Lifeboat Foundation

Last week, the transhumanist activist Zoltan Istvan announced his candidacy for President of the United States in next year’s elections. The writer, humanitarian and outspoken advocate of radical science is no stranger to the issues surrounding Longevity, and has spoken widely on subjects including AI, genetic editing, technology policy, and futurism.

In 2016, Istvan ran as an independent presidential candidate and travelled across the United States, spreading his message from a coffin-shaped bus, known as the “Immortality Bus.” This time he’s on the ballot, running against Donald Trump as a candidate for the Republican party in next year’s primaries. Things are a bit more serious this time.

Among his key policies, Istvan includes transhumanism, universal basic income and the need to beat China in the global innovation race – an issue we addressed in our Jamie Metzl interview. We spoke to him to find out more about his views on the Longevity sector.

A team from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital tracked stem cells injected into the hearts of mice, and what they found could explain why clinical trials testing stem cell therapies in people with heart disease have been unsuccessful. They believe a smarter approach could be to harness the power of macrophages that provide healing in response to inflammation.

The blood-brain barrier, a region of dense cells and blood vessels, keeps drugs from reaching deep parts of the brain. West Virginia University scientists temporarily opened it with ultrasound.

Doctors at Duke University Medical Center this month “reanimated” a heart for a first-of-its-kind transplant performed on an adult in the United States.

Heart transplants typically come from donations after brain death, in which the still-beating heart of a person who has been declared brain dead is transplanted into a recipient. The approach used at Duke is known as a donation after circulatory death (DCD), and it relies on hearts that have stopped beating and are essentially reanimated and begin beating again.

The TransMedics Organ Care System, a warm perfusion pump, allows doctors to resuscitate and preserve hearts for transplantation. The system was used for the adult donation after circulatory death transplant at Duke University Medical Center, one of five centers in the United States approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for clinical trials of the TransMedics system.

Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow or even reverse the cognitive decline that comes with age.

University of California, Berkeley, and Ben-Gurion University scientists report that senile mice given one such drug had fewer signs of brain inflammation and were better able to learn new tasks, becoming almost as adept as mice half their age.

“We tend to think about the aged brain in the same way we think about neurodegeneration: Age involves loss of function and dead cells. But our new data tell a different story about why the aged brain is not functioning well: It is because of this “fog” of inflammatory load,” said Daniela Kaufer, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and a senior author, along with Alon Friedman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Dalhousie University in Canada. “But when you remove that inflammatory fog, within days the aged brain acts like a young brain. It is a really, really optimistic finding, in terms of the capacity for plasticity that exists in the brain. We can reverse brain aging.”

New evidence suggests that the cause of Alzheimer’s – which is the most common form of dementia – is actually the result of leakage from the brains ‘filtration system’ known as the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier is a border within the brain that separates circulating blood from a variety of different fluids in the central nervous system. Previous MRI scans have found that the blood-brain barrier breaks down in nearly 60% of people by the age of 70, and it is believed that this allows harmful chemicals to seep through which is triggering inflammation and fog throughout the brain.

A groundbreaking new study that has seen scientists successfully reverse the effects of dementia is changing the way the scientific world once viewed the disease.

The majority of dementia treatments have focused on trying to remove amyloid plaque from the brain, however, the latest study published in Science Translational Medicine suggest that targeting brain inflammation is the silver-bullet for curing dementia.

Continue reading “Scientists Reverse The Effects Of Dementia For The First Time Ever” »

New studies help to explain how microbes in the gut can shape a host’s fear responses.

Human CD8+ EMRA T cells are acquired at a faster rate owing to their lower mitochondrial content. This leads to impaired nutrient uptake by CD8+ EMRA T cell, which impacts their function.

Bacteria and the viruses that infect them are engaged in a molecular arms race as ancient as life itself. Evolution has equipped bacteria with an arsenal of immune enzymes, including CRISPR-Cas systems, that target and destroy viral DNA. But bacteria-killing viruses, also known as phages, have devised their own tools to help them outmaneuver even the most formidable of these bacterial defenses.

Now, scientists at UC San Francisco and UC San Diego have discovered a remarkable new strategy that some phages employ to avoid becoming the next casualty of these DNA-dicing enzymes: after they infect bacteria, these phages construct an impenetrable “safe room” inside of their host, which protects vulnerable phage DNA from antiviral enzymes. This compartment, which resembles a cell nucleus, is the most effective CRISPR shield ever discovered in viruses.

“In our experiments, these phages didn’t succumb to any of the DNA-targeting CRISPR systems they were challenged with. This is the first time that anyone has found phages that exhibit this level of pan-CRISPR resistance,” said Joseph Bondy-Denomy, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UCSF. Bondy-Denomy led the research team that made the discovery, which is detailed in a paper published Dec. 9, 2019 in the journal Nature.