The Google Arts & Culture app went viral over the weekend as people discovered the funny results it can provide. Some are accurate while others aren’t so much.
Here’s how to use it.
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Distinct amyloid-beta prion strains discovered in different variants of Alzheimer’s disease.
In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team led by Carlo Condello presented their results from a study of the sliced brain fragments of deceased Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. It appears different amyloid-beta prions are uniquely associated with different AD variants [1].
A primer on Alzheimer’s disease
AD is a chronic neurodegenerative disease affecting about 5% of the population above 65 years of age—the time when the first symptoms usually manifest. It is estimated to be the cause of up to 70% of all cases of dementia, which according to WHO projections, by 2050 will be around 115 million.
An interview with Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy on the topic of young blood and blood filtering for rejuvenation purposes.
Due to a recently published study on the effects of young plasma on aged mice, we got in touch with Dr. Irina Conboy of Berkeley University. Dr. Conboy is an Associate Professor at the Department of Bioengineering and an expert in stem cell niche engineering, tissue repair, stem cell aging and rejuvenation. Before we dive into the main topic, let’s familiarize ourselves a little with Dr. Conboy and her work.
Dr. Conboy got her Ph.D. at Stanford University, focusing on autoimmunity. She met her partner in science—and in life—Dr. Michael Conboy at Harvard and they got married before embarking on graduate studies; they celebrated their Silver Anniversary a few years ago. During her postdoctoral studies, she began focusing on muscle stem cells, trying to figure out what directs them to make new healthy tissue and what causes them to lose their ability to regenerate the tissues they reside in as we age[1].
Together with her husband Michael, she eventually discovered that old stem cells could be reactivated and made to behave like young ones if appropriately stimulated. The Conboys’ parabiosis experiments—which consisted in hooking up the circulatory systems of aged and young mice—showed that old age is not set in stone and can be reversed in a matter of weeks[2].
For your scrutiny. This is about the 90+ year old father of Mel Gibson getting stem cell therapy and Joe Rogan talking about Bas Ruten getting the same. According to this doctor these treatments are not available in the U.S.
Joe Rogan, Mel Gibson and Dr. Neil Riordan talk about stem cell therapy and how it saved Mel Gibson’s Dad, on The Joe Rogan Experience, JRE 1066. Full podcast — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtL1fEEtLaA
Joe Rogan discusses stem cell treatment with Mel Gibson and Dr. Neil Riordan. Mel Gibson tells Joe Rogan that his dad was 92 and in terrible shape health wise, so they decided to try stem cell treatment for him and it improved all aspects of his health, from his heart and cognition to his eyesight. Joe Rogan talks about stem cells, Mel Gibson’s experience with stem cell therapy, stem cell treatment in Panama and other topics with Mel Gibson and Neil Riordan on the Joe Rogan Experience, JRE #1066.
The dozen people working at CSER itself—little more than a large room in an out-of-the-way building near the university’s occupational health service—organize talks, convene scientists to discuss future developments, and publish on topics from regulation of synthetic biology to ecological tipping points. A lot of their time is spent pondering end-of-the-world scenarios and potential safeguards.
A small cadre of scientists worries that lab-made viruses, AI, or nanobots could drive humans to extinction.
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Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).
In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties’ and sixties’ California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.
Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon):
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