Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered a new phase of solid carbon, called Q-carbon, which is distinct from the known phases of graphite and diamond. They have also developed a technique for using Q-carbon to make diamond-related structures at room temperature and at ambient atmospheric pressure in air.

Phases are distinct forms of the same material. Graphite is one of the solid phases of ; diamond is another.

“We’ve now created a third solid phase of carbon,” says Jay Narayan, the John C. Fan Distinguished Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State and lead author of three papers describing the work. “The only place it may be found in the natural world would be possibly in the core of some planets.”

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The world’s first anti-ageing drug will be tested on humans next year in trials which could see diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s consigned to distant memory.

Scientists now believe that it is possible to actually stop people growing old as quickly and help them live in good health well into their 110s and 120s.

Although it might seem like science fiction, researchers have already proven that the diabetes drug metformin extends the life of animals, and the Food and Drug Administration in the US has now given the go ahead for a trial to see if the same effects can be replicated in humans.

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Excited to have a full feature on the BBC homepage on transhumanism and my growing presidential campaign. Transhumanist Party, speech at the World Bank, Immortality Bus, and universal basic income issues discussed:

Not many politicians running for the White House promise to end death. But not many politicians are Zoltan Istvan. Tim Maughan meets a man travelling America in a giant coffin-shaped bus to make his point.

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NEW YORK, Aug. 26, 2015 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF) officially launches Lifespan.io, an online platform designed to bridge the gap between longevity researchers and the public who support breakthroughs happening in this burgeoning field.

Lifespan.io is a website designed to house today’s most promising life extension projects. People are invited to contribute financially to the ones they wish to support. This unique approach to crowdfunding gives the public the opportunity to learn about longevity research, meet the people making it happen, and allows them to be a part of promising, historical breakthroughs in life extension technologies.

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Gene editing has already been used to fight diseases, but there’s now hope that it might eliminate the diseases altgether. Researchers have shown that it’s possible to eliminate facial muscular dystrophy using a newer editing technique, CRISPR (Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) to replace the offending gene and ‘turn off’ the condition. The approach sends a mix of protein and RNA to bind to a gene and give it an overhaul.

This doesn’t mean that doctors suddenly have a cure-all on their hands. They haven’t tried CRISPR on real live people, and there’s no guarantee that it’d work with every genetic condition under the Sun. The initial test was only 50 percent effective, too. If this gene mending is useful in the field, though, it could do a lot to transform medicine. Doctors could treat the root cause of a genetic disease rather than deal with the symptoms, and possibly wipe it out entirely — or at least, make it more bearable.

[Image credit: Getty Images].

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