Lifeboat Foundation

As pubs and bars in the UK get busier in the run up to Christmas, Barclaycard has uncorked a way to reduce the time people spend waiting to be served. Pay @ Pump is a beer pump that allows customers to pour their own pint and pay with a contactless card in as little as a minute.

According to Barclaycard, people spend an average of 12 minutes per order waiting to be served over the Christmas period. The Pay @ Pump system is designed to reduce customer queuing time and speed up service.

“I’m sure everyone has been stuck behind the person who orders the most complicated cocktail on the menu or a round of 10 drinks for their group of friends,” explains Barclaycard’s commercial director for digital consumer payments Tami Hargreaves. “When people told us that waiting time was one of their biggest annoyances, we wanted to help solve a common problem with a simple solution.”

A non-invasive robotic arm developed by University of Minnesota researchers could give the physically impaired a newfound sense of mobility without the risk of going under the knife.

My new story for New Scientist on robot voting rights. This story came about because of my discussion with Professor Lawrence Lessig on the BBC World Service. To read my article, you may have to sign up for a free New Scientist account (it takes 1 minute). Please do it! It’s an important article. Gerrymandering in the AI and & robot age: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23231043-300-prep…ith-votes/ #transhumanism

If human-like AI comes to fruition then we may have grant voting rights to our silicon equals. Democracy will change forever, says Zoltan Istvan.

Check out the LEAF interview with Synthetic Biology company CellAge who plan to use their technology to create aging biomarkers for the research community to use for free as well as new approaches to removing senescent cells.

CellAge are using synthetic biology to remove senescent cells that accumulate with age and contribute to disease. We took the time to interview them about their technology, treating age-related diseases and their plans for the future.

You can also check out their campaign on Lifespan.io:

Continue reading “CellAge – Synthetic biology meets senolytics” »

Progress with treating osteoporosis.

A team of scientists at the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) discovered a new bone-forming growth factor, Osteolectin (Clec11a), which reverses osteoporosis in mice and has implications for regenerative medicine.

Although Osteolectin is known to be made by certain bone marrow and bone cells, CRI researchers are the first to show Osteolectin promotes the formation of new bone from skeletal stem cells in the bone marrow. The study, published in eLife, also found that deletion of Osteolectin in mice causes accelerated bone loss during adulthood and symptoms of osteoporosis, such as reduced bone strength and delayed fracture healing.

Continue reading “Scientists discover new bone-forming growth factor that reverses osteoporosis in mice” »

Zura Kakushadze is lead author of this peer reviewed paper published by the Free University of Tbilisi. It describes an information paradox that arises in a materialist’s description of the Universe—if we assume that the Universe is 100% quantum. The observation of the paradox stems from an interdisciplinary thought process whereby the Universe can be viewed as a “quantum computer”.

The presentation is intentionally nontechnical to make it accessible to a wide a readership.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey on the case again in this amusing video.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey in a new video where people ask questions via Twitter. It is a bit tongue in cheek and sorry about the title but hopefully you will enjoy it,

Continue reading “Is it Possible to Defeat Death? SENS Research Over 9000!” »

An interesting but predictably hyped research study currently doing the rounds. Epigentic changes are one of the Hallmarks of Aging and this study reinforces their importance despite the usual media hype.

Graying hair, crow’s feet, an injury that’s taking longer to heal than when we were 20—faced with the unmistakable signs of aging, most of us have had a least one fantasy of turning back time. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute have found that intermittent expression of genes normally associated with an embryonic state can reverse the hallmarks of old age.

This approach, which not only prompted human skin cells in a dish to look and behave young again, also resulted in the rejuvenation of mice with a premature aging disease, countering signs of aging and increasing the animals’ lifespan by 30 percent. The early-stage work provides insight both into the cellular drivers of aging and possible therapeutic approaches for improving human health and longevity.

Continue reading “Cellular reprogramming reverses signs of aging” »

In September, a doctor named John Zhang announced that a baby, created via a complicated fertility treatment involving DNA contributions from three people, was successfully delivered the previous April. Now the U.K. has opened the way for more attempts at creating babies with three parents.

The fertility treatment involves sperm, an egg from the prospective mother, and an egg from a donor and has been used to help women who have mitochondrial issues with their eggs, replacing the nucleus DNA of those eggs with that of donor, either before or after fertilization. The embryo then carries the donor’s mitochondrial DNA, which amounts to less than 1% of the resulting child’s genes. CBS News reports that on Thursday, Britain’s fertility regulator, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, approved the technique.