The complexity in biology is astounding. That is why biologists are thankful that model organisms, like the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, can be used to breakdown biological processes into simpler units.
C. elegans is a particular favourite. It grows in the exact same way from a single fertilised egg cell to 959 cells as an adult. Its body is transparent which has allowed scientists to map its growth and study internal changes to great detail.
In a paper published in Nature recently, En-Zhi Shen at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing and colleagues have used C. elegans to make an intriguing discovery. Based on a process that occurs in each cell’s power house, mitochondria, they claim to be able to predict the lifespan of that organism.
In nature, electrons are found in pairs in orbit around the atom’s nucleus. A free radical is created when an atom has an unpaired electron whizzing around the nucleus. Inside mitochondria, there is formation of such free radicals called reactive oxygen species.
The mitochondria produces many types of reactive oxygen species (ROS) as by-products of the normal metabolic process, including superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, and nitric oxide. These free radicals propelled by their unpaired electrons seek to find other molecules in the cells from whom they can steal an electron and thereby damage them. Thus, free radicals can damage DNA and stop proteins and lipids from performing their functions in the cell. This process of stealing electrons from functional molecules by reactive oxygen species and its resulting damage is known as oxidative stress.
Shen thought that if they were able to measure the amount of oxidative stress in the worms they may be able to predict how long they would live. Shen had previously discovered that the mitochondria in cells produce sudden short bursts of free radicals which could be counted.
When Shen studied C. elegans with added proteins that glow in the dark because of oxidative stress, she could detect levels of oxidative stress by measuring the flashes of light, termed mitoflash, emitted by proteins which detect free-radicals produced by the mitochondria. The more mitoflashes that happen within a certain window of time, the higher the amount of free radicals produced by the mitochondria.
Using the mitoflash method, an individual worm can be observed during the entirety of its 21-day lifespan. These worms are at the peak of their reproductive ability during the second and third day of their lives. Soon after this, the worms start their steady decline towards old age and by about the fifteenth day most of them are considered old.
Shen discovered that there were two periods in the lifespan of the worm when oxidative stress increased. The first was around the third day, when the worms are laying their eggs and the other was around the fifteenth day when the worms were old.
They then compared these finding using other worms who were engineered to have longer or shorter lifespans. Consistently, they found that worms with low amounts of mitoflashes during the third day of their lives lived longer compared to worms with higher mitoflashes. Interestingly, the number of mitoflashes on ninth day was not predictive of lifespan. Shen, therefore, thinks that oxidative stress levels of a worm during early life can determine how long they can live.
Telling age in a flash
Shen’s work improves on previous worm studies by hinting that free radicals produced by mitochondria especially in early life may be a central mechanism driving the decline during ageing.
Also, the results of this study agree with the free radical theory of ageing, which assumes that the diseases of ageing result due to the increasing inability of cells to repair damage caused by oxidative stress. This theory predicts that organisms that have long lives must lower their oxidative stress by producing more antioxidants.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in real life. Human beings live much longer lives in spite of producing much fewer antioxidants compared to rats, hamsters, mice and rabbits. And studies involving dietary supplementation of antioxidants show an inverse relationship between antioxidant levels and life span. The claim that oxidative stress in early life may be a predictor of lifespan may work in some worms but it will certainly be of no use in humans.
The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.
QUOTATION(S): “…The forces shaping your future are digital [and mathematical], and you need to understand them…” AND “…You can’t understand the knot without understanding the strands, but in the future, the strands need not remain tied up in the same way as they are today…” AND “…ALL CHILDREN ARE BORN GENIUSES; 9,999 OUT OF EVERY 10,000 ARE SWIFTLY, INADVERTENTLY DEGENIUNIZED BY GROWNUPS…” AND “…Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020 .… We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are ‘things’ outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not .… We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body…” AND “…People are always [and wrongfully] assuming that everything that is going to be invented must have been invented already. But it hasn’t…”
CITATION(S): “…We have the Internet that we have today because the Internet of yesterday did not focus on the today of yesterday…” AND “…Legal scholars can debate whether copyright law mandates a future of ‘authorized use only’ for digital information. The answer may not matter much, because that future is coming to pass through the technologies of digital rights management and trusted systems…” AND “…Can we envision the future transcontinental flights, where books, music, images, and videos are automatically extracted, sampled, mixed, and remixed; fed into massive automated reasoning engines; assimilated into the core software of every personal computer and every cell phone ─ and thousands of other things for which the words don’t even exist yet?…” AND “…Governments of the Industrial World, your weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You have no so sovereignty where we gather .… We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity … In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits .… [Y]ou are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace…”
NEWEST, PRACTICAL PRINCIPALS (TENETS) TO SEIZE SUSTAINABLE PROFESSIONAL, MANAGERIAL AND BUSINESS SUCCESS TENTES: (18) Foster momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that harm credibility. (19) Institute coalitions that translate into swifter organizational adjustments to the inevitable streams of change in personnel and environment. BOOK(S): A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink (ISBN-13: 978–1594481710).
N.B.: Quotations, Citations and Success Tenets are by the Futuretronium Book.
THE OMNISCIENT TRUTH ABOUT OUTER-SPACE INTELLIGENCE AND WHAT THE OFFICIAL ESTABLISHMENT HAS TO DECLARE ABOUT IT! BY MR. ANDRES AGOSTINI.
I have the glory to have read every book by Dr. Raymond Kurzweil with the sole exception of “Transcend.”
Dr. Kurzweil is an engineer graduate from grandiose M.I.T. (the technological avant-garde within the Ivy League universities).
Beyond his many inventions, patents, and scientific breakthroughs and discoveries, please remember that Ray holds 19 doctoral degrees among many other amenities.
I exactly relish the way he exercises his mind. And instead of fighting sourly against his contrarians, he kindly and respectfully invites them to lavishly publish the opposing views on books and blogs.
Ray is a pervasive sage by any known or unknown measure. He is now the Chief Engineer Officer at Google and the Chairman of the Singularity University (founded by him with the institutional backing of NASA and Google).
We all like the Founding Fathers, especially Jefferson and Franklin. But tons of Americans and others seem to frequently and prevalently ignore this Hi-Tech Founding Father.
Within his duties at Google, he is embarked into the greatest scientific advancement in order to transform any illness or biological cause of death (natural death) into a superseded cure (outright state of well-being), radically.
HE IS INTO STRINGENT R&D&I TO MAKE HUMAN DEATH A THING OF THE PAST.
I also argue that he will be auspiciously fighting against challenges and problems in order to systemically and systematically reverse-engineer biology and the human brain with the utter purpose of seizing the correct software templates for Strongest Quantum Supercomputing.
In “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” (ISBN-13: 978–0143037880) book, Ray argues that most extraterrestrial beings might, just might, exhibit a grayish look because they are the trans-exobiologicals stemming from [outer-space and infinitely beyond] advanced exobiological civilizations.
Trans-exobiologicals are exobiologicals who have transcended their own exobiology.
Having said that and since the advent of his landmark book (I wish all fact-driven books were written like this canonical marvel), he has given many interviews and speeches about The Technological Singularity.
As a process of that, one day Ray ended up giving a seminal keynote to the upper management and scientists at SETI Institute. SETI, an American Organization, stands for Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Conversely, the about one-hour talk was about the Technological Singularity and the Law of Accelerating Returns as it posited by Ray himself.
Towards the end of the keynote, one or two SETI scientists told Ray that, as per their own research, they were considering as a probable and plausible scenario to be that extraterrestrials’ domicile was within the immeasurable limits of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
AS A CONSULTANT, MANAGER, STRATEGIST AND RESEARCHER, ANDRES WORKS AND HAS WORKED WITH INSTITUTIONS ─ AND THE RESPECTIVE EXECUTIVES OF SAID ORGANIZATIONS ─ SUCH AS:
► Toyota,
► Mitsubishi,
► World Bank,
► Shell,
► Statoil,
► Total,
► Exxon,
► Mobil,
► PDVSA, Citgo,
► GE,
► GMAC,
► TNT Express,
► AT&T
► GTE,
► Amoco,
► BP,
► Abbot Laboratories,
► World Health Organization,
► Ernst Young Consulting,
► SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation),
Entering the Era of Private and Semi-Anonymous Apps
Three rules for success: Michael Raynor at TEDxUniversity
QUOTATION(S): “…It reminds us that, in our accelerating, headlong era, the future presses so close upon us that those who ignore it inhabit not the present but the past …” AND “…The future is not a privilege but a perpetual conquest…”
CITATION(S): “…The world has profoundly changed … The challenges and complexity we face in our personal lives and relationships, in our families, in our professional lives, and in our organizations are of a different order of magnitude. In fact, many mark 1989 ─ the year we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall ─ as the beginning of the Information Age, the birth of a new reality, a sea change of incredible significance ─ truly a new era ─ Being effective as individuals and organizations is no longer merely an option ─ survival in today’s world requires it. But in order to thrive, innovate, excel, and lead in what Covey calls the new Knowledge Worker Age, we must build on and move beyond effectiveness [long-held assumptions, fallacies and flawed beliefs and faulty conventions]…Accessing the higher levels of human genius and motivation in today’s new reality REQUIRES A SEA CHANGE IN THINKING: a new mind-set, a new skill-set, a new tool-set ─ in short, a whole new habit…”
BOOK(S): The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage by Yossi Sheffi. ISBN-13: 978–0262693493
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
uArm, A Mini Robotic Arm You Can Assemble and Control http://singularityhub.com/2014/01/28/uarm-a-mini-robotic-arm…d-control/ QUOTATION(S): “…It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring…” AND “…Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion…”
CITATION(S): “…HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS].…COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS…”
BOOK(S): Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku. ISBN-13: 978–0307473332
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
PayPal Is Cracking Down on Bitcoin Sellers http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/05/idUS371088795720140205 QUOTATION(S): “…Change is hard. Change is hardest on those caught by surprise. Change is hardest on those who have difficulty changing too. But change is natural; change is not new; change is important…” AND “…Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition…”
CITATION: “…BEGINNING WITH THE AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE KNOWN WORLD AT THE TIME OF CHRIST, STUDIES HAVE ESTIMATED THAT THE FIRST DOUBLING OF THAT KNOWLEDGE TOOK PLACE ABOUT 1700 A.D. THE SECOND DOUBLING OCCURRED AROUND THE YEAR 1900. IT IS ESTIMATED TODAY THAT THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE BASE WILL DOUBLE AGAIN BY 2010 AND AGAIN AFTER THAT BY 2013…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK(S): Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier. ISBN-13: 978–1451654967
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
With so few effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, seniors who may be experiencing loss of cognitive function often avoid testing for fear that they may have the dreaded disease. Yet other, more treatable problems are thought to account for 40 percent of the 44.4 million cases of dementia worldwide, and the treatments that do exist for slowing Alzheimer’s disease require early intervention.
In other words, seniors stand to gain quite a bit from an expansion of cognitive check-ups.
Douglas Scharre, an Ohio State University neurologist, has developed a cognitive test that’s cheap and easy and can be administered to large groups of people at once. It’s a 20-minute, pencil-and-paper quiz that people can take anywhere, no doctor or dreaded computer needed.
QUOTATION: “…Thirty-five years ago, psychologist and visionary Dr. Abraham Maslow warned, ‘life is moving far more rapidly now than ever before in the rate of growth of facts, knowledge, techniques, and inventions. We need a different kind of human being able to life in a world that changes perpetually, who has been educated to be comfortable with change and situations in which he has absolutely no forewarning. The society that can turn out those people will survive. Societies which do not will die.’…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae. ISBN-13: 978–0312367077
QUOTATION: “…The flattening of the world is going to be hugely disruptive to both traditional and developed societies. The weak will fall further behind faster. The traditional will feel the force of modernization much more profoundly. The new will get turned into old quicker. The developed will be challenged by the underdeveloped much more profoundly. I worry, because so much political stability is built on economic stability, and economic stability is not going to be a feature of the flat world. Add it all up and you can see that the disruptions and going to come faster and harder. No one is immune ─ not me, not you, not Microsoft. WE ARE ENTERING AN ERA OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION ON STEROIDS. Dealing with flatism is going to be a challenge of a whole new dimension even if your country has a strategy. But if you don’t have a strategy at all, well, again, you’ve warned…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business by Arie De Geus ISBN-13: 978–1857881851
SUGGESTED BOOK: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler ISBN-13: 978–1451614213
QUOTATION: “…Again, yesterday holds tomorrow hostage .… Memory is past. It is finite. Vision is future. It is infinite. Vision is greater than history…”
SUGGESTED BOOK: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. ISBN-13: 978–1451614213 Regards,
