Something to post to your websites and to vote online.
Aubrey de Grey can get $1.5 million for the Methuselah Foundation if enough people vote.
Voting ends September 1st, take a second to vote now.
Any US Amex cardmember or US resident (who makes a guest account) can vote.
Here is the page where you can vote “nominate”
The Methuselah Foundation Page with some more details if you are interested, to vote though you only need click on the above link…
The UK’s Guardian today published details of a report produced by Britain’s Security Service (MI5) entitled, ‘Understanding radicalization and violent extremism in the UK’. The report is from MI5’s internal behavioral analysis unit and contains within it some interesting and surprising conclusions. The Guardian report covers many of these in depth (so no need to go over here) but one point, which is worth highlighting is the claim made within the report that religion is and was not a contributory factor in the radicalization of the home-grown terrorist threat that the UK faces. In fact, the report goes on to state that a strong religious faith protects individuals from the effects of extremism.This viewpoint is one that is gathering strength and coincides with an article written by Martin Amis in the Wall Street Journal, which also argues that ‘terrorism’s new structure’ is about the quest for fame and thirst for power, with religion simply acting as a “means of mobilization”.
All of this also tends to agree with the assertion made by Philip Bobbit in ‘Terror and Consent’, that al-Qaeda is simply version 1.0 of a new type of terrorism for the 21st century. This type of terrorism is attuned to the advantages and pressures of a market based world and acts more like a Silicon Valley start-up company than the Red Brigades — being flexible, fast moving and wired — taking advantage of globalization to pursue a violent agenda.
This all somewhat begs the question of, what next? If al-Qaeda is version 1.0 what is 2.0? This of course is hard to discern but looking at the two certain trends, which will shape humanity over the next 20 years — urbanization and virtualization — throws up some interesting potential opponents who are operating today. The road to mass urbanization is currently being highlighted by the 192021 project (19 cities, 20 million people in the 21st century) and amongst other things, points to the large use of slum areas to grow the cities of the 21st century. Slum areas are today being globally exploited from Delhi to Sao Paulo by Nigerian drug organizations that are able to recruit the indigenous people to build their own cities within cities. This kind of highly profitable criminal activity in areas beyond the vision of government is a disturbing incubator.
Increased global virtualization complements urbanization as well as standing alone. Virtual environments provide a useful platform for any kind of real-life extremist (as is now widely accepted) but it is the formation of groups within virtual spaces that then spill-out into real-space that could become a significant feature of the 21st century security picture. This is happening with, ‘Project Chanology’ a group that was formed virtually with some elements of the Anonymous movement in order to disrupt the Church of Scientology. While Project Chanology (WhyWeProtest Website)began as a series of cyber actions directed at Scientology’s website, it is now organizing legal protests of Scientology buildings. A shift from the virtual to the real. A more sinister take on this is the alleged actions of the Patriotic Nigras — a group dedicated to the disruption of Second Life, which has reportedly taken to using the tactic of ‘swatting’ — which is the misdirection of armed police officers to a victim’s home address. A disturbing spill-over into real-space. Therefore, whatever pattern future terrorist movements follow, there are signs that religion will play a peripheral rather than central role.
Originally posted on the Counterterrorism blog.
Read our new report 23 Things Science Can Tell Us about Life, the Universe, and Everything and post your comments here!
My proposal for the Society for Risk Analysis’s annual meeting in Boston has been accepted, in oral presentation format, for the afternoon of Wednesday, December 10th, 2008. Any Lifeboat members who will be in the area at the time are more than welcome to attend. Any suggestions for content would also be greatly appreciated; speaking time is limited to 15 minutes, with 5 minutes for questions. The abstract for the paper is as follows:
Global Risk: A Quantitative Analysis
The scope and possible impact of global, long-term risks presents a unique challenge to humankind. The analysis and mitigation of such risks is extremely important, as such risks have the potential to affect billions of people worldwide; however, little systematic analysis has been done to determine the best strategies for overall mitigation. Direct, case-by-case analysis can be combined with standard probability theory, particularly Laplace’s rule of succession, to calculate the probability of any given risk, the scope of the risk, and the effectiveness of potential mitigation efforts. This methodology can be applied both to well-known risks, such as global warming, nuclear war, and bio-terrorism, and lesser-known or unknown risks. Although well-known risks are shown to be a significant threat, analysis strongly suggests that avoiding the risks of technologies which have not yet been developed may pose an even greater challenge. Eventually, some type of further quantitative analysis will be necessary for effective apportionment of government resources, as traditional indicators of risk level- such as press coverage and human intuition- can be shown to be inaccurate, often by many orders of magnitude.
More details are available online at the Society for Risk Analysis’s website. James Blodgett will be presenting on the precautionary principle two days earlier (Monday, Dec. 8th).
For both ethical and practical reasons, monoclonals are usually made in mice. And that’s a problem, because the human immune system recognizes the mouse proteins as foreign and sometimes attacks them instead. The result can be an allergic reaction, and sometimes even death.
To get around that problem, researchers now “humanize” the antibodies, replacing some or all of mouse-derived pieces with human ones.
Wilson and Ahmed were interested in the immune response to vaccination. Conventional wisdom held that the B-cell response would be dominated by “memory” B cells. But as the study authors monitored individuals vaccinated against influenza, they found that a different population of B cells peaked about one week after vaccination, and then disappeared, before the memory cells kicked in. This population of cells, called antibody-secreting plasma cells (ASCs), is highly enriched for cells that target the vaccine, with vaccine-specific cells accounting for nearly 70 percent of all ASCs.
“That’s the trick,” said Wilson. “So instead of one cell in 1,000 binding to the vaccines, now it is seven in 10 cells.”
All of a sudden, the researchers had access to a highly enriched pool of antibody-secreting cells, something that is relatively easy to produce in mice, but hard to come by for human B cells.
To ramp up the production and cloning of these antibodies, the researchers added a second twist. Mouse monoclonal antibodies are traditionally produced in the lab from hybridomas, which are cell lines made by fusing the antibody-producing cell with a cancer cell. But human cells don’t respond well to this treatment. So Wilson and his colleagues isolated the ASC antibody genes and transferred them into an “immortalized” cell line. The result was the generation of more than 100 different monoclonals in less than a year, with each taking just a few weeks to produce.
In the event of an emerging flu pandemic, for instance, this approach could lead to faster production of human monoclonals to both diagnose and protect against the disease.
Journal Nature article: Rapid cloning of high-affinity human monoclonal antibodies against influenza virus
Nature 453, 667–671 (29 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06890; Received 16 October 2007; Accepted 4 March 2008; Published online 30 April 2008
Pre-existing neutralizing antibody provides the first line of defence against pathogens in general. For influenza virus, annual vaccinations are given to maintain protective levels of antibody against the currently circulating strains. Here we report that after booster vaccination there was a rapid and robust influenza-specific IgG+ antibody-secreting plasma cell (ASC) response that peaked at approximately day 7 and accounted for up to 6% of peripheral blood B cells. These ASCs could be distinguished from influenza-specific IgG+ memory B cells that peaked 14–21 days after vaccination and averaged 1% of all B cells. Importantly, as much as 80% of ASCs purified at the peak of the response were influenza specific. This ASC response was characterized by a highly restricted B-cell receptor (BCR) repertoire that in some donors was dominated by only a few B-cell clones. This pauci-clonal response, however, showed extensive intraclonal diversification from accumulated somatic mutations. We used the immunoglobulin variable regions isolated from sorted single ASCs to produce over 50 human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that bound to the three influenza vaccine strains with high affinity. This strategy demonstrates that we can generate multiple high-affinity mAbs from humans within a month after vaccination. The panel of influenza-virus-specific human mAbs allowed us to address the issue of original antigenic sin (OAS): the phenomenon where the induced antibody shows higher affinity to a previously encountered influenza virus strain compared with the virus strain present in the vaccine1. However, we found that most of the influenza-virus-specific mAbs showed the highest affinity for the current vaccine strain. Thus, OAS does not seem to be a common occurrence in normal, healthy adults receiving influenza vaccination.
With the receptor identified, a therapy can be developed that will bind to the receptor, preventing the deadly immune response. Also, by targeting a receptor in humans rather than a particular strain of flu, therapies developed to exploit this discovery would work regardless of the rapid mutations that beguile flu vaccine producers every year.
This discovery could lead to treatments which turn off the inflammation in the lungs caused by influenza and other infections, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Immunology. The virus is often cleared from the body by the time symptoms appear and yet symptoms can last for many days, because the immune system continues to fight the damaged lung. The immune system is essential for clearing the virus, but it can damage the body when it overreacts if it is not quickly contained.
The immune overreaction accounts for the high percentage of young, healthy people who died in the vicious 1918 flu pandemic. While the flu usually kills the very young or the sickly and old, the pandemic flu provoked healthy people’s stronger immune systems to react even more profoundly than usual, exacerbating the symptoms and ultimately causing between 50 and 100 million deaths world wide. These figures from the past make the new discovery that much more important, as new therapies based on this research could prevent a future H5N1 bird flu pandemic from turning into a repeat of the 1918 Spanish flu.
In the new study, the researchers gave mice infected with influenza a mimic of CD200, or an antibody to stimulate CD200R, to see if these would enable CD200R to bring the immune system under control and reduce inflammation.
The mice that received treatment had less weight loss than control mice and less inflammation in their airways and lung tissue. The influenza virus was still cleared from the lungs within seven days and so this strategy did not appear to affect the immune system’s ability to fight the virus itself.
The researchers hope that in the event of a flu pandemic, such as a pandemic of H5N1 avian flu that had mutated to be transmissible between humans, the new treatment would add to the current arsenal of anti-viral medications and vaccines. One key advantage of this type of therapy is that it would be effective even if the flu virus mutated, because it targets the body’s overreaction to the virus rather than the virus itself.
In addition to the possible applications for treating influenza, the researchers also hope their findings could lead to new treatments for other conditions where excessive immunity can be a problem, including other infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases and allergy.
the B612 Foundation made estimates of Apophis path if a 2036 Earth impact were to occur.
The impact result is a narrow corridor called the ‘risk corrider’ which would be a few miles wide. Countries estimated to be in the direct path:
- southern Russia,
- across the north Pacific Ocean (relatively close to the coastlines of the California and Mexico), then
- right between Nicaragua and Costa Rica,
- crossing northern Colombia and
- Venezuela and over the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago,
- over the Atlantic Ocean to the west coast of Africa.
Earth’s Path of Risk for the 99942 Apophis Asteroid that is suspected to be on track for a collision course with earth in the year 2036. This image is self-made from data estimated by the B612 Foundation, this is why it is just an approximation. Credit: Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz Mariordo and the re-use of this image is based on ‘Fair use’ of public domain info by the B612 Foundation work on Apophis.
The hypothetical impact of Apophis along the path of risk could have more than 10 million casualties, however the threatened zones would be evacuated [as per B612 foundation comment. The threat of casualties would be for a similar sized object, if it was not detected.].
Spaceworks Engineering had an award winning plan to send a spacecraft to shadow the Apophis asteroid
A video Foresight: A Radio Beacon Mission to Asteroid Apophis is on Youtube.
What is metabolomics?
Genes are similar to the plans for a house; they show what it looks like, but not what people are getting up to inside. One way of getting a snapshot of their lives would be to rummage through their rubbish, and that is pretty much what metabolomics does. […]
Metabolomics studies metabolites, the by-products of the hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions that continuously go on in every cell of the human body. Because blood and urine are packed with these compounds, it should be possible to detect and analyse them. If, say, a tumour was growing somewhere then, long before any existing methods can detect it, the combination of metabolites from the dividing cancer cells will produce a new pattern, different from that seen in healthy tissue. Such metabolic changes could be picked up by computer programs, adapted from those credit-card companies use to detect crime by spotting sudden and unusual spending patterns amid millions of ordinary transactions.
This could be used for traditional medicine, both to prevent pathologies and to detect those that are already present so they can be treated. But another use would be as part of an early-detection system to defend against pandemics and biological attacks. As mentioned previously, network-theory can help us better use vaccines. But once you have a cure or antidote, you also need to identify people that are already infected but haven’t died yet, and the earlier you can do that after the infection, the more chances they have to live.
Once the techniques of metabolomics are sufficiently advanced and inexpensive to use, they might provide better data than simply relying on reported symptoms (might be too late by then), and might scale better than traditional detection methods (not sure yet — something else might make more economic sense). It’s a bit too early to tell, but it’s a very promising field.
For more information, see Douglas Kell’s site or Wikipedia: Metabolomics.
Source: The Economist. See also Lifeboat’s BioShield program.
If a pandemic strikes and hundreds of millions are at risk, we won’t have enough vaccines for everybody, at least not within the time window where vaccines would help. But a new strategy could help use the vaccines we have more effectively:
Researchers are now proposing a new strategy for targeting shots that could, at least in theory, stop a pandemic from spreading along the network of social interactions. Vaccinating selected people is essentially equivalent to cutting out nodes of the social network. As far as the pandemic is concerned, it’s as if those people no longer exist. The team’s idea is to single out people so that immunizing them breaks up the network into smaller parts of roughly equal sizes. Computer simulations show that this strategy could block a pandemic using 5 to 50 percent fewer doses than existing strategies, the researchers write in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.
So you break up the general social network into sub-networks, and then you target the most important nodes of these sub-networks and so on until you run out of vaccines. The challenge will be to get good information about social networks, something not quite as easy as mapping computer networks, but there is progress on that front.
In one of the most dramatic illustrations of their technique, the researchers simulated the spread of a pandemic using data from a Swedish study of social connections, in which more than 310,000 people are represented and connected based on whether they live in the same household or they work in the same place. With the new method, the epidemic spread to about 4 percent of the population, compared to nearly 40 percent for more standard strategies, the team reports.
Source: ScienceNews. See also Lifeboat’s BioShield program.
There is a strong overlap between those concerned about extinction risk prevention and healthy life extension. Accordingly, many supporters of the Lifeboat Foundation will be attending an open event on regenerative medicine taking place on the UCLA campus on the 27th of June. Here is the blurb:
On Friday, June 27th, leading scientists and thinkers in stem cell research and regenerative medicine will gather in Los Angeles at UCLA for Aging 2008 to explain how their work can combat human aging, and the sociological implications of developing rejuvenation therapies. Aging 2008 is free, with advance registration required.
UCLA Royce Hall
Friday June 27th | Doors open 4pm
405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90024
This special public event is being organized by the Methuselah Foundation. Dr. Aubrey de Grey, chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation, said, “Our organization has raised over $10 million to crack open the logjams in longevity science. With the two-armed strategy of direct investments into key research projects, and a competitive prize to spur on competing scientists’ race to break rejuvenation and longevity records in lab mice, the Foundation is actively accelerating the drive toward a future free of age-related degeneration.” The Methuselah Foundation has been covered by “60 Minutes,” Popular Science, the Wall Street Journal, and other top-flight media outlets.
If any Lifeboat Foundation supporters are interesting in meeting up before or after the event, comment on this post.