Lifeboat Foundation

Smile Vector is a Twitter bot that can make any celebrity smile. It scrapes the web for pictures of faces, and then it morphs their expressions using a deep-learning-powered neural network. Its results aren’t perfect, but they’re created completely automatically, and it’s just a small hint of what’s to come as artificial intelligence opens a new world of image, audio, and video fakery. Imagine a version of Photoshop that can edit an image as easily as you can edit a Word document — will we ever trust our own eyes again?

The time is right to make quantum computing real…

With micro-LEDS, Rohinni aims to advance product lighting, starting with laptops.

Decline of the immune system is one of the areas SENS are working on, with just over a week left for the Winter Fundraiser and Triple donation match now is the time to support their work!

Immunosenescence is a key process in aging and rejuvention or replacement of the thymus which gradually wastes away as we age exposing us to pathogens is an important step in dealing with age-related diseases. SENS is working on these problems so if you want to see solutions please consider donating to our Winter Fundraiser today on the link below:

http://www.sens.org/donate

Continue reading “Immune Restoration Results from Placing a Young Thymus into an Aged Mouse” »

Light therapy kills cancer in new no surgery, no chemo approach.

A new non-surgical treatment for low-risk prostate cancer can effectively kill cancer cells while preserving healthy tissue, reports a new UCL-led phase III clinical trial in 413 patients. The trial was funded by STEBA Biotech which holds the commercial license for the treatment.

The new treatment, ‘vascular-targeted photodynamic therapy’ (VTP), involves injecting a light-sensitive drug into the bloodstream and then activating it with a laser to destroy tumour tissue in the prostate. The research, published in The Lancet Oncology, found that around half (49%) of patients treated with VTP went into complete remission compared with 13.5% in the control group.

Continue reading “Light therapy effectively treats early prostate cancer” »

The biotech battle between China and the US has begun as we predicated when we announced the first CRISPR deployment in humans last month. The US has upped the ante and is taking a step further in the race for the biotech crown. All great news for us as the more competition the faster progress will move so let’s hope there is a fierce battle for biotech coming.

In 2015, a little girl called Layla was treated with gene-edited immune cells that eliminated all signs of the leukemia that was killing her. Layla’s treatment was a one-off, but by the end of 2017, the technique could have saved dozens of lives.

It took many years to develop the gene-editing tool that saved Layla, but thanks to a revolutionary method known as CRISPR, this can now be done in just weeks.

Continue reading “CRISPR gene editing human trials in China and US offer hope for countless lives” »

Google Tech Talk with the SENS Research Foundation!

Commentary about our recent Google Tech Talk about the MitoSENS project from FightAging!

“As the clock ticks on this year’s SENS rejuvenation research fundraiser — less than two weeks to go now, and plenty left in the matching fund for new donations — it is good to be reminded of the progress that the SENS Research Foundation has accomplished with the charitable funding of recent years. With that in mind, today I’ll point you to a recent Google Tech Talk that provides a layperson’s introduction to one of the projects that our community has funded, fixing the problem of mitochondrial damage in aging. The point of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) research programs is to accelerate progress towards specific forms of therapy that can bring aging under medical control.”

Continue reading “Presenting Mitochondrial Rejuvenation at a Google Tech Talk” »

In a technological tour de force, scientists have developed a new way to probe antimatter.

For the first time, researchers were able to zap antimatter atoms with a laser, then precisely measure the light let off by these strange anti-atoms. By comparing the light from anti-atoms with the light from regular atoms, they hope to answer one of the big mysteries of our universe: Why, in the early universe, did antimatter lose out to regular old matter?

“This represents a historic point in the decades-long efforts to create antimatter and compare its properties to those of matter,” says Alan Kostelecky, a theoretical physicist at Indiana University.

Continue reading “Scientists Blast Antimatter Atoms With A Laser For The First Time” »

Slight variations in the moon’s gravitational tug have hinted that kilometers-wide caverns lurk beneath the lunar surface. Like the lava tubes of Hawaii and Iceland, these structures probably formed when underground rivers of molten rock ran dry, leaving behind a cylindrical channel. On Earth, such structures max out at around 30 meters across, but the gravitational data suggest that the moon’s tubes are vastly wider.

Other satellites had found the openings of large lunar lava tubes and caves.

• The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now imaged over 200 pits that show the signature of being skylights into subsurface voids or caverns, ranging in diameter from about 16 feet (5 meters) to more than 2,950 feet (900 m), although some of these are likely to be post-flow features rather than volcanic skylights.