Lifeboat Foundation

Several different causes of aging have been discovered, but the question remains whether there are common underlying mechanisms that determine aging and lifespan. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Ageing research at the University Cologne have now come across folate metabolism in their search for such basic mechanisms. Its regulation underlies many known aging signaling pathways and leads to longevity. This may provide a new possibility to broadly improve human health during aging.

In recent decades, several cellular signaling pathways have been discovered that regulate the lifespan of an organism and are thus of enormous importance for aging research. When researchers altered these signaling pathways, this extended the lifespan of diverse organisms. However, the question arises whether these different signaling pathways converge on common metabolic pathways that are causal for longevity.

We probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints, an unprecedented study of lifespan statistics in human and non-human primates has confirmed.

The study set out to test the ‘invariant rate of aging’ hypothesis, which says that a species has a relatively fixed rate of aging from adulthood. An international collaboration of scientists from 14 countries, including José Manuel Aburto from Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, analyzed age-specific birth and death data spanning centuries and continents. Led by Fernando Colchero, University of Southern Denmark and Susan Alberts, Duke University, North Carolina, the study was a huge endeavor requiring monitoring wild populations of primates over several decades.

Jose Manuel Aburto says, Our findings support the theory that, rather than slowing down death, more people are living much longer due to a reduction in mortality at younger ages. We compared birth and death data from humans and non-human primates and found this general pattern of mortality was the same in all of them. This suggests that biological, rather than environmental factors, ultimately control longevity.

Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

Automated data searches and new customized patient care are the future of cancer treatment.

Each day information floods into every cancer clinic. Oncologists are scrambling for new ways to tap it to deliver the best of modern cancer care.

This article was produced by Hackensack Meridian Health in partnership with Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.

Continue reading “A New Challenge For Personalized Cancer Care: The Information Explosion” »

A supply-chain component lays open camera feeds to remote attackers thanks to a critical security vulnerability.

Millions of connected security and home cameras contain a critical software vulnerability that can allow remote attackers to tap into video feeds, according to a warning from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The bug (CVE-2021–32934, with a CVSS v3 base score of 9.1) has been introduced via a supply-chain component from ThroughTek that’s used by several original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of security cameras – along with makers of IoT devices like baby-and pet-monitoring cameras, and robotic and battery devices.

Man watered dish to cool it down but overheating knocked it offline for 7 hours.

According to a Medium blog post penned by bug bounty hunter Mayur Fartade on Tuesday, a set of vulnerable endpoints in the Instagram app could have allowed attackers to view private media on the platform without following a target account.

This included private and archived posts, stories, and reels.

If an attacker obtains a target user’s Media ID, via brute-force or through other means, they could then send a POST request to Instagram’s GraphQL endpoint, which exposed display URLs and image URLs, alongside records including like and save counts.

The companies revealed upgrades for their phones that protect data and reduce reliance on the cloud. It also binds users more tightly to their ecosystems.

Humans can do lots of things that plants can’t do. We can walk around, we can talk, we can hear and see and touch. But plants have one major advantage over humans: They can make energy directly from the sun.

That process of turning sunlight directly into usable energy – called photosynthesis – may soon be a feat humans are able to mimic to harness the sun’s energy for clean, storable, efficient fuel. If so, it could open a whole new frontier of clean energy. Enough energy hits the earth in the form of sunlight in one hour to meet all human civilization’s energy needs for an entire year.

Yulia Puskhar, a biophysicist and professor of physics in Purdue’s College of Science, may have a way to harness that energy by mimicking plants.