Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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“This week, the viral aggregator ViralNova was acquired for $100 million dollars. Meanwhile, the Pitchfork spin-off film criticism site The Dissolve ceased operations with an internet_meaningful blogpost entitled “The End.” The divergence between the missions and lifecycles of these two media projects that both launched in 2013 leave me wondering, “WTF is value?” It is certainly not creating #niche content for ‘intelligent audiences.’ Over the past two years, we’ve learned that there isn’t any actual monetizable ‘cultural value’ in building a content farm with an authoritative voice or domination of a niche area. Instead, it is more important to chase quantifiable human metrics by shoving lowbrow content in front of Facebook users. This is exactly what ViralNova has done better than most content farms–it figured out the current system and #growth_hacked the hell out of it.” Read more

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There is a whole lot more to innovation than thinking up a great new idea. A new study from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management suggests that when budding entrepreneurs get time off their normal activities to work on other things — dubbed ‘slack’ time — they use it to complete the less exciting jobs needed to bring a novel project to life.

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An interesting paper about Urchins and how some species effectively do not age (like some lobsters) by expressing telomerase.

Note the researcher makes the classic mistake about telomere biology not understanding the correlation between a short lived species which has longer telomeres and one that has negligible senescence and considerably shorter telomeres. The same applies to mice and men, mice have much longer telomeres than us but live about 3 years max.

The frequently made misconception about telomeres is that telomere length defines or causes aging, it does not. An organism’s telomere length has little to do with how long it lives or how fast it ages. People often point out, some animals, such as mice, have long telomeres and a short lifespan, while other animals, such as humans, have much shorter telomeres but longer lifespan.

To clarify, Telomere theory doesn’t suggest that telomere length controls aging, in fact telomere length is irrelevant to aging. It is the change in telomere length that controls cell aging. The key isn’t how long your telomeres are at birth, but how much your telomeres have shortened relative to that starting length. It’s this shortening that changes gene expression.

Changes in telomere lengths from birth to old age in mice and other animals show clearly that telomere shortening – or rather, the way in which shortening telomeres cause changes in gene expression – is a primary driver of aging of the cell and therefore the organism.

Continue reading “Cellular and molecular mechanisms of negligible senescence: insight from the sea urchin” | >