My work is featured in Reason today via a review on book Radicals, which opens with a controversial chapter on my transhumanist presidential run: http://reason.com/blog/2017/07/12/theres-no-harm-in-fantasizing-about-a-be #transhumanism
In Radicals Chasing Utopia, transhumanist enthusiasm gets a bad rap.
AI is being used for much more than many realize. In fact, particle physicists are currently pushing the limits of our understanding of the universe with the help of these technologies.
Many might associate current artificial intelligence (AI) abilities with advanced gameplay, medical developments, and even driving. But AI is already reaching far beyond even these realms. In fact, AI is now helping particle physicists to discover new subatomic particles.
Keith Comito introduces the Lifespan Heroes, a campaign to help support scientific progress, journalism and advocacy at the LEAF Foundation.
By becoming a Heroes patron you are helping us to create more content, exclusive interviews, the latest biotech news, livestream events and more.
Check out the campaign here: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/join-us-become-a-lifespan-hero/
Interesting results in mice but don’t jump on the bandwagon yet.
Fisetin is a naturally occurring plant polyphenol from the flavonoid group, similar to quercetin. It is present in many plants, where it acts as a colouring agent. It is also found in many fruits and vegetables, such as strawberries, apples, persimmons, onions, and cucumbers.
It has also been found to be a senolytic compound able to clear senescent cells, at least it does in vitro studies in a petri dish[1]. The clearance of dysfunctional senescent cells is one of the repair based approaches proposed by the SENS Research Foundation to prevent or reverse age-related diseases.
Before you jump on the bandwagon
A new therapy for brain cancer.
A new type of cell that can seek and destroy brain cancer and then dispose of themselves has just been successfully tested in mice. The cells are able to home in on brain tumors and reduce them to between 2 to 5% of their original size[1].
This new approach could potentially give doctors a new weapon against aggressive cancers like brain cancer (glioblastoma), which normally kills in 12–15 months.
Interestingly, it only took the researchers four days to create and deploy these cells in the mice, which is an amazing accomplishment.
Reason at Fight Aging! discusses the need to fund and support advocacy as much as research. Ultimately profressional advocacy and marketing could help popularize the field. Currently advocacy is left to a handful of volunteers and zealous individuals and that is not an optimal strategy for growth.
Useful activities in our community can be powered either by zealotry or by money. Zealotry has the advantage of being cheap, but the profound disadvantages of being rare, unreliable, and never quite optimally opinionated for the task at hand. Set a zealot to a challenge and you get the output the zealot decides upon, and only for so long as he or she is suitably motivated by whatever internal alchemy is at work in that particular case. Sustainable, reliable, long-term zealots only exist in stories. Money, on the other hand, has the disadvantage of being expensive, but for for so long as income is greater than expenditure, it can be used to produce reliable, sustainable, long-term outcomes. Changing the world always starts with the zealots, but the whole point of the subsequent bootstrapping process is to transition to money rather than zealotry as a power source just about as rapidly as possible. The future is defined by the few visionaries who care greatly enough to set aside their lives to work upon it, but it is enacted by the vastly greater number of people who take a paycheck and go home at the end of the work day.
To the extent we agree that the advocacy, fundraising, and other matters accomplished via Fight Aging! are good things, we’d like to see more of this taking place. More of it, and not dependent on the fickle motivations of zealots. Ultimately that means finding ways to do what Fight Aging! does, but for profit, with money. In this I do not mean Fight Aging! itself, which will be powered by zealotry until such time as the alchemy fails, at which point it will vanish just like everything else does in time, but something like it, and preferably dozens of varied somethings. Experimentation and diversity drive progress, and we won’t find out exactly what it is that Fight Aging! is doing suboptimally without the existence of many other attempts at the same types of initiative.
In the years that I have been running Fight Aging!, I’ve seen many longevity science interest and news sites come and go. Zealotry has a short half-life. When it comes to the money side of the house, things haven’t been much better, however. The typical ad-supported sites roll over and die fairly quickly; there never was enough money in that to do it for a niche interest such as ours over the past fifteen years. Their business models fail, and they linger a little while on the fumes of zealotry until that also departs. The initiatives that try sponsorship from the “anti-aging” marketplace tend to last longer, but are so corrupted by that revenue that they quickly lose all possible usefulness and relevance. You can’t take money from people pushing interventions that do not work and still speak with correctness and authority.
The evolution of communication throughout history has largely been about taming two dimensions: time and distance. That was as true of spoken language as it was of the telegraph or email. Humans have been so successful at taming these factors that, today, neither time nor distance are meaningful bottlenecks to transmitting your thoughts.
In fact, if you want to tell a friend living in a different hemisphere what you just ate for lunch, the most time-consuming part of the process is physically typing or tapping the message. Communication these days can be so fast that it’s fair to consider it “instantaneous,” though technically it’s not quite there yet. Because with all of the messaging we do in a day, all of that typing and tapping adds up.
We still rely heavily on fingers and thumbs to get the message across, but for how long will this be the case? It’s too soon for anything but speculation, but research groups and corporations are working on new technologies that might allow us to share our ideas using thoughts alone. Flying cars, walking-talking robots, and now sci-fi telepathy? It’s a fascinating time to be alive.
An iceberg about the size of the state of Delaware split off from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf sometime between July 10 and July 12. The calving of the massive new iceberg was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite, and confirmed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the joint NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite. The final breakage was first reported by Project Midas, an Antarctic research project based in the United Kingdom.
Animation of the growth of the crack in the Larsen C ice shelf, from 2006 to 2017, as recorded by NASA/USGS Landsat satellites.
