Lifeboat Foundation

The complex interplay of various processes and mechanisms that contribute to aging means it’s unlikely we’ll discover a single “magic bullet” to prevent age-related diseases. But new research led by University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Biology and Ageing is potentially as close as anything we’ve seen. The scientists have been able to extend the lifespan of fruit flies by 48 percent using a triple drug combination made up of drugs already used in people.

“As life expectancies increase, we are also seeing an increase of age-related diseases so there is an urgent need to find ways to improve health in old age,” says study co-lead author, Dr Jorge Castillo-Quan. “Here, by studying fruit flies which age much more rapidly than people, we have found that a combination drug treatment targeting different cellular processes may be an effective way to slow down the aging process.”

The three drugs making up the combo include lithium, which is used as a mood stabilizer, trametinib, a cancer drug that inhibits MEK1 and MEK2 enzymes, and rapamycin, an immune system regulator produced by bacteria that was first found in a soil sample from Easter Island and has been found to improve learning and memory in mice.

The standard model of physics remains incomplete. Could supersymmetry fill the gaps? From whether supersymmetric particles could fix the mass of the Higgs Boson to what this would mean for string theory, the world’s leading thinkers explain all.

John Ellis is a British theoretical physicist who is currently Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London. He was Division Leader for the CERN theory division, a founding member of the LEPC and of the LHCC at CERN and currently chair of the committee to investigate physics opportunities for future proton accelerators.

Continue reading “On Supersymmetry | John Ellis, Catherine Heymans, Ben Allanach, Subir Sakar, Cumrun Vafa” »

An ancient city “ten times the size of Jericho” has been unearthed in northern Israel. The site, En Esur, is still expected to be paved over by a new road.

Delivery service UPS won the federal government’s first full approval to operate a fleet of drones. It marks a milestone in the race to commercial drone delivery.

More than 100 people in North Carolina were sickened with Legionnaires’ disease and Pontiac fever last month. One person died.

It’s good to see a growing response to the materialist superstition about the mind and the brain from the neuroscience and philosophy community. Materialist theories of the mind are philosophically indefensible and scientifically discredited. Dualism is necessary to account for the immaterial nature of the intellect, for the metaphysical simplicity of the mind, and for free will. Of the varieties of dualism, I believe that Thomistic dualism offers the most satisfactory framework for neuroscience.

Continue reading “An Oxford Neuroscientist Explains Mind vs. Brain” »

Virgin thinks it can make its way to orbit — but can it compete with SpaceX?

China has broken new lunar ground, successfully growing cotton on the moon for the first time. The experiment was part of the Chang’e 4 project, in which China is exploring the far side of the moon with a lander. This is the same lander that recently discovered a mysterious gel-like substance on the moon’s surface.

The cotton plant was one of several organisms encased in a mini biosphere weighing just 2.6 kilograms (5.7 lbs) with a pressure of 1 atmosphere which was aboard the lander. The organisms experienced an environment largely similar to that on Earth, however, they did have to contend with both space radiation and microgravity.

In an interview with engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, project leader for the experiment Xie Gengxin explained more about the challenges of growing plants in the restricted environment. “The weight of the Chang’e-4 probe demanded that the weight [of the experiment] can’t exceed three kilograms,” he said. That’s why it was important to select the biological samples in the experiment carefully.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOHFE0hEyU&feature=share