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I said over a year ago that if the US will not do it China will. Whilst there was talk about a moratorium on CRISPR in the US the Chinese were forging ahead and taking steps to become a world leader in biotech. Well here we are, they have deployed CRISPR in humans for cancer and this is only the start. As George Church advocates, we should have appropriate engineering safety measures in place but we should push ahead and do these things.

The move by Chinese scientists could spark a biomedical duel between China and the United States.

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Fancy a bit of cheese?

(Medical Xpress)—A large team of researchers with members from several Europeans countries and the U.S. has found that mice fed a compound called spermidine lived longer than ordinary mice and also had better cardiovascular heath. In their paper published in the journal Nature Medicine, the researchers describe experiments they carried out with the compound and mice, what they found and why they believe the compound might provide benefits for humans.

Prior research has found that ingestion of spermidine—which was first discovered in semen samples, hence its name—led to longer lifespans in simple organisms such as fruit flies, yeast and roundworms. In this new study, the researchers sought to find out if the same would prove true for more complex creatures.

The researchers chose mice as their target, feeding some groups water with spermidine mixed in, while other groups received plain water. After observing the rodents over the course of their lifespans, the researchers discovered that those who had been given spermidine lived longer than those who had not—even if the supplement was not given to them until middle age. Closer examination of the rodents revealed that those given the supplement also had better heart function and lower . They also found that rats fed a high-salt diet, which causes , had lower pressure readings when given spermidine.

Continue reading “Spermidine found to lengthen lifespan in mice and to promote cardiovascular health” | >

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research non-profit backed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, a Donald Trump fan called Peter Thiel, and numerous other tech luminaries, is partnering with Microsoft to tackle the next set of challenges in the still-nascent field.

OpenAI will also make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform, in part because of its existing support for AI workloads with the help of Azure Batch and Azure Machine Learning, as well as Microsoft’s work on its recently rebranded Cognitive Toolkit. Microsoft also offers developers access to a high-powered GPU-centric virtual machine for these kind of machine learning workloads. These N-Series machines are still in beta, but OpenAI has been an early adopter of them and Microsoft says they will become generally available in December.

Amazon already offers a similar kind of GPU-focused virtual machine, though oddly enough, Google has lagged behind and — at least for the time being — doesn’t offer this kind of machine type yet.

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As part of Google’s slew of artificial intelligence announcements today, the company is releasing a number of AI web experiments powered by its cloud services that anyone can go and play with. One — called Quick, Draw! — gives you a prompt to draw an image of a written word or phrase in under 20 seconds with your mouse cursor in such a way that a neural network can identify it. It’s both a hilarious and fascinating exercise with broader implications for how AI can self-learn over time in key AI research areas like image recognition and optical character recognition.

Quick, Draw! is a great way to familiarize yourself with how neural networks work to identify objects and text in photos, which is one of the most common forms of AI-guided software techniques we see daily on platform’s like Facebook and Google Photos. As you start to craft the doodle, Quick, Draw!’s software automaton will start yelling out words and phrases it thinks you’re trying to illustrate. As you get closer to the finished product, the voice starts to become a good indication of how your drawing could be misinterpreted as something else. If you’re on point, however, the neural network will hone in on the object and guess correctly.

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More news about SENS Research Foundation fundraiser and a look back at some of the achievements so far.

#sens #aging

Good news! Thanks to the generous pledges of new SENS Patrons, signing up for monthly donations to the SENS Research Foundation over the past two weeks since the fundraiser started, the $24,000 matching fund put up by Josh Triplett and Fight Aging! is nearly met. Just a little more left to reach the target: if you are the next person to sign up, the next year of your donations to the SENS Research Foundation will be matched dollar for dollar. But if you miss out on that, donations made before the end of the year can still be matched. The Forever Healthy Foundation’s Michael Greve, who earlier this year pledged $10 million to SENS rejuvenation research and startup companies building rejuvenation therapies, has put up a further $150,000 challenge fund. He will match all donations to the SENS Research Foundation made before the end of 2016, and there is still a way to go in order to meet that target. So help us get this done!

Why support the SENS Research Foundation, and their ally the Methuselah Foundation? Because these organizations have proven capable of using your charitable donations more effectively than any other in order to make significant progress towards an end to aging and age-related disease. For fifteen years now, the principals and their network of advocates and scientists have nudged, debated, and funded researchers to ensure that the broader research community builds the basis for human rejuvenation. Aging is an accumulation of molecular damage, and if that damage is repaired sufficiently well, a goal that modern medicine is only just starting to grapple with despite decades of evidence, then the result will be a halt to the processes of degenerative aging. An end to the disease, dysfunction, and suffering of aging.

Continue reading “Forever Healthy Foundation Provides a 0,000 Challenge Fund to Match SENS Rejuvenation Research Donations” | >

New hope for age related macular degeneration.

The discovery of a novel protein that links aging and age-dependent retinal diseases could lead to potential new treatments for conditions that cause sight loss in later life.

In a study in mice, to be published in the journal eLife, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reveal that Transmembrane 135 (Tmem135) regulates retinal aging, and that mutations in the protein result in age-dependent disease.

Tmem135 has previously been associated with fat storage and long life in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, but its molecular function has never been characterized clearly. The new study shows that irregular levels of the protein lead to symptoms of a common age-related retinal disease called macular degeneration.

Continue reading “New protein provides critical link between aging and age-dependent disease” | >

Heart disease prevention measures have made some impact on mortality rates. Looking after your heart is absolutely critical for your longevity plan.

Despite the rising proportion of the older population who choose to be overweight or obese, risk of heart disease has declined somewhat in past few decades. This outcome can be attributed to prevention in the sense of at least some people taking better care of their health by specifically targeting measures such as blood pressure and blood lipid levels, coupled with prevention in the sense of treatments such as statins that also reliably influence these measures. Increased blood pressure with age, or hypertension, directly impacts risk of cardiovascular disease and other conditions by putting additional stress on tissue structures and causing the heart to remodel itself detrimentally. Higher blood lipid levels on the other hand contribute to the progression of atherosclerosis, attacking blood vessel walls to form fatty deposits that can later break to cause blockages or ruptures of blood vessels. These are all things best avoided if possible, but until the advent of rejuvenation therapies after the SENS model the best that can be done is to slow down the damage.

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Continue reading “Measuring the Effects of Prevention on Heart Disease” | >