Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: health – Page 471

Death is a disease.

Diseases can and will be cured.

Do the math. wink

Disease GWAS show substantial genetic overlap with longevity. Shown are results for coronary artery disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The y axis is the observed P values for longevity, and the x axis is the expected P values under the null hypothesis that the disease is independent of longevity. The cyan, blue and purple lines show the P values for longevity of the top 100, 250, and 500 disease SNPs from independent genetic loci, respectively. Red lines show the background distribution of longevity P values for all independent genetic loci tested in both the longevity and disease GWAS. The grey horizontal line corresponds to the threshold for nominal significance (P = 0.05) for longevity. Significance of enrichment was determined with the hypergeometric test. (credit: Kristen Fortney et al./PLOS Genetics)

What’s the secret of centenarians who have health and diet habits similar to the average person but have remained active and alert at very old ages?

Genes. That’s according to scientists at Stanford University and the University of Bologna, who have written a new report published in PLOS Genetics, based on their finding of several disease variants that may be absent in centenarians compared to the general population.

Continue reading “New genes associated with extreme longevity identified” | >

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) – X-ray vision, a comic book fantasy for decades, is becoming a reality in a lab at MIT.

A group of researchers led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dina Katabi has developed software that uses variations in radio signals to recognize human silhouettes through walls and track their movements.

Researchers say the technology will be able to help health care providers and families keep closer tabs on toddlers and the elderly, and it could be a new strategic tool for law enforcement and the military.

Read more

Society isn’t ready to take a medium seriously until it can provide certain things. The first, and most obvious, achievement is it must work with porn. Virtual reality passed that benchmark a long time ago, and it seems to have no problem revisiting it over and over again. So what’s the next trial that virtual reality must face on its quest to becoming a true consumer medium?

Someone has to try and make me exercise with it.

That someone are the makers of the Virzoom, an exercise bike and app suite for the Oculus Rift headset. The VirZOOM is available for preorder today, with the first 300 units are $200 (it’s regular price $250).

Read more

Healthy living isn’t meaningless, but while all of us can make positive lifestyle modifications, genes play a massive role in longevity — or there would be no species variation. We’re still discovering exactly which genes provide a longevity boost and what they do, but we now know 7 variants could help give you an advantage.

The search for a longevity gene

Previous efforts to search out a ‘longevity gene’ have been largely unsuccessful, so researchers led by Stuart Kim at Stanford decided to focus on ‘bad’ gene variants this time — or more crucially a lack of them. They analysed 800 people over 100 and 5000 people over 90 and found that while many variants are common in the average person, possession of fewer ‘bad’ versions of 5 crucial genes was indeed associated with longevity. Many long-lived individuals are able to avoid chronic disease despite harmful lifestyle choices like smoking, and this could be one of the explanations. These confirmed 5 add to 2 already associated with longer lifespans.

Read more


Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate legal practice within 15 years, perhaps leading to the “structural collapse” of law firms, a report predicting the shape of the legal market has envisaged.

Civilisation 2030: The near future for law firms, by Jomati Consultants, foresees a world in which population growth is actually slowing, with “peak humanity” occurring as early as 2055, and ageing populations bringing a growth in demand for legal work on issues affecting older people.

This could mean more advice needed by healthcare and specialist construction companies on the building and financing of hospitals, and on pension investment businesses, as well as financial and regulatory work around the demographic changes to come; more age-related litigation, IP battles between pharmaceutical companies, and around so-called “geriatric-tech” related IP.

Read more

Glucosepane is one of the most significant mechanisms of aging and yet very few people are working on it!

As we age skin and blood vessels lose their elasticity. People care too much about the skin and too little about the blood vessels, but that is always the way of it. Appearance first and substance later, if at all. Yet you can live inside an aged skin; beyond the raised risk of skin cancer its damaged state arguably only makes life less pleasant, and the present state of medical science can ensure that the numerous age-related dermatological dysfunctions can be kept to a state of minor inconvenience. Loss of blood vessel elasticity, on the other hand, will steadily destroy your health and then kill you. Arterial stiffening causes remodeling of the cardiovascular system and hypertension. The biological systems that regulate blood pressure become dysfunctional as blood vessels depart from ideal youthful behavior, creating a downward spiral of increasing blood pressure and reactions to that increase. Small blood vessels fail under the strain in ever larger numbers, damaging surrounding tissue. In the brain this damage contributes to age-related cognitive decline by creating countless tiny, unnoticed strokes. Ultimately this process leads to dementia. More important parts of the cardiovascular system are likely to fail first, however, perhaps causing a stroke, or a heart attack, or the slower decline of congestive heart failure.

From what is known today, it is reasonable to propose that the two main culprits driving loss of tissue elasticity are sugary cross-links generated as a byproduct of the normal operation of cellular metabolism and growing numbers of senescent cells. Elasticity is a property of the extracellular matrix, an intricate structure of collagens and other proteins created by cells. Different arrangements of these molecules produce very different structures, ranging from load-bearing tissues such as bone and cartilage to elastic tissues such as skin and blood vessel walls. Disrupting the arrangement and interaction of molecules in the extracellular matrix also disrupts its properties. Persistent cross-links achieve this by linking proteins together and restricting their normal range of motion. Senescent cells, on the other hand, secrete a range of proteins capable of breaking down or remodeling portions of the surrounding extracellular matrix, and altering the behavior of nearby cells for the worse.

The most important cross-linking compound in humans is glucosepane. Our biochemistry cannot break down glucosepane cross-links, and as a result it accounts for more than 99% of cross-links in our tissues. This isn’t a big secret. Given this you might expect to find researchers working flat out in scores of laboratories to find a viable way to break it down. After all here we have one single target molecule, and any drug candidate capable of clearing even half of existing cross-links would provide a treatment that can both reverse skin aging and vascular aging to a much greater degree than any presently available therapy. The size of the resulting market is every human being, the potential for profit staggering. Yet search on PubMed, and this is all of relevance that you will see published on the topic in the past few years:

Read more

At MIT, researchers have developed a stretchable bandage-like device capable of sensing skin temperature, delivering drugs transdermally, and containing electronics that include LED lights for displaying information. The various components of the system are designed to work together, for example the drug dispenser activating only when skin temperature is within a certain range and the LEDs lighting up when the drug reservoirs are running low. While this is only a prototype device, it certainly points toward future flexible devices that stay attached to a person’s skin, or even internally, for extended periods of time while providing health data and taking therapeutic actions in an intelligent way.

The device is based on a stretchable hydrogel matrix that reliably holds onto embedded metallic components linked by pliable wires. The hydrogel was made to have a stiffness similar to human soft tissues so that it blends well with the body when attached to it. When wires, drug reservoirs, delivery channels, and electronic components were built-in, the team tested the stretchiness of the final result showing that it maintains functionality even after repeated stress.

Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google Life Sciences, the Silicon Valley giant’s new foray into health and medicine, announced a new name Monday that slips easily off the tongue but might sound antiquated to a high-tech, life-sciences ear: Verily.

“Verily, I swear,” as Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII.

The word means “truly” or “certainly.” It dates back to 13th century Middle English and fell out of common use … well, a while ago. It often pops up, however, in the still very popular King James Bible.

Read more