some of the human ability to think abstractly about other minds, adapting their behavior by attributing their own perceptions to others.

The study, “Ravens Attribute Visual Access to Unseen Competitors,” was published Feb. 2 in Nature Communications. It found that ravens guarded caches of food against discovery in response to the sounds of other ravens if a nearby peephole was open, even if they did not see another bird. They did not show the same concern when the peephole was closed, despite the auditory cues.

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Shift Bioscience is a company aiming to solve the problem of mitochondrial dysfunction, one of the hallmarks of aging, by repairing the aging mitochondria in our cells so that they work as if they were younger.

Mitochondrial dysfunction is at the heart of aging

The mitochondria are often called the powerhouses of cells, and they convert the food we eat into usable energy in the form of a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP supplies energy for many cellular processes, such as muscle contraction, nerve impulse propagation, and protein synthesis. ATP is found in all forms of life and is often referred to as the “molecular unit of currency” of intracellular energy transfer.

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https://youtu.be/3lY3XK_Z6UQ

Agricultural Revolution is one of the milestones of today’s civilization. It was driven by technological innovations and inventions thousands of years ago, and it is still a very crucial part of our species’ social construct. Engineers are developing tools and machines to make farmers’ job a lot easier by technologies like automation for sustainable productivity. Here are 7 innovative ways the technology is used for agriculture.

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On Tuesday afternoon, NASA announced 19 new partnerships with 10 US companies to help bring more cutting-edge technologies closer to production use in spaceflight. There were a lot of useful engineering ideas here, such as precision landing systems and robotic plant farms, but perhaps the most intriguing one involved the rocket company SpaceX and two of NASA’s field centers—the Glenn Research Center in Ohio and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

“SpaceX will work with Glenn and Marshall to advance technology needed to transfer propellant in orbit, an important step in the development of the company’s Starship space vehicle,” the NASA news release states. This is a significant announcement for reasons both technical and political.

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Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered a new signal that cancers seem to use to evade detection and destruction by the immune system.

The scientists have shown that blocking this signal in mice implanted with allows immune cells to attack the cancers. Blocking other “don’t eat me” signals has become the basis for other possible anti– therapies.

Normally, immune cells called macrophages will detect cancer cells, then engulf and devour them. In recent years, researchers have discovered that proteins on the can tell macrophages not to eat and destroy them. This can be useful to help normal cells keep the immune system from attacking them, but cancer cells use these “don’t eat me” signals to hide from the immune system.

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