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May 30, 2017

Death gives meaning to life

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Death gives as much meaning to life as having your stomach ripped out gives meaning to having a stomach.


You’ve probably heard this sentence a bagillion times. It’s the kind of statement people assume to be deeply philosophical and meaningful by default. In my humble opinion, though, it’s a pile of sh—oh, well, you know what.

If death gives meaning to life, I suppose diseases give meaning to being healthy, and thus we should leave some diseases around so that people can appreciate not being sick, right? How often do you say yourself, ‘Hmm… I haven’t been sick in a while… I should get one of those nasty cancers, before I stop appreciating how it feels being healthy. Where’s my emergency plutonium bar?’ Personally, I don’t say that to myself very often. I mean, I can totally appreciate the feeling of not being kicked in the nuts even without ever being kicked in the nuts, really. And I can appreciate not having a certain disease even if I’m not aware the disease exists. I can totally enjoy life without dying, and I could still enjoy it even if it were impossible for me to die.

People reason by analogies. They know there are some concepts that would be more difficult to grasp without their opposite, and think the analogy can be extended to ANYTHING AT ALL. For example, if you’ve never been sad, you can’t be sure just how different it is from being happy. I’m not sure how you can get from this to ‘you need to be mortal to enjoy life’, especially when there are no real-life examples of immortal people incapable to enjoy life because of their immortality. Can you smell the pungent aroma of foxes disdaining grapes?

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May 30, 2017

Journal Club May 30th 13:00 EST/18:00 UK

Posted by in categories: genetics, life extension

Our Journal Club goes live at 13:00 EST/18:00 UK. Come and watch the live stream on our page where we discuss the latest research. Todays topic is the recent reversal of Epigenetic changes in a living animal via partial cellular programming.


Journal Club live stream to our Facebook page May 30th 13:00 EST/18:00 UK. Join us here live to listen to LEAF and Ocean level Patrons discuss epigenetics and how it relates to aging. It will also be available later to view on Youtube.

This the first of our Monthly Journal Club events hosted by Dr. Oliver Medvedik and guests where we discuss the latest research papers. Journal Club is part of a host of new activities and content this year and is a result of the support we have recieved from the Heroes Campaign currently running on Lifespan.io. If you would like to see more content like this consider becoming a Patron today on the link below:

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May 30, 2017

Do stars fall quietly into black holes, or crash into something utterly unknown?

Posted by in category: cosmology

Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University have put a basic principle of black holes to the test, showing that matter completely vanishes when pulled in. Their results constitute another successful test for Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Most scientists agree that black holes, cosmic entities of such great gravity that nothing can escape their grip, are surrounded by a so-called . Once matter or energy gets close enough to the black hole, it cannot escape—it will be pulled in. Though widely believed, the existence of event horizons has not been proved.

“Our whole point here is to turn this idea of an event horizon into an experimental science, and find out if event horizons really do exist or not,” said Pawan Kumar, a professor of astrophysics at The University of Texas at Austin.

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May 30, 2017

Dark Energy May Lurk in the Nothingness of Space

Posted by in categories: cosmology, quantum physics

The new work addresses not only what dark energy is but why the rate of universal expansion has the value it does.

“Everybody wants to know what dark energy is,” Wang told Live Science. “I reconsidered this question more carefully,” from the perspective of the universe’s energy density.

Wang and his colleagues assumed that modern quantum field theory was correct about the energy density being very large, but that the vacuum fluctuations, or the movements of empty space, were very large on tiny scales, near what is called the Planck length, or 1.62 × 10 ^ minus 35 meters. That’s so small that a proton is 100 million trillion times bigger.

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May 30, 2017

Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

HONG KONG — Sören Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in Germany, and seemed set to go to Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established.

Instead, he went to China.

“You couldn’t have started a lab like mine elsewhere,” Mr. Schwertfeger said.

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May 29, 2017

Spy shots reveal Tesla Model 3’s radical single screen dashboard

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Anticipation is growing for the July release of Tesla’s ‘affordable’ $35,000 Model 3.

Now, the latest shots of Telsa testing the car may have revealed one of its final secrets — what the interior will look like.

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May 29, 2017

ROBOT ARMIES: End of western soldiers in war zones ‘within a DECADE’ as MACHINES take over

Posted by in categories: military, robotics/AI

Peace and love on this Memorial Day to those who served and gave their lives for freedom. My interview a while back with Express is still right on.track about the future of military and how most human soldier casualties will be a thing of the past.


THERE will be no longer be human casualties of war from wealthy countries within 10 years as advanced militaries will begin sending MACHINES to warzones, an expert has claimed.

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May 29, 2017

The Need for Better Aging Biomarkers

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

There is an urgent need to develop better biomarkers and to use the in cost effective packages for accurate measurement of aging.


As human life expectancy has increased throughout the 20th and 21st centuries this has led to a steady increase in the population of older people. With that increase has come the rise of age-related diseases and disabilities. As a result it is becoming ever more important to develop preventative strategies to monitor and maintain health as well as therapies that directly address the various aging processes to delay or prevent the onset of age-related diseases.

One of the ways we can do this is by developing more effective ways to measure how someone is aging, this means developing high quality aging biomarkers. The challenge in creating such biomarkers has always been the fundamental question – what do we measure?

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May 29, 2017

Bioelectricity is a new weapon to fight dangerous infection

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, neuroscience

By Kim Thurler, Tufts University

(MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass.) — Changing the natural electrical signaling that exists in cells outside the nervous system can improve resistance to life-threatening bacterial infections, according to new research from Tufts University biologists. The researchers found that administering drugs, including those already used in humans for other purposes, to make the cell interior more negatively charged strengthens tadpoles’ innate immune response to E. coli infection and injury. This reveals a novel aspect of the immune system – regulation by non-neural bioelectricity – and suggests a new approach for clinical applications in human medicine. The study is published online May 26, 2017, in npj Regenerative Medicine, a Nature Research journal.

“All cells, not just nerve cells, naturally generate and receive electrical signals. Being able to regulate such non-neural bioelectricity with the many ion channel and neurotransmitter drugs that are already human-approved gives us an amazing new toolkit to augment the immune system’s ability to resist infections,” said the paper’s corresponding author Michael Levin, Ph.D., Vannevar Bush Professor of Biology and Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences. Levin is also an Associate Faculty member of the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

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May 29, 2017

Here’s how to launch a satellite for less than $1M

Posted by in category: satellites

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