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If you are religious, or have religious friends worried about the implications of rejuvenation for their beliefs, this article may help.

Preamble: I am an atheist. So I don’t have any God-related issues concerning rejuvenation/living forever. Other people, though, may believe there’s an afterlife waiting for them once they die, or that curing ageing equals playing God. I don’t think these are particularly problematic concerns.

First, if anyone at all, believer or not, wishes to die at any point, I am in no position to object. It’s their life, not mine, and they can do with it whatever they see fit. If you are afraid of never reaching your god because of quasi-immortality, I think you should be free to die the way you wish, be it by ageing or whatever way you prefer (as long as you don’t take others down with you). I think it’d be crazy to terminate your life for this reason, but hey, whatever sinks floats your boat. It’s your choice, and you should be given it. Rejuvenation isn’t about forcing people to never die. It’s about giving them the possibility of living in perfect health for as long as they see fit.

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A collaborative team of scientists and physicians from the Oxford University, Cambridge University, Imperial College London, University College London and King’s College London have made a remarkable progress towards curing patients with HIV infection.

Of 50 patients taking part in NHS funded revolutionary clinical trial, a 44-year-old British man is the first to complete the trial. He showed no sign of the virus in his blood following treatment.

HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, is a retrovirus found in body fluids of infected person. These can be semen, vaginal and anal fluids, blood, and breast milk. It can be easily transmitted through unprotected sex or simply sharing infected needles. An infected mother can also transmit HIV to her child during pregnancy, delivery, or breastfeeding.

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LEAF caught up with Futurist David Wood at the recent International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid to talk about rejuvenation biotechnology.

We recently attended the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid. LEAF director Elena Milova caught up with futurist David Wood at the summit to ask him about his work and his views on the development of rejuvenation biotechnology.

David is the Chair of the London Futurists a group who organize regular public meetings to discuss the future and how technology and science will change the world we live in. It is their aim to engage and educate the public about science and foster better understanding for what is credible in science and what is not.

Continue reading “David Wood – We Should Prepare for the Future Now” | >

Fun in fiction. Perhaps not so much in reality.

The human mind is already pretty open to manipulation—just ask anyone who works in advertising. But neural implant technology could potentially open up a direct digital link to our innermost thoughts that could be exploited by hackers.

In recent months, companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Kernel, and Facebook have unveiled plans to create devices that will provide a two-way interface between human brains and machines.

While these devices could undoubtedly bring many benefits, they would be networked to computers and therefore essentially part of the Internet of Things. That should immediately set off alarm bells for anyone paying attention to cybersecurity news.

Continue reading “Neural Implant Tech Raises the Specter of Brainjacking” | >

New research suggests that the human brain is almost beyond comprehension because it doesn’t process the world in two dimensions or even three. No, the human brain understands the visual world in up to 11 different dimensions.

The astonishing discovery helps explain why even cutting-edge technologies like functional MRIs have such a hard time explaining what is going on inside our noggins. In a functional MRI, brain activity is monitored and represented as a three-dimensional image that changes over time. However, if the brain is actually working in 11 dimensions, looking at a 3D functional MRI and saying that it explains brain activity would be like looking at the shadow of a head of a pin and saying that it explains the entire universe, plus a multitude of other dimensions.

The team of scientists led by a group from Scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland detected the previously unknown complexities of the brain while working on the Blue Brain Project. The project’s goal is to create a biologically accurate recreation of the human brain.

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“Deep Learning” computer systems, based on artificial neural networks that mimic the way the brain learns from an accumulation of examples, have become a hot topic in computer science. In addition to enabling technologies such as face- and voice-recognition software, these systems could scour vast amounts of medical data to find patterns that could be useful diagnostically, or scan chemical formulas for possible new pharmaceuticals.

But the computations these systems must carry out are highly complex and demanding, even for the most powerful computers.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has developed a new approach to such computations, using light instead of electricity, which they say could vastly improve the speed and efficiency of certain deep learning computations. Their results appear today in the journal Nature Photonics (“Deep learning with coherent nanophotonic circuits”) in a paper by MIT postdoc Yichen Shen, graduate student Nicholas Harris, professors Marin Soljacic and Dirk Englund, and eight others.

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