Lifeboat Foundation

Let’s keep up the momentum and continue to show the world what power the crowd can have in standing up to age-related disease. # LifespanIO # CrowdfundTheCure.

What I wonder here is if you could do this with uninjured cells, remaking the whole body with new cells.

The new technique, called tissue nanotransfection, is based on a tiny device that sits on the surface of the skin of a living body. An intense, focused electric field is then applied across the device, allowing it to deliver genes to the skin cells beneath it – turning them into different types of cells.

Continue reading “New Nanochip technology that can reprogram cells to replace tissue or even whole organs” »

Scientists aim to 3D print human tissue so they can better study how new drugs interact with our bodies. A recent advance? 3D printed blood vessels.

Coming from a fusion of the words ‘protein’ (a molecule that a cell uses as a machine or scaffolding) and ‘stasis’ (meaning to keep the same), the term ‘proteostasis’ can essentially be simplified into “Each function reliant on proteins is running as it should. There are enough proteins to serve a function, and the concentrations of proteins are being maintained at healthy levels.”

Proteostasis is the process that cells perform in order to have all their proteins functioning properly; this, in turn, allows cells to work properly. Since cells are the building blocks of our bodies, when they work properly, we are healthy.

When proteostasis is not maintained, cells become dysfunctional and can die; this failure can lead to aging, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, inflammation, developmental defects, and other problems. The loss of proteostasis is thought to be a primary reason we age, and we discuss how this happens in more detail here.

The first successful attempt to remove inherited disease by genetically modifying human embryos has reportedly taken place in the US using CRISPR.

There is a growing list of aging biomarkers available to researchers that help them measure how well someone is aging and assess how aging interventions are working in preclinical testing.

Some clinical biomarkers, such as DNA methylation and telomere length, are commonly used in labs. Other biomarkers, such as blood pressure, grip strength, heart rate variability, visual reaction time, and decision reaction time, are non-invasive and easy to test.

Currently, DNA methylation is generally regarded as the gold standard for aging biomarkers, although new techniques, such as cell functional age, are attempting to challenge that. The sensible choice, of course, would be to combine both methods to further improve the accuracy of results.

Nextbigfuture wrote about the designs for an improved nuclear thermal rocket by John Bucknell. John has worked as a senior engineer on the SpaceX Raptor rocket. John provides high quality qualified work to his rocket designs and to his proposed space habitat.

Nextbigfuture comments had some technical observations about Project Timberwind and a comment from John himself that his design improves on flaws in the last major nuclear thermal rocket experiments. There were also comments and discussion about Star Trek and communism and O’Neill space stations.

Continue reading “Comparing Reactions of different Groups to Nuclear Thermal Rocket enabled space colonization” »

Stanford researchers accidentally discovered that iron nanoparticles invented for anemia treatment have another use: triggering the immune system’s ability to destroy tumor cells. Iron nanoparticles can activate the immune system to attack cancer cells, according to a study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The nanoparticles, which are commercially available as the injectable iron supplement ferumoxytol, are approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat iron deficiency anemia.

The mouse study found that ferumoxytol prompts immune cells called tumor-associated macrophages to destroy cancer cells, suggesting that the nanoparticles could complement existing cancer treatments. The discovery, described in a paper published online Sept. 26 in Nature Nanotechnology, was made by accident while testing whether the nanoparticles could serve as Trojan horses by sneaking chemotherapy into tumors in mice.

Continue reading “Researchers Accidentally Discover That Iron Nanoparticles Can Help Destroy Cancer Cells” »

An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.

This huge leap forward towards creating a universal quantum computer is published today (1 February 2017) in the influential journal Science Advances. It has long been known that such a computer would revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. But this new work features the actual industrial blueprint to construct such a large-scale machine, more powerful in solving certain problems than any computer ever constructed before.

Continue reading “The First Ever Blueprint for a Large Scale Quantum Computer has been Unveiled” »