Lifeboat Foundation

As regenerative medicine expands, our ability to engineer organs is growing with it. Researchers can now grow a number of so called ‘organoids’ — mini-organs which can teach us more about developmental biology and enable vastly improved testing. In the latest addition to the bunch, a team from Ohio State University has successfully engineered the most complete model yet of a human brain, with a similar maturity to a 5 week old fetus.

Containing 99% of the genes present in the human fetal brain, and about the size of an eraser, the organoid was developed from transformed adult human skin. This method could allow more ethical and precise clinical trials, both speeding up and enabling more rigorous, personalized testing. As animal testing frequently fails to predict varied human responses, these organoid models offer an alternative approach which could revolutionize clinical trial methodology.

“It not only looks like the developing brain, its diverse cell types express nearly all genes like a brain. We’ve struggled for a long time trying to solve complex brain disease problems that cause tremendous pain and suffering. The power of this brain model bodes very well for human health because it gives us better and more relevant options to test and develop therapeutics other than rodents.”

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Checkout the latest Longevity Reporter Newsletter (22nd August, 2015), covering this week’s top news in health, aging, longevity.

This week: An Entire Nervous System Captured On Film; 10 Enduring Health Myths, Debunked By Science; Peto’s Paradox: Why Don’t Larger Animals Get Cancer More Often?; Antioxidants: Separating Myth From Reality; And more.

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While billions have now been spent on researching dementia in its various forms, progress is still limited and the underlying triggers are still not clear. The majority of research over the past 30 years has revolved around targeting the amyloid plaques that build up in the disease, but this has resulted in limited success. Is it time to focus resources on other hypotheses instead?

The real problem with tackling these conditions is the sheer complexity of the brain and biology. Research is usually a trial and error process filled with intelligent guesswork, but this means it can often take a great deal of time to establish what’s actually going wrong. The cause or effect conundrum is a significant roadblock in research and working out which aspects drive a disease and which are a result of another malfunction can take serious resources and time. When researchers first began analysing Alzheimer’s patients, perhaps the most obvious feature was the now famous amyloid plaque, but while amyloid may seem like a clear culprit because it’s so clearly out of place, it could easily be a smokescreen; the reason why it appears at all may be far more relevant than the plaque itself.

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Soldiers often have to carry over 100 lb (45 kg) of gear in a backpack, for several hours at a time. That’s why engineers at the Australia’s Department of Defence have developed a new exoskeleton, that diverts two thirds of pack weight directly to the ground.

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The world only quantum computer maker says its upgraded chip is 15 times faster than ordinary computers, but experts doubt the comparison is a fair test.

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Interesting…but I’d rather it was ME that was immortal, not some virtual copy.

By learning everything there is to know about you and your online habits, social network ETER9 promises a kind of digital immortality wherein an artificially intelligent agent continues to post on your behalf long after you’re dead. The future is creepier than we ever imagined.

ETER9, a startup launched by Portuguese developer Henrique Jorge, is still in the beta phase, but 5,000 people have already signed up for the service. It currently features a Facebook-like newsfeed, and a “cortex” that works much like a Facebook wall. But that’s where the similarities end.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=fAq7n2k5FkA

The stock market is tanking, North and South Korea are on the brink of war, and a cartoon character from a dystopian future is the most popular candidate for US President at the moment. But don’t despair. While most things are garbage, there are some things in the world that aren’t. Like this adorable kid who just got his own high-tech bionic hand.

Nine-year-old Josh Cathcart was often bullied in school for having just one hand. But he’s about to become the coolest kid in school, thanks to his new i-limb, developed by a company called Touch Bionics. The hand can be programmed via an iPad app.

Continue reading “Kid Gets Awesome New Bionic Hand, Reminds Us Not Everything is Garbage” »

(Phys.org)—A trio of physicists with the Autonomous University of Barcelona has built what they claim is the first artificial magnetic wormhole. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, Jordi Prat-Camps, Carles Navau and Alvaro Sanchez describe how they built the device and why they believe it might prove useful in building a more user-friendly MRI machine.

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Could the mysterious moons of Jupiter be hiding habitable zones under their icy crusts?

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