Lifeboat Foundation

But the best science and tech writing goes one step further. With delight and mystery—and sans unnecessary jargon and technical details—this genre can help us better understand some of the world’s most complex and abstract concepts, from gravitational waves (Gravity’s Kiss) to Darwinian evolution (The Evolution of Beauty) to antibiotic resistance (Big Chicken). Each of these remarkable tomes from 2017 does just that, shining a light on the hidden connections and invisible forces that shape the world around us. In doing so, they make our experience of that world that much richer.

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Aubrey de Grey, from Nov 28, 2017.

Virtual Futures presents Dr. Aubrey de Grey who claims to have drawn a roadmap to defeat biological aging and proposes that that the first human beings who will live to 1,000 years old have already been born.

Continue reading “End Aging — with Aubrey de Grey | Virtual Futures Salon” »

New therapies are creating excitement for the treatment of a terrible disease.

Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation took a few hours from his packed schedule yesterday to answer questions from the community at /r/futurology. It is a pity that we can’t get a full day of his time at some point — clearly there are way too many interested folk with questions and not enough hours to answer more than half of them. It is a sign of progress, I hope, that ever more people recognize that the SENS approach to the development of rejuvenation therapies is promising, and understand enough of the science to ask intelligent questions about the details.

SENS is simple enough to explain at the high level: identify the cell and tissue damage that (a) appears in old tissues but not in young tissues, and (b) is caused by the normal operation of metabolism, not by some other form of damage. The resulting short list includes the causes of aging. It may include some other things as well, that in the end turn out not to need fixing, but why take the chance? In modern biotechnology and life science research, it is faster and cheaper to develop a repair therapy and see what happens than it is to painstakingly figure out how everything fits together.

When de Grey first evaluated the field of aging research, back before the turn of the century, he found that the causes of aging by the above definition were largely known, with a good deal of evidence in support of each one. Yet next to no-one was working on fixing them. Since then, he has campaigned tirelessly to build organisations, assemble allies, raise funding, and persuade researchers, and all of that to ensure that the scientific and biotechnology communities do in fact move ahead with a repair-based approach to building functional rejuvenation therapies. It has been surprisingly hard work, given a research community that was hostile towards the idea of treating aging as a medical condition versus merely observing it, and a public at large who seem disinterested in living longer in good health.

Our physical attraction to hot bodies is real, according to UC Berkeley physicists.

To be clear, they’re not talking about sexual attraction to a “hot” human body.

But the researchers have shown that a glowing object actually attracts atoms, contrary to what most people — physicists included — would guess.

Scientists at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have found a way to make mitochondria more resistant to damage, which could potentially be used to halt Alzheimer’s and other, similar, diseases.

Globally, Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia and cause of neurodegeneration. It causes brain damage and symptoms such as long-term memory loss. It is an amyloid-based disease, with the characteristic hallmark being the formation of toxic plaques in the brain made from the aggregated beta-amyloid inside the neurons.

In a bold first-of-its-kind experiment, scientists have edited a person’s genes directly inside living tissue in an ambitious bid to cure a man of a rare, crippling genetic disorder.

While CRISPR has broken ground in things like editing human embryos and injecting patients with genetically edited cells, this alternative technique pioneers a new real-time approach to infusing a person’s blood with a gene-editing virus.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Tried First-Ever Gene Editing Directly Inside a Patient’s Body” »

Chinese AI-powered robot Xiaoyi took the country’s medical licensing examinations and passed, according to local reports. Xiaoyi is just one example of how much China is keen on using AI to make a number of industries more efficient.

Experts generally agree that, before we might consider artificial intelligence (AI) to be truly intelligent —that is, on a level on par with human cognition— AI agents have to pass a number of tests. And while this is still a work in progress, AIs have been busy passing other kinds of tests.

Stanford researchers have developed an algorithm that offers diagnoses based off chest X-ray images. It can diagnose up to 14 types of medical conditions and is able to diagnose pneumonia better than expert radiologists working alone.

A paper about the algorithm, called CheXNet, was published Nov. 14 on the open-access, scientific preprint website arXiv.

“Interpreting X-ray images to diagnose pathologies like pneumonia is very challenging, and we know that there’s a lot of variability in the diagnoses radiologists arrive at,” said Pranav Rajpurkar, a graduate student in the Machine Learning Group at Stanford and co-lead author of the paper. “We became interested in developing machine learning algorithms that could learn from hundreds of thousands of chest X-ray diagnoses and make accurate diagnoses.”