Lifeboat Foundation

Anxiety disorders are severe mental disorders in which patients suffer from intense fears and anxiety or from sudden, inexplicable panic attacks. In extreme cases, the affected individuals barely leave their homes, which can have serious consequences for their relationships with family and friends as well as for their professional lives. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen have now identified a synaptic protein which, when inactivated, has an anxiolytic effect in mice.

Around 10 percent of the population suffer from anxiety disorders, and current treatment options only offer effective help for a proportion of those affected. One of the changes observed in the brains of patients with anxiety disorders is an increased neuronal activity in the amygdala, a brain region that plays a key role in processing emotions such as anxiety or fear. An overactivation of the amygdala is thought to be involved in causing exaggerated anxiety. Many anxiolytic medications such as benzodiazepines presumably normalize this overactivation by strengthening the function of inhibitory synapses.

Synapses are connections between nerve cells in the brain, at which information is transmitted from one nerve cell to another. At inhibitory synapses, this transmission results in a reduction in the activity of the neighbouring nerve cells. In the amygdala, for instance, this inhibits the transmission of stimuli that trigger fear and anxiety. Benzodiazepines strengthen this inhibitory effect—but unfortunately they affect not only those inhibitory synapses that transmit anxiogenic stimuli but also many other inhibitory synapses in the brain. This can lead to significant side effects such as pronounced sedation and impaired concentration. Accordingly, scientists are searching for new, more specific targets for anxiolytic medications.

Continue reading “Synaptic protein regulates anxiety behaviour” »

Such a good news for the holidays! Wonderful food ranking of the 100 most nutritious foods, published in PloS journal. Notice the eighth best place- pork fat: “… 8. PORK FAT 632kcal, $0.95, per 100g A good source of B vitamins and minerals. Pork fat is more unsaturated and healthier than lamb or beef fat…” And for my Bulgarian and other Balkan friends, even better, the seventh best food is the cheapest, time-filling pumpkin seeds, we grew up with. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The next step for our Forever Healthy Berlin meetup…

We are a community collaborating on how to implement our early stage rejuvenation treatments.

The world has started the transition from an era where we were utterly helpless about our aging process to one where aging is under full medical control, and age-related diseases are a thing of the dark past.

Continue reading “Forever Healthy (Berlin, Germany)” »

Thanks to Authority Magazine and Fotis Georgiadis for the interview — Bioquark inc. (http://www.bioquark.com) — Regeneration, Disease Reversion, Age Rejuvenation — https://medium.com/authority-magazine/the-future-is-now-we-a…cc6dc8ebf1

The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency says blockchain technology has “enormous” potential to improve disaster relief efforts.

A 6.1-magnitude earthquake jolted West Papua on Friday morning, the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) reported.

The earthquake struck at around 10 a.m. local time, with its epicenter located some 55 kilometers southeast of South Manokwari and predicted to be 26 km deep.

“It did not trigger a tsunami,” a BMKG spokesperson said in a press release, adding that no casualties were reported as of yet.

Continue reading “6.1-magnitude earthquake hits West Papua” »

BEIJING, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) — A Chinese research group has identified a gene variant that plays a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease in Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China.

The study was recently published by the National Science Review, an English journal affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory, thinking skills and the ability to carry out simple tasks. The disease affects about 48 million people worldwide, and the number is expected to increase with the aging population. There is no effective cure.

But in the grander context of human history, 2018 was an extraordinarily positive year. In fact, every year has been getting progressively better.

Before we dive into some of the highlights of human progress from 2018, let’s make one thing clear. There is no doubt that there are many overwhelming global challenges facing our species. From climate change to growing wealth inequality, we are far from living in a utopia.

Yet it’s important to recognize that both our news outlets and audiences have been disproportionately fixated on negative news. This emphasis on bad news is detrimental to our sense of empowerment as a species.

Continue reading “The Milestones of Human Progress We Reached in 2018” »

In 2018, AI bested humans at following fauna, diagnosing disease, mapping the moon and more.