Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Scientists at the University of Washington (UW) may have found an unexpected way to tackle persistent indoor air pollution: a common houseplant modified with rabbit DNA.

Researchers wanted to find a way to remove the toxic compounds chloroform and benzene from the home, a UW press release explained. Chloroform enters the air through chlorinated water and benzene comes from gasoline and enters the home through showers, the boiling of hot water and fumes from cars or other vehicles stored in garages attached to the home. Both have been linked to cancer, but not much has been done to try and remove them. Until now.

“People haven’t really been talking about these hazardous organic compounds in homes, and I think that’s because we couldn’t do anything about them,” senior study author and UW civil and environmental engineering department research professor Stuart Strand said in the release. “Now we’ve engineered houseplants to remove these pollutants for us.”

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“Mikhail first approached me nearly 15 years ago with the totally crazy idea that replacing hydrogen with deuterium in bioactive molecules so as to slow down undesirable chemical reactions. Well, if ever there were a proof that some of the craziest ideas are actually right, it is this one. In the years since, Misha and his company Retrotope have taken this concept from chemistry to yeast to mice and all the way to highly promising clinical results for several hitherto untreatable orphan diseases. I’m looking forward to hearing the latest!” says Aubrey de Grey.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/news/dr-mikhail-s-shchepinov-t…aging-2019

#undoingaging #sens #foreverhealthy

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The U.K.’s Telegraph reports that the new treatment, devised by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London, uses implanted immune system cells from strangers to fight tumors, instead of old-school cancer treatments like chemotherapy — a new tack in oncology that the researchers say could boost cancer ten-year cancer survival rates from 50 percent to 75 percent.

Immune System

The scientists behind the project explained it as a “do-it-yourself” approach to cancer treatment in interviews with the Telegraph. Instead of relying on chemicals or radiation outside the body to fight tumors, the transplants aim to help the bodies of cancer patients fight the tumors on their own.


A compelling study from the Weizmann Institute of Science has revealed a new anti-aging strategy designed to help the immune system remove old and dysfunctional cells from the body. The initial animal experiments promisingly restored youthful characteristics in old mice, suggesting improving immune system surveillance may be an effective anti-aging therapy.


The Cray-1 supercomputer, the world’s fastest back in the 1970s, does not look like a supercomputer. It looks like a mod version of that carnival ride The Round Up, the one where you stand, strapped in, as it dizzies you up. It’s surrounded by a padded bench that conceals its power supplies, like a cake donut, if the hole was capable of providing insights about nuclear weapons.

After Seymour Cray first built this computer, he gave Los Alamos National Laboratory a six-month free trial. But during that half-year, a funny thing happened: The computer experienced 152 unattributable memory errors. Later, researchers would learn that cosmic-ray neutrons can slam into processor parts, corrupting their data. The higher you are, and the bigger your computers, the more significant a problem this is. And Los Alamos—7,300 feet up and home to some of the world’s swankiest processors—is a prime target.

The world has changed a lot since then, and so have computers. But space has not. And so Los Alamos has had to adapt—having its engineers account for space particles in its hard- and software. “This is not really a problem we’re having,” explains Nathan DeBardeleben of the High Performance Computing Design group. “It’s a problem we’re keeping at bay.”

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