Lifeboat Foundation

Today, we conclude our ongoing series discussing the Hallmarks of Aging [1] by looking at the hallmark of altered intercellular communication, the change in signals between cells that can lead to some of the diseases and disabilities of aging.

As an integrative hallmark, altered intercellular communication is caused by other hallmarks of aging. As a result, there is some hope that therapies targeting these other hallmarks will be able to treat this one.

Continue reading “Hallmarks of Aging – Altered Intercellular Communication” »

“If you’re under 40 reading this article, you’re probably not going to die unless you get a nasty disease.”

Those are the words of esteemed futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson, who told The Sun he believes humans are very close to achieving “immortality” – the ability to never die.

Humans have been trying to find a way to dodge death for years.

Continue reading “Want to live forever? You just have to make it to 2050” »

God” according to Rev Benek is working thru people like me who are pioneers in the AI and uploading field — and I am developing a Zenet interface for artificial death simulating the Khemetic afterlife — not a Judeo-Christian version. Osiris is a key deity in Zenet, and has a special place in Mormonism btw. There are good technical reasons for using Zenet. Objectives for the dead are slightly different than play strategy for the living in Zenet (having already passed over the dangerous waters). It is the Bridge between Worlds perfect for artificial-death, no biblical or koranic account exists how to communicate between living and deceased. “The betterment of mankind” imo involves the Restoration of Ma’at. And the Egyptian afterlife is available to all races (not just chosen people) — “Hour Five is one of the most complex hours within the composition. In the upper registers, the gods are portrayed with a surveying cord, because the deceased are allotted space (in the form of fields) within this hour. The deceased are also allotted time, and hence the gods also carry the body of a serpent and the hieroglyphs meaning “lifetime” in the lower register. In order to accomplish this, the Apophis fiend, known as “the Retreater, must once again be battled and fettered. Behind Apophis we notice the ba-souls of the blessed dead, and at the beginning of the lower register are found the four ”races” of mankind, including Egyptians, Asiatics, Nubians and Libyans. Each race is represented by four individual figures, who are assured existence in the afterlife. They are placed in the care of Horus and Sakhmet. It should be noted that the Great Hymn of Akhenaten, Aten is said to care even for foreign people, and hence, they are sheltered in the realm of the dead, according to Even if the uploading doesn’t take, this belt and braces offering still offers (conventional religious) Immortality with Horus, Amen, Isis, Thoth and the gang. Why does it matter which ”God(s)” — so long as we make it to the (1st) afterlife with the bonus of communication with the living?

Funerary Text from Egypt’s New Kingdom.

Researchers have made progress on the road to effective biomarkers for senescent cells.

In aging research, there has long been a need for better biomarkers that can detect and confirm the presence of senescent cells. This has become particularly urgent in recent years due to the meteoric rise of the senescent cell-clearing therapies known as senolytics.

Traditional ways of measuring senescent cell populations are problematic and have multiple shortfalls, so the development of better biomarkers is very important. Today, we share a new publication in which researchers take a step towards developing such a biomarker [1].

Continue reading “New Senescent Cell Biomarker Discovered” »

The global population aged 60 or over is growing faster than all younger age groups and faces the tide of chronic diseases threatening their quality of life and posing challenges to healthcare and economy systems. To better understand the underlying biology behind healthspan — the healthy period of life before the first chronic disease manifestation — the scientists from Gero and MIPT collaborated with the researchers from PolyOmica, the University of Edinburgh and other institutes to analyze genetic data and medical histories of over 300,000 people aged 37 to 73 made available by UK Biobank.

The study published today in Communications Biology was lead by Dr. Peter Fedichev and Prof. Yurii Aulchenko. It shows that the most prevalent chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, dementia, and some others apparently share the common underlying mechanism that is aging itself.

«According to Gompertz mortality law, the risk of death from all causes increases exponentially after the age of 40 and doubles approximately every 8 years», explains Peter Fedichev, founder and CSO of Gero. «By analyzing the dynamics of disease incidence in the clinical data available from UKB, we observed that the risks of age-related diseases grow exponentially with age and double at a rate compatible with the Gompertz mortality law. This close relation between the most prevalent chronic diseases and mortality suggests that their risks could be driven by the same process, that is aging. This is why healthspan can be used as a natural proxy for investigation of the genetic factors controlling the rate of aging, the “holy grail” target for anti-aging interventions».

Last month, researchers at Johan Auwerx’s lab at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) had looked at the connections between RNA-binding proteins and aging. RNA binding proteins (RBPs) play an important part in post-transcriptional control by binding to mRNAfter binding, RBPs can aid in the processing of pre-mRNA as well as mRNA stability, transport and translation [1].

Mitochondria

Upon screening aged animals for RBPs, researchers at the EPFL noticed increased activity of Pumilio2 (PUM2), which can lower the production of some proteins. It does this by binding to specific mRNAs (based on recognition sites) so that it can repress the translation of those mRNAs into proteins.

Longevity Vision Fund has exited stealth with plans to invest $100 million in startups with aspirations to extend healthy lifespans. The fund, which is linked to the founder of XPrize, will pump the money into biotechs and other longevity startups based around the world in seed to series B rounds.

Sergey Young, the founder of Longevity Vision, unveiled the fund at an event in London this week. Young is the cofounder of Peak State Ventures and an innovation board member at XPrize Foundation, a nonprofit known for running competitions to incentivize advances in fields including suborbital space flight.

At Peak State, Young and his colleagues invest in fields well outside of longevity, including property and education. But Young has established a foothold in the longevity space, leading to him becoming development sponsor of Longevity XPrize and a longevity partner at Bold Capital Partners.

Continue reading “XPrize board member raises $100M fund to tackle aging” »

Combining Machine Learning and Your Gut

The link between the gut biome and age is described by longevity researcher Alex Zhavoronkov and a team of his colleagues at Insilico Medicine, an artificial intelligence startup focused on drug discovery, biomarker development, and aging research.

Project fear? Should we pay attention to American Jesuits?

But the fundamental ambition of transhumanism is more problematic. Its architects champion a use of technology to accelerate the evolution of humanity so radically that at the end of the process humanity as such would disappear. A superior posthuman being would emerge. According to Wikipedia, “Transhumanism is the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available knowledge to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.” From its inception, the abolition of human death and aging has been one of the goals of transhumanism as it engineers a new being freed from the biological constraints of the current human condition.

From its inception, the abolition of human death and aging has been one of the goals of transhumanism.

Continue reading “Who’s afraid of transhumanism? (We all should be)” »