Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Physics is not the first scientific discipline that springs to mind at the mention of DNA, but a group of scientists, including John van Noort from the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION) have discovered a new structure of telomeric DNA.

Longevity. Technology: In every cell of our bodies are chromosomes that carry genes that determine our characteristics. At the ends of these chromosomes are telomeres, which protect the genes from damage. Telomeres are rather like aglets, the plastic tips at the end of a shoelace – they protect the DNA from damage and fraying. However, every time a cell divides, the telomeres become shorter, until eventually the Hayflick Limit is reached, the cell can no longer divide and apoptosis – programmed cell death – occurs.

This means that telomeres are sometimes seen as the key to living longer, and the researchers behind this new discovery hope it will help us to better understand aging and age-related diseases.

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Set to be one of the largest, if not the largest, investment opportunity in the decades to come, longevity is a rapidly accelerating field; the Longevity Investors Conference targets the global investor community, bringing together institutional investors and top class experts for networking and exploration of relevant insights into the field, as well as expert education and investment opportunities.

Longevity. Technology: It’s not long to wait, now until the Longevity Investors Conference, which takes place later this month in Gstadt, Switzerland. The speaker list is full of longevity pioneers and visionaries, and we have been lucky enough to be given the opportunity to ask them some of our burning longevity questions.

Longevity. Technology readers can get their exclusive invitation to the leading investors-only longevity conference HERE.

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Hot on the heels of its €7.4 million raise to accelerate remote medical diagnostics, Certific has announced it is partnering with healthtech startup PocDoc to tackle the world’s biggest killer – cardiovascular disease.

The novel screening will allow patients to remotely monitor blood pressure, BMI and, crucially, quantitative lipid levels through the same user experience. This solution will be rolled out through a number of pilots, in conjunction with the NHS, across the UK, and eventually across Europe and globally.

Longevity. Technology: Heart and circulatory diseases cause a quarter of all deaths in the UK – that’s more than 160,000 deaths each year, or one every three minutes. There are around 7.6 million people living with a heart or circulatory disease in the UK. This costs the country’s National Health Service (NHS) an estimated £7.4 billion per year, with a wider cost to the economy of around £15.8 billion. Early identification of those at highest risk can ensure appropriate treatment, prevent many cases and reduce the strain on the healthcare system.

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A new longevity focused venture capital fund is preparing to announce its first investments, as it seeks to accelerate commercialisation in the field. Joining the likes of Maximon, Apollo and Korify, New York’s Life Extension Ventures (LifeX) has put together a $100 million fund specifically for companies developing solutions to extend the longevity of both humans and our planet. In a slight twist, the fund is predominantly looking to invest in companies that are leveraging software and data at the heart of their efforts to hasten the adoption of scientific breakthroughs in longevity.

Longevity. Technology: The longevity field is alive with innovation, and developments in AI and Big Data are just some of the software-led technologies driving progress throughout the sector. Co-founded by scientists-turned-entrepreneurs, Amol Sarva and Inaki Berenguer, LifeX Ventures’ investment philosophy draws on their combined experiences building software-led companies across a wide range of sectors. We caught up with Sarva to learn more.

Between them Sarva, a cognitive scientist by training, and Berenguer have led and/or founded several startups, such as CoverWallet, Virgin Mobile USA and Halo Neuroscience. The two have also invested personally in more than 150 startups before their interest turned more recently to longevity.

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“Ultimately, there’s going to be a more satisfying and possibly better solution that involves systems that do a better job of understanding the way the world works.”

Along the way, LeCun offers some withering views of his biggest critics, such as NYU professor Gary Marcus — “he has never contributed anything to AI” — and Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research — “it’s very easy to do flag-planting.”

Beyond the critiques, the more important point made by LeCun is that certain fundamental problems confront all of AI, in particular, how to measure information.

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Theorists at the University of Pittsburgh and Swansea University have shown that recent experimental results from the CERN collider give strong evidence for a new form of matter.

The experiment at CERN, site of the world’s highest-energy particle collider, examined a heavy particle called a Lambda b that decays to lighter particles, including the familiar proton and the famed J/psi, discovered in 1974.

In a paper published online today in Physical Review D, physicists Tim Burns of Swansea in Wales and Eric Swanson at Pitt argue that the data can be understood only if a new type of matter exists.

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Physicists at UC Santa Barbara, the University of Maryland, and the University of Washington have found an answer to the longstanding physics question: How do interparticle interactions affect dynamical localization?

“It’s a really old question inherited from condensed matter physics,” said David Weld, an experimental physicist at UCSB with specialties in ultracold atomic physics and . The question falls into the category of “many-body” physics, which interrogates the physical properties of a quantum system with multiple interacting parts. While many-body problems have been a matter of research and debate for decades, the complexity of these systems, with quantum behaviors such as superposition and entanglement, lead to multitudes of possibilities, making it impossible to solve through calculation alone. “Many aspects of the problem are beyond the reach of modern computers,” Weld added.

Fortunately, this problem was not beyond the reach of an experiment that involves ultracold lithium atoms and lasers. So, what emerges when you introduce interaction in a disordered, chaotic quantum system? A “weird quantum state,” according to Weld. “It’s a state which is anomalous, with properties which in some sense lie between the classical prediction and the non-interacting quantum prediction.”

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For the first time, scientists will be able to test therapeutics for a group of rare neurodegenerative diseases that affect infants and young children, thanks to a new research model created by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hereditary spastic paraplegias (HSPs) are a group of caused by . They lead tens of thousands of children to develop increased muscle tone in their lower extremities, causing weakness in their legs and ultimately affecting their ability to crawl or walk.

“Kids as early as six months of age that have these start to show signs of disease,” says Anjon Audhya, a professor in the Department of Biomolecular Chemistry at UW-Madison. “Between two and five years of age, these kids become wheelchair-bound, and they unfortunately will never be able to walk.”

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As electric vehicles grow in popularity, the spotlight shines more brightly on some of their remaining major issues. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are tackling two of the bigger challenges facing electric vehicles: limited range and slow recharging.

The researchers fabricated a new type of electrode for that could unleash greater power and faster charging. They did this by creating thicker electrodes—the positively and negatively charged parts of the battery that deliver power to a device—using magnets to create a unique alignment that sidesteps common problems associated with sizing up these critical components.

The result is an electrode that could potentially facilitate twice the range on a single charge for an electric vehicle, compared with a battery using an existing commercial electrode.

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