Lifeboat Foundation

Professor Nadeem Sarwar is Corporate Vice President, Co-Founder and Head, Transformational Prevention Unit, Novo Nordisk (https://www.novonordisk.com/partnerin…), Co-Chair UK Dementia Mission (a UK Government Ministerial appointment) and Honorary Professor, University of Edinburgh Medical School.

Professor Sarwar joined Novo Nordisk in June 2023 as Corporate Vice President, Co-Founder and Head of Novo Nordisk’s new Transformational Prevention Unit (TPU) whose mission is to increase obesity-free life years, so people live healthier and longer lives. To achieve this, the TPU is establishing an integrated ecosystem that will deliver science-first, empowering, and scalable commercial solutions that predict and pre-empt obesity and its consequences through innovative partnerships, with solutions intending to push the boundaries of what is possible with drugs, genomics, microbiome, digital health, and behavioral science.

Continue reading “Prof Nadeem Sarwar — Corporate VP, Co-Founder & Head, Transformational Prevention Unit, Novo Nordisk” »

“We’ve solved many, if not most of the challenges, and those that we haven’t solved yet are solvable,” the company’s CEO says.

In a recent study, 151 human participants were pitted against ChatGPT-4 in three tests designed to measure divergent thinking, which is considered to be an indicator of creative thought.

Divergent thinking is characterized by the ability to generate a unique solution to a question that does not have one expected solution, such as “What is the best way to avoid talking about politics with my parents?” In the study, GPT-4 provided more original and elaborate answers than the human participants.

The study, “The current state of artificial intelligence generative language models is more creative than humans on divergent thinking tasks,” was published in Scientific Reports and authored by U of A Ph.D. students in psychological science Kent F. Hubert and Kim N. Awa, as well as Darya L. Zabelina, an assistant professor of psychological science at the U of A and director of the Mechanisms of Creative Cognition and Attention Lab.

Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have characterized a bright quasar, finding it to be not only the brightest of its kind but also the most luminous object ever observed. Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies, and supermassive black holes power them.

The black hole in this record-breaking quasar is growing in mass by the equivalent of one sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole to date.

The black holes powering quasars collect matter from their surroundings in an energetic process that emits vast amounts of light. So much so that quasars are some of the brightest objects in our sky, meaning even distant ones are visible from Earth. Generally, the most luminous quasars indicate the fastest-growing supermassive black holes.

Proteins are nature’s polymers, governing biological processes at every level. A new study presents artificial proteins made using modern, precision polymers to intervene and alter natural processes towards a new way of developing therapeutics.

Researchers led by Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have introduced a pioneering approach aimed at combating neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

In a new study, researchers discovered a new way to enhance the body’s antioxidant response, which is crucial for cellular protection against the oxidative stress implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases.

Transforming base materials into gold was one of the elusive goals of the alchemists of yore. Now Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich has accomplished something in that vein. He has not of course transformed another chemical element into gold, as the alchemists sought to do. But he has managed to recover gold from electronic waste using a byproduct of the cheesemaking process.

Electronic waste contains a variety of valuable metals, including copper, cobalt, and even significant amounts of gold. Recovering this gold from disused smartphones and computers is an attractive proposition in view of the rising demand for the precious metal.

However, the recovery methods devised to date are energy-intensive and often require the use of highly toxic chemicals. Now, a group led by ETH Professor Mezzenga has come up with a very efficient, cost-effective, and above all far more sustainable method: with a sponge made from a protein matrix, the researchers have successfully extracted gold from electronic waste.

A team of Chinese scientists introduced a quantum communication technique that they say could help secure Web 3.0 against the formidable threat of quantum computing.

Their approach, called Long-Distance Free-Space Quantum Secure Direct Communication (LF QSDC), promises to improve data security by enabling encrypted direct messaging without the need for key exchange, a method traditionally vulnerable to quantum attacks.

They add the approach not only enhances security but also aligns with the decentralized ethos of Web 3.0, offering a robust defense in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

New findings reveal that the body undergoes significant, systematic changes across multiple organs during prolonged periods of fasting. The results demonstrate evidence of health benefits beyond weight loss, but also show that any potentially health-altering changes appear to occur only after three days without food.

The study, published in Nature Metabolism, advances our understanding of what’s happening across the body after prolonged periods without food.

By identifying the potential health benefits from fasting and their underlying molecular basis, researchers from Queen Mary University of London’s Precision Healthcare University Research Institute (PHURI) and the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences provide a road map for future research that could lead to therapeutic interventions—including for people that may benefit from fasting but cannot undergo prolonged fasting or fasting-mimicking diets, such as ketogenic diets.

The Forever Healthy Foundation is pleased to announce the Rejuvenation Startup Summit 2024 program and full speaker list.

The Rejuvenation Startup Summit (Berlin, May 10–11, 2024) is a vibrant networking event that brings together startups and members of the longevity venture capital/investor ecosystem – all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan. Rejuvenation and longevity biotech is a new, emerging field of medicine. It aims to prevent and reverse the diseases of aging by addressing their common root cause, the aging process itself.

In addition to an exciting range of presentations from CEOs of startups in the fields of rejuvenation & longevity, the summit features an all-day startup forum for networking, panel discussions, and keynote presentations. Starting midday on Friday and finishing off on Saturday night with a party for all attendees, the summit offers ample opportunity to connect with some of the most promising leaders in the field, including: