How to keep your assets intact if you’re revived through cryonics.
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Traditionally, welding has been limited to materials that share similar properties, so it’s tough to make even aluminum and steel join forces. But now, scientists from Heriot-Watt University are claiming a breakthrough method that can weld together materials as different as glass and metal, thanks to ultrafast laser pulses.
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Five years ago, French aeronautical engineer Edwin Van Ruymbeke successfully crowdfunded his Bionic Bird – it’s a remote-control model that flies by flapping its wings, just like a real bird. Now he’s back, with the insect-inspired MetaFly.
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A 22W laser used for adaptive optics on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. A suite of similar lasers could be used to cloak our planet’s transit around the Sun. (credit: ESO/G. Hüdepohl)
We could use lasers to conceal the Earth from observation by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization by shining massive laser beams aimed at a specific star where aliens might be located — thus masking our planet during its transit of the Sun, suggest two astronomers at Columbia University in an open-access paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The idea comes from the NASA Kepler mission’s search method for exoplanets (planets around other stars), which looks for transits (a planet crossing in front a star) — identified by a tiny decrease in the star’s brightness.*.
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Alzheimer’s disease may soon be spotted through a simple eye test, after scientists discovered tell-tale alterations in the retina and blood vessels when dementia is present.
Currently diagnosing Alzheimer’s is tricky, requiring an expensive brain scan, a risky spinal tap or in most cases a behavioural assessment by a doctor based on symptoms.
But US scientists at the Duke Eye Centre in North Carolina, wondered if changes might also be visible in the retina, which is an extension of the brain and so could offer a window into what is happening behind the skull.
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A nasal spray that could alleviate symptoms of depression in just a few hours has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – though the decision has attracted its share of criticism and controversy. The new drug, called esketamine, is a molecular variation of ketamine, which is already being used as an anesthetic, an antidepressant, and a party drug.
Esketamine will be sold as a spray called Spravato and is intended for patients with treatment-resistant depression, meaning they have failed to respond to at least two other types of antidepressant. Because of ketamine’s mind-altering effects and high potential for abuse, patients will be required to take Esketamine in a doctor’s office or clinic and remain under medical supervision for two hours after administration.
Most people with a diagnosis of depression are prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac. These ensure that neurons have access to an increased amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is a key emotional regulator. However, it is thought that around one-third of people with major depressive disorder (MDD) do not respond to conventional medications for the condition, which is why researchers are hunting for alternative treatments.
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NASA’s #Moon2Mars Update
Posted in space travel
Monday, March 11 at 1 p.m. EDT: NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine will share the work underway to return astronauts to the Moon and onward to Mars. Watch & explore how we’ll get from the #Moon2Mars: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/march-11-events-highlight…020-budget
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Well, Wesley J Smith just did another hit piece against Transhumanism. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/transhumanism-the-lazy…provement/
It’s full of his usual horrible attempts to justify his intelligent design roots while trying to tell people he doesn’t have any religious reasons for it. But, then again, what can you expect from something from the National Review.
Sometimes you have to laugh. In “Transhumanism and the Death of Human Exceptionalism,” published in Aero, Peter Clarke quotes criticism I leveled against transhumanism from a piece I wrote entitled, “The Transhumanist Bill of Wrongs” From my piece:
Transhumanism would shatter human exceptionalism. The moral philosophy of the West holds that each human being is possessed of natural rights that adhere solely and merely because we are human. But transhumanists yearn to remake humanity in their own image—including as cyborgs, group personalities residing in the Internet Cloud, or AI-controlled machines.
Intervene Immune is a company focused on the age-related decline of the immune system, which is known as immunosenescence. Here, Bobby Brooke, CEO of Intervene Immune, discusses the clinical potential of regenerating the thymus as a means of reversing age-related immune system decline.
Earlier this year, we hosted the Ending Age-Related Diseases 2018 conference at the Cooper Union, New York City. This was a conference designed to bring together the best in the aging research and biotech investment worlds and saw a range of industry experts sharing their insights.
As the human body ages, the thymus begins to shrink, and fewer numbers of T cells are created and trained to fight. The thymus tissue also turns to fat rather than healthy immune cell-producing thymic tissue. Eventually, the thymus wastes away, becoming a useless fatty organ that no longer produces immune cells.