The agency successfully ensured that Voyager 1 can beam back data for two-to-three more years despite being 13 billion miles away.
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Summary: Will gene drive wipe out malaria-causing mosquitoes, or will the genetic technology that ‘spreads like wildfire’ cause a catastrophe? Gene drive raises hopes and fears as a team of scientists funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are using it to wipe out the mosquitoes that carry malaria, to eradicate the disease. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Follow us on Reddit | Google+ | Facebook. Author: Brady Hartman.]
In a basement lab at the Imperial College London (ICL), a group of researchers led by Andrew Hammond are on a mission to wipe out malaria. The scientists are funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and are using a technology called gene drive – a souped-up form of genetic engineering designed to wipe out the mosquitoes that carry the disease.
The lab contains cages of mosquitoes modified with the gene drive, along with an additional gene that makes their eyes and other body parts glow red under laser light.
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Summary: Can a gene fuel obesity? Variants of a gene called ‘ankyrin-B’ – a gene carried by millions of Americans – could cause individuals to put on pounds through no fault of their own. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Follow us on Reddit | Google+ | Facebook. Author: Brady Hartman]
We often attribute obesity to eating too much and exercising too little. However, the evidence is growing that at least some of our weight gain is predetermined by our genes. And if a simple genetic variant causes weight gain, then it’s a prime target for gene editing.
New research from the University of North Carolina suggests that variants in a gene called ankyrin-B, a gene carried by millions of Americans, could cause individuals to gain weight through no fault of their own.
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Summary: Aubrey de Grey’s SENS foundation is both controversial and inspirational. Watch a 3-minute video of Aubrey, followed by a discussion of Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s revolutionary plans to reverse aging. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. Follow us on Reddit | Google+ | Facebook. ]
Aubrey de Grey is on a mission to reverse aging and has a large group of followers who think he might do it.
In a video interview with the Swiss Innovation Forum a few days ago, Aubrey explains the mission of his SENS Research Foundation in simple language. Later on, you’ll read about the details of his revolutionary plans for rejuvenation science.
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Have you seen the clickbait campaign that focuses on the research of Dr. Steven Gundry. It employs a slimy, photo-tile lure that asks you to turn up your speakers and then hawks a product or service disguised as a breakthrough discovery. These scams force the viewer to stay on the page. Typically, there is no indication of how long the video is, or any way to skip forward,
But often, it is hard to tell if a photo tile is news or clickbait. Big companies like Yahoo and Outbrain intermingle genuine news with marketing scams, teasers and outright fake news into an array of little photos at the end of every feature. This particular clickbait may be a story of a dogged counter-cultural researcher with a genuinely relevant finding. It could be newsworthy…I’m just not sure. Dr. Gundry clearly believes that our health is adversely affected by many of the plant based foods that we thought was healthy, because of a defense mechanism linked to lectin.
Passing judgement on Dr. Gundry’s evolutionary claims and diet recommendations begs for independent clinical studies, or at least the analysis and commentary of scholars in nutrition, gastroenterology and evolution. But, like Robert Atkins and Dean Ornish, Dr. Gundry seems earnest in his research and motives. I don’t think that he is selling anything other than his opinion.
I found web sites and white papers that summarize his research and conclusions without a scammy video. If true, this would be an eye-opener—completely unexpected! While his points fascinate, I don’t have the tools to determine if this may be legit. This certainly merits vetting.
For example, Gundry claims that farmers have selectively reinforced a genetic mutation in cows, which appeared only two thousand years ago—and that this has resulted in a lectin-like protein in milk called Casein A1. (Normal cows make Casein A2, a safe protein). Apparently, the only herds of “normal” cows are on farms in southern Europe. Could this result in food poisoning for the rest of us? Dr. Gundry is pretty convincing that the answer could be “Yes”.
- Q&A with Dr. Gundry: Are we wrong about what makes foods healthy?
- Dr. Gundry’s Food Pyramid [Explained]
- Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution (diet & recipe tips)
- Dr. Gundry’s Book: The Plant Paradox
This article is a stub without a conclusion. Rather than passing judgement, I encourage further inquiry. Reader feedback is invited. What do you think about Dr. Gundry’s analysis and claims. Might there be adverse problems associated with many “healthy” vegetables and out of season fruits? Tell me, doctor: Must I give up sun-dried tomato and eggplant?!
This is Philip Raymond’s first post on food and nutrition. More often, he covers Bitcoin, online privacy and quantum physics.
Raymond chairs CRYPSA, produces The Bitcoin Event, edits Wild Duck and moderates LinkedIN Bitcoin P2P, the largest Bitcoin discussion group. He delivered the keynote address at Cryptocurrency Expo in Dubai last month and sits on the New Money Systems board at Lifeboat Foundation.
Google’s AutoML project, designed to make AI build other AIs, has now developed a computer vision system that vastly outperforms state-of-the-art-models. The project could improve how autonomous vehicles and next-generation AI robots “see.”
In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that’s capable of generating its own AIs. More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a “child” that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts.
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SENS Research Foundation co-founder Aubrey de Grey believes in a world in which we no longer age. At a London event, he explained that he believes the first person who will live to be 1,000 has already been born, and we’ll solve this “aging problem” within 20 years.
Aging has plagued biological organisms since life first began on planet Earth and it’s an accepted and universally understood part of life. Sure, things like climate change pose significant threats to society, but aging will almost certainly still exist even if we ever manage to stop damaging our environment.
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Dr. Aubrey de Grey Summarizes Rejuvenation Research at the MIT Technology Review. To learn more about the work of Dr. Aubrey de Grey and the SENS Foundation visit http://www.sens.org/
Since the dawn of medicine, aging has been doctors’ foremost challenge. Three unsuccessful approaches to conquering it have failed: treating components of age-related ill health as curable diseases, extrapolating from differences between species in the rate of aging, and emulating the life extension that famine elicits in short-lived species. SENS Research Foundation is spearheading the fourth age of anti-aging research: the repair of age-related damage, that is, rejuvenation biotechnology.
The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach was first proposed in 2002. “Senescence,” here, refers to the actuarial phenomenon—the trend that individuals within a population suffer from an increasing morbidity and mortality rate in (typically exponential) relation to their chronological age. “Negligible” is used in a statistical sense: we consider a level of senescence negligible if no age-related contribution to mortality is statistically demonstrable within a population, given the “background noise” of age-independent mortality (such as unfortunate encounters with motor vehicles). Finally, by “Engineered,” we indicate that this state is achieved by the deliberate application of biomedical therapies, and is not the normal situation. The goal of SENSE is thus unambiguously defined; we seek methods to convert a population experiencing a non-negligible level of senescence into one experiencing a negligible level.
To see how the goal of negligible senescence could be “engineered,” it is useful to consider a situation in which human ingenuity and perseverance has already achieved an analogous result. Motor vehicles experience a process of wear-and-tear essentially similar to organismal aging; the paint flakes, windowpanes chip, rust infiltrates the pipework, and so forth. Nonetheless, as vintage car owners will attest, it is entirely possible to keep one functional for an essentially indefinite period. Critically, this is achieved not by preventing the wear but by repairing the damage that does occur at a rate sufficient to ensure that the function of the machine is never irretrievably compromised.