Lifeboat Foundation

A number of companies are studying and commercializing rapamycin and rapalogs, including resTORbio, a Boston-based company. Tam Hunt got in touch with Dr. Joan Mannick from the company to find out more about this promising anti-aging therapeutic.

Blagoskonny ([3], [4]) has suggested that rapamycin and rapalogs are effective anti-aging therapies today for humans as well as other animals because they arrest “quasi-programmed hypertrophy.” What are your thoughts on Blagoskonny’s theory?

I think Blagoskonny’s theory is very interesting. mTOR stimulates cell growth, and there is data that mTOR becomes hyperactive in some aging tissues. This may explain why TORC1 inhibitors have benefit in aging-related diseases.

Continue reading “An Interview with Dr. Joan Mannick of resTORbio” »

Insitro and Gilead are teaming up to create drugs to treat a liver disease affecting millions. The startup is backed by Jeff Bezos, Andreessen Horowitz, and GV.

“We are heartbroken for the French people and those around the world for whom Notre Dame is a symbol of hope,” Cook said.

Apple is pledging to assist in the rebuilding efforts of Notre-Dame after the historic cathedral took damage from a massive fire on Monday.

Alexandre Zanghellini can’t help but think about what makes up the world around him. Sitting in a conference room, Zanghellini considered the paint on the walls, the table, the window shades, the plastic chairs. It’s all oil.

“The entire world is made from oil. We just don’t realize it,” he said.

Zanghellini’s job, as the CEO of Seattle-based synthetic biology company Arzeda, is to reconsider how we make the basic molecules that go into anything and everything in the human world. And he has a bias for processes that use living organisms. “The tools of biology, proteins, are better at doing chemistry than chemists,” he said.

Continue reading “Inside Arzeda’s synthetic biology lab, where industrial ingredients are brewed like beer” »

As the bitter strife between left and right, citizen and noncitizen, white and non-white attest, the greatest threat to humanity today goes beyond political and religious divides, economics, and psychiatric diagnoses. It goes beyond cultural conflicts and even the degradation of the environment—and yet it includes all of these.

To counter it, we call for a mobilization of mindfulness practices and dialogue groups on the scale of a public works program for human civility.

Pets in a British animal hospital have been found to be harbouring potentially lethal drug-resistant bugs that could be transferred to owners.

Tests by Public Health England (PHE) revealed three cats a dog were colonised by bacteria able to fend off Linezolid, a “last-resort” antibiotic used to treat superbugs such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

No staff or owners are known to have been taken ill as a result, however the agency last night warned veterinary surgeries to enforce proper cleaning practices after this first discovery of its kind.

Continue reading “Drug-resistant bugs discovered in animal hospital prompts health warning” »

Drug-resistant fungi are appearing around the globe, and some are known to cause illness in humans.

Whether it comes to rescuing people from a cave system or the underground maze of sewers, tunnels and the like that exist underneath any major city, having accurate maps of the area is always crucial to know what the optimal routes are, and what the expected dangers are. The same is true for combat situations, where such maps can mean the difference between the failure or success of a mission. This is why DARPA last year started the Subterranean Challenge, or ‘SubT’ for short.

This challenge seeks new approaches to map, navigate, and search underground environments during time-sensitive combat operations or disaster response scenarios, which would allow for these maps to be created on-demand, in the shortest amount of time possible. Multidisciplinary teams from the world are invited to create autonomous systems that can map such subsurface networks no matter the circumstances.

Continue reading “Go Subterranean With This DARPA Challenge” »

The ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge travelled west across the Mediterranean before reaching Britain, a study has shown.

Researchers in London compared DNA extracted from Neolithic human remains found in Britain with that of people alive at the same time in Europe.

The Neolithic inhabitants appear to have travelled from Anatolia (modern Turkey) to Iberia before winding their way north.

Continue reading “DNA reveals origin of Stonehenge builders” »