Category: life extension – Page 525
ESA’s Mars Express orbiter is getting a major software upgrade that will extend its service life for years to come. On Sunday, the space agency uploaded the update into the veteran deep space probe’s computers where it will remain stored in memory until a scheduled restart on April 16. If successful, it will take some of the burden off the aging gyroscopes used to keep the unmanned spacecraft’s vital high-gain radio antenna pointed at Earth.
As anyone who regularly uses digital devices can tell you, software updates are a way of life. It turns out that Mars orbiting spacecraft are no exception, with aging electronics that need new instructions to deal with worn out components after years of heavy use.
Mars Express is one of the oldest still-functioning missions to the Red Planet. Launched on June 2, 2003 atop a Soyuz-FG rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the orbiter arrived at Mars on December 25 of that year. Since then, it has spent 14 years revolving about Mars taking photographs and gathering a mountain of scientific data to send back to mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.
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This is a fairly common response to the discussion of extending healthy human lifespans. The idea that fear of dying is the only thing that motivates the advocates, supporters, and scientists working on rejuvenation biotechnology and ending age-related diseases.
These days, war is not really portrayed in a very good light. When we think about war, we think about genocide, mass murder, and slaughter, and we call for an end to it. The popular sentiment is that war is bad and we should just do away with it. However, once upon a time, things were rather different, and soldiers fighting wars were not seen as victims of mindless violence. Losing your life in battle was considered glorious and noble, and your family would be proud of you for fighting in the name of your country, your God, or whatever. People who were afraid of dying and refused to fight were regarded as cowards, most certainly not as pacifists of a strong moral fiber, and were possibly executed; being a conscientious objector was not yet a thing, and human rights weren’t either.
This is sheer madness to us, but back in the day, it was entirely normal. Most of us will probably think people must have been crazy to let themselves be fooled into believing such nonsense, but that’s the power of propaganda for you.
The modern age of pro-death propaganda
However, the story is not completely over even today. This may be because of past glorification of death, stale ideas about the “circle of life”, a widespread coping mechanism, or a combination of the three, but at least in certain circumstances, being afraid of death is still seen as a sign of cowardice and sometimes also inferiority.
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It’s time to rethink the quest to control aging, death, and disease—and the fear of mortality that fuels it.
I went to medical school, at least in part, to get to know death and perhaps to make my peace with it. So did many of my doctor friends, as I would find out. One day—usually when you’re young, though sometimes later—the thought hits you: You really are going to die. That moment is shocking, frightening, terrible. You try to pretend it hasn’t happened (it’s only a thought, after all), and you go about your business, worrying about this or that, until the day you put your hand to your neck—in the shower, say—and … What is that? Those hard lumps that you know, at first touch, should not be there? But there they are, and they mean death. Your death, and you can’t pretend anymore.
I never wanted to be surprised that way, and I thought that if I became a doctor and saw a lot of death, I might get used to it; it wouldn’t surprise me, and I could learn to live with it. My strategy worked pretty well. Over the decades, from all my patients, I learned that I would be well until I got sick and that although I could do some things to delay the inevitable a bit, whatever control I had was limited. I learned that I had to live as if I would die tomorrow and at the same time as if I would live forever. Meanwhile, I watched as what had been called “medical care”—that is, treating the sick—turned into “health care,” keeping people healthy, at an ever-rising cost.
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Kazan, Russia, April 23–25.
23–25 April 2018 in Kazan (Russia) will be a biogerontological conference with the following main topics:
- Epigenetic mechanisms of aging
- Genomics, metabolomics, proteomics of longevity in humans and animals.
- Environment and aging
- Biomarkers of biological age
- Pharmacological interventions in aging.
- Mechanisms of regeneration.
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Researchers at the USC Roski Eye Institute, in collaboration with other institutions in California, have shown that a new stem cell-based retinal implant could help people with dry age-related macular degeneration.
The researchers have published the results of their phase 1/2a study in the journal Science Translational Medicine [1].
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An early symptom is blurry vision in which straight lines appear distorted. That can progress to darkness, whiteouts, or blurry areas in the center of the visual field. The disease does not, by itself, lead to total blindness because peripheral vision remains unaffected. Although some therapies delay loss of central vision, no current treatments restore it completely.
“Macular degeneration therapies seem to be treating disease symptoms, rather than its cause,” Lin says. “We focused on the role of macrophages in regulating inflammation and the growth of abnormal blood vessels to see whether it may be possible one day to help people who don’t get much benefit from existing treatments and design therapies that may prevent progression to advanced forms of the disease.”
Virus delivers genes to fight vision loss.
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DIYers can bioprint living human organs by modifying an off-the-shelf 3D printer costing about $500, announce researchers who published the plans as open source, enabling anyone to build their own system. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) developed a low-cost 3D bioprinter to print living tissue by modifying a standard desktop 3D printer and released the design as open source so that anyone can build their own system.
The biomedical engineering team led by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Associate Professor Adam Feinberg, Ph.D., BME postdoctoral fellow TJ Hinton, Ph.D. just published a paper in the journal HardwareX describing a low-cost 3D bioprinter. The article contains complete instructions for modifying nearly any commercial plastic printer, as well as printing and installing the syringe-based, large volume extruder.
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In brief: An implantable cancer vaccine from Harvard has shown promising results in mice, and researchers are testing it in a clinical trial on humans. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
An implantable cancer vaccine being tested on patients by Harvard’s Wyss Institute is a new type of immunotherapy that holds promise to treat a wide range of cancers such as melanoma, as well as auto-immune conditions and infectious diseases. The aspirin-sized implant is made of a polymer scaffold containing growth factors and tissue samples from a patient’s tumors which trains a patient’s immune system to search and destroy cancer cells.
Harvard’s cancer vaccine is approaching the end of clinical testing, promising to be available 4 or 5 years sooner than Stanford’s vaccine with its 97% cure rate.
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