Lifeboat Foundation

Set on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, the third annual Blockchain Summit, hosted by BitFury, a leading full service Blockchain company, and Bill Tai, a venture investor and technologist, has come to a close. This event was an intimate, if perfectly balanced, gathering of technology, policy, investment and business leaders from around the world and across sectors. Topics ranged from the public policy implications of what is being heralded as a foundational technology, to new emerging business models that can ride on the very rails that enabled the global bonanza of digital currencies like Bitcoin. A key question that underpinned the Summit is if Blockchain could not have existed without the Internet, what could not exist without Blockchain?

Blockchain technology can undoubtedly change industries, especially those that labor under often byzantine, opaque and friction-laden business models. While many of the early pioneers are focusing on finance and insurance, the opportunities for this radical technology may very well reorder society as we know it. The remarkable case of Estonia, for example, shows a country reinventing itself into a future-proof digital state, where citizen services are rendered nearly instantaneously and to people all over the world. Similarly, promising work inspired by the famed Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, on improving land registries is being carried out by BitFury in a host of countries. With land and property being the two largest assets people will own — and the principal vehicle of value creation and wealth transfer — an unalterable, secure and transparent registration process should give the world comfort and elected leaders longevity.

What drives this unique technology is the power of distributed singularity, from which Blockchain’s identity pioneers like Dr. Mariana Dahan, who launched the World Identity Network on Necker Island, and Vinny Lingham of Civic, draw their inspiration. Blockchain operates on the basis of a distributed ledger (or database) system, inexorably marching forward recording and time-stamping transactions or records. While some may herald Bitcoin as Blockchain’s “killer app,” it is easy to maintain that the killer app is not the digital currencies that ride on Blockchain’s rails, but rather the rail system altogether. Two trains can ride on rails. But a high-speed maglev train is a decidedly faster mode of transport than a steam engine. Just as the maglev makes little or no contact with the rails enabling low-friction transport, the Blockchain can greatly reduce the friction in how the world transfers and records value.

Continue reading “Blockchain and the Power of Singularity” »

She goes on to detail which expressions and messages can increase public acceptance and which have proven to be counterproductive. Related cognitive biases are also briefly discussed.

Elena is a LEAF/Lifespan.io Director of the Board and the head of its Outreach/Fundraising committee, and has been a longevity activist and advocate since 2013. Since then she has organized educational events to make new evidence-based methods of healthy life extension more popular, and is member of the Russian transhumanist movement.

Forever Labs, a startup in Y Combinator’s latest batch, is preserving adult stem cells with the aim to help you live longer and healthier.

Stem cells have the potential to become any type of cell needed in the body. It’s very helpful to have younger stem cells from your own body on hand should you ever need some type of medical intervention, like a bone marrow transplant as the risk of rejection is greatly reduced when the cells are yours.

Mark Katakowski spent the last 15 years studying stem cells. What he found is that not only do we have less of them the older we get, but they also lose their function as we age. So, he and his co-founders Edward Cibor and Steve Clausnitzer started looking at how to bank them while they were young.

Continue reading “Forever Labs preserves young stem cells to prevent your older self from aging” »

Read more

It is tempting to dismiss scientifically inspired presentiments of immortality as arrant nonsense, but we should not underestimate the way ideas like transhumanism speak powerfully to our unconscious need for delusion. This is not only a new religion that does without God and churches — it also is a marketing strategy for new technology. A novel form of cross-promotion and co-branding, tech evangelism really aims at a deeper and more efficient penetration into the digital marketplace by offering mortality denial in the same package.

Human beings are the only animals to have evolved an insight into their own death.

Both Kurzweil and the 2045 program have predicted the state of machine-human singularity being achieved by 2045, but what are the methods of achieving such an end and what are the consequences of doing so?

Herodotus’s Fountain of Youth. Rowling’s Philosopher’s Stone. Barrie’s Neverland. Ovid’s Cumaean Sibyl. The idea of immortality has been ingrained in humanity’s creative consciousness since our humble beginnings. In the present day, eternal youth may soon move out of the realms of myth and into a reality thanks to developing technologies.

Researchers at UCLA have offered new hope to people losing their hair. These scientists have discovered a way to activate stem cells in the follicles to make hair grow again.

The new study published in the journal Nature Cell Biology gives us a tantalizing hint that we can restore hair growth and treat conditions such as baldness and alopecia[1]. These conditions are associated with hormonal imbalance, stress, aging, and chemotherapy treatment.

According to a new study, aging hearts might find a new lease on life. Researchers have demonstrated that stem cells taken from young rats and given to aged rats rejuvenated their hearts, making them functionally younger in a number of ways.

Young at heart

The new study published in the European Heart Journal investigated the effects of cardiac stem cells on the function and structure of aged hearts[1]. There have been previous experiments using cardiosphere-derived cells (CDCs) that have delivered promising results, but they have never been tested in relation to aging.

Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State’s College of Engineering have developed a new technology, Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), that can generate any cell type of interest for treatment within the patient’s own body. This technology may be used to repair injured tissue or restore function of aging tissue, including organs, blood vessels and nerve cells.

Results of the regenerative medicine study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Continue reading “Breakthrough device heals organs with a single touch” »