Lifeboat Foundation

A triple drug combination has been used to extend the lifespan of fruit flies by 48% in a new study led by UCL and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing.

The three drugs are all already in use as medical treatments: lithium as a mood stabiliser, trametinib as a cancer treatment and rapamycin as an immune system regulator.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that a combination drug treatment may one day be helpful at preventing age-related diseases in people.

Musk revealed the stainless steel monstrosity during a presentation at SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas testing site on Saturday. The hope is that it’ll one day allow up to 100 passengers to travel to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

The record-breaking rocket will eventually be 160 feet tall and twice as powerful, according to Musk, as NASA’s retired Saturn V rocket that took American astronauts to the Moon during the Apollo missions.

Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect: in its most intuitive form, a single atom is irradiated with light. According to Einstein, light consists of particles (photons) that transfer only quantised energy to the electron of the atom. If the photon’s energy is sufficient, it knocks the electrons out of the atom. But what happens to the photon’s momentum in this process? Physicists at Goethe University are now able to answer this question. To do so, they developed and constructed a new spectrometer with previously unattainable resolution.

Doctoral student Alexander Hartung became a father twice during the construction of the apparatus. The device, which is three meters long and 2.5 meters high, contains approximately as many parts as an automobile. It sits in the experiment hall of the Physics building on Riedberg Campus, surrounded by an opaque, black tent inside which is an extremely high performing laser. Its photons collide with individual argon atoms in the apparatus, and thereby remove one electron from each of the atoms. The momentum of these electrons at the time of their appearance is measured with extreme precision in a long tube of the apparatus.

The device is a further development of the COLTRIMS principle that was invented in Frankfurt and has meanwhile spread across the world: it consists of ionising individual atoms, or breaking up molecules, and then precisely determining the momentum of the particles. However, the transfer of the photon momentum to electrons predicted by theoretic calculations is so tiny that it was previously not possible to measure it. And this is why Hartung built the “super COLTRIMS.”

The life sciences hold the edge over other areas of research as having the most promise for the future according to the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zuA9AazhbOM

TL;DR: Learn languages on the go with the Aunu Audio M50 headphones — pair it with the companion app for just $99.99.

We’ve seen it all when it comes to truly wireless earbuds: superior sonics, sleek design, sweat, water, and life-proof construction. Earbuds that look like AirPods for less. And earbuds that are AirPods.

Continue reading “These wireless earbuds can translate languages as you hear them” »

Circa 2012

Hundreds of the world’s brightest minds — engineers from Google and IBM, hedge funds quants, and Defense Department contractors building artificial intelligence — were gathered in rapt attention inside the auditorium of the San Francisco Masonic Temple atop Nob Hill. It was the first day of the seventh annual Singularity Summit, and Julia Galef, the President of the Center for Applied Rationality, was speaking onstage. On the screen behind her, Galef projected a giant image from the film Blade Runner: the replicant Roy, naked, his face stained with blood, cradling a white dove in his arms.

At this point in the movie, Roy is reaching the end of his short, pre-programmed life, “The poignancy of his death scene comes from the contrast between that bitter truth and the fact that he still feels his life has meaning, and for lack of a better word, he has a soul,” said Galef. “To me this is the situation we as humans have found ourselves in over the last century. Turns out we are survival machines created by ancient replicators, DNA, to produce as many copies of them as possible. This is the bitter pill that science has offered us in response to our questions about where we came from and what it all means.”

Continue reading “Rapture of the nerds: will the Singularity turn us into gods or end the human race?” »

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A follow on study from their previous human trial targeting IPF. This time the researchers ran a study to see how senolytics influenced diabetic kidney disease and if it actually removes senescent cells in humans.

Senescent cells, which can release factors that cause inflammation and dysfunction, the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), accumulate with ageing and at etiological sites in multiple chronic diseases. Senolytics, including the combination of Dasatinib and Quercetin (D + Q), selectively eliminate senescent cells by transiently disabling pro-survival networks that defend them against their own apoptotic environment. In the first clinical trial of senolytics, D + Q improved physical function in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a fatal senescence-associated disease, but to date, no peer-reviewed study has directly demonstrated that senolytics decrease senescent cells in humans.

Continue reading “For the September Journal Club we are taking a look at the new human trial data from the recent senolytics trial at the Mayo Clinic” »

“Dark silicon” sounds like a magical artifact out of a fantasy novel. In reality, it’s one branch of a three-headed beast that foretells the end of advances in computation.

Ok—that might be too dramatic. But the looming problems in silicon-based computer chips are very real. Although computational power has exploded exponentially in the past five decades, we’ve begun hitting some intractable limits in further growth, both in terms of physics and economics.

Moore’s Law is dying. And chipmakers around the globe are asking, now what?

Cell motility, the spontaneous movement of cells from one location to another, plays a fundamental role in many biological processes, including immune responses and metastasis. Recent physics studies have gathered new evidence suggesting that mammalian cells do not only crawl on solid substrates, including complex 3D mediums of a tissues, but can also swim in fluids.

In a recent study, a team of researchers at the University Grenoble Alpes and CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research) tried to shed light on the mechanisms behind the onset of motility cells in suspension, which would occur if they were moving in fluids. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, presents a model that couples actin and myosin kinetics with fluid flow, which they applied to a spherical and a non-spherical shape.

“Recent studies have suggested that adhesion is not necessary for cells to move in a three-dimensional environment, and have even shown that cells of the immune system can swim when suspended in a fluid,” the researchers who conducted the study told Phys.org via email.