Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,361

The Rejuvenation Market in Singapore

With its growing aging population, Singapore has a looming crisis, but could also be primed to become a major player in the rejuvenation biotechnology industry.

Singapore has one of the fastest-aging populations in the world. Senior citizens 65 years old or older are expected to make up almost half of Singapore’s population by 2050. Unfortunately, this swelling population is spending more time living with sickness, even though they live longer. While average lifespans have been extended, healthspans have not. [1] Singaporeans have an impressive average life expectancy of 84.8 years, but an average Singaporean born in 2017 is predicted to spend the last ten and a half years in sickness, compared to how a Singaporean born in 1999 is likely to spend only nine twilight years in deteriorating health.

This is becoming a massive concern for the Singaporean government because of the financial strain that this is imposing on Singapore’s budget. Having the world’s second-lowest birth rate coupled with a rapidly aging population means that the ratio of working adults to senior citizens is quickly shrinking. In 2007, there were 6.9 working adults for every senior citizen. By 2030, there will be 2.3 working adults per senior citizen.

In under a decade, Singapore’s healthcare budget more than doubled from S$4 billion in 2010 to S$10 billion in 2017. [2] Among the developed nations of the world, Singapore has a reputation for being one of the most fiscally conservative; there’s a socio-political stigma against the term “welfare state” in Singapore. Since its unprecedented independence in 1965, Singapore has had a general zeitgeist of “every man for himself,” as we are a nation with no natural resources. Our highly-educated workforce, along with our strategic geographical location, is the primary resource undergirding our knowledge-based economy.

21CM Cryopreservation Eval Page Foundation

Pichugin2006_Fahy2012_FrontPageImagesRotated

21st Century Medicine (21CM) is a cryobiology research company whose core mission is to develop a cryopreservation protocol sufficiently benign that whole, donated human organs could be vitrified (stored below −130 degrees Celsius without ice formation) and rewarmed when needed for transplantation –an incredibly ambitious goal that has so far eluded medical researchers. 21CM’s scientists are the original pioneers of whole organ vitrification and have been diligently working on the technique for decades. A significant milestone of their progress toward that goal is their demonstration work on rabbit kidneys. Two of their most relevant publications are “Cryopreservation of organs by vitrification: perspectives and recent advances” (Fahy, Wowk, Wu, Phan, Rasch, Chang & Zendejas 2004) and “Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification” (Fahy, Wowk, Pagotan, Chang, Phan, Thomson & Phan 2009). These papers are a fantastic resource for anyone interested in just how difficult it is to cryopreserve large organs (and by extension whole animals) for long-term storage with the intent on later recovery of biological function. In short, it is incredibly difficult but progress is slowly being made.

The state-of-the-art whole organ vitrification techniques developed by 21CM are the basis of the human cryopreservation protocols used by some cryonics companies (e.g. Alcor). This is made clear in Alcor’s 2004 publication in the New York Academy of Sciences “The Arrest of Biological Time as a Bridge to Engineered Negligible Senescence” (Lemler, Harris, Platt & Huffman 2004).

21CM has been an official competitor in our Brain Preservation Prize competition since 2012. They actually have two separate preservation techniques competing for our prize: the “straight” cryopreservation\cryonics technique described on this page, and a radically new technique called “Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation” (ASC), described on a separate page,which they developed to overcome the “tissue shrinkage” issues described on this page and to optimize ultrastructure preservation at the expense of viability.

A genetic “cheat code” that activates dormant DNA

Circa 2011

Scientists have found a gene that can ‘lock’ and ‘unlock’ certain sections of your genetic code, allowing other genes to be expressed in your body. If you are under enough stress, this gene springs into action.

So you think you have access to all your DNA just by being born? Think again. You have to earn it, people. You have to work to get there. You have to suffer. Epigeneticists have proved this to be so, but they also might have a cheat code.

How to support open-source software and stay sane

It’s a familiar problem: open-source software is widely acknowledged as crucially important in science, yet it is funded non-sustainably. Support work is often handled ad hoc by overworked graduate students and postdocs, and can lead to burnout. “It’s sort of the difference between having insurance and having a GoFundMe when their grandma goes to the hospital,” says Anne Carpenter, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose lab developed the image-analysis tool CellProfiler. “It’s just not a nice way to live.”

Releasing lab-built open-source software often involves a mountain of unforeseen work for the developers.

Wild Case Study Reveals 66-Year-Old Man With All His Organs on The Wrong Side

For the latest tale of the unexpected from medical emergency rooms, we bring you the case of a 66-year-old man who turned up at the hospital complaining of a cough and chest pains.

Soon enough, doctors realised the patient’s internal organs were all on the wrong side of his body: his heart was on the right, liver on the left, and so on.

This condition actually has a name, situs inversus totalis, and it’s not as life-changing as you might think at first. In fact, before we had modern medical scanning tools, it’s thought most people who had this lived their lives without ever getting diagnosed.

This New Mind-Controlled Robot Arm Works Without a Brain Implant

If you want to control a robot with your mind — and really, who doesn’t? — you currently have two options.

You can get a brain implant, in which case your control over the robot will be smooth and continuous. Or you can skip the risky, expensive surgery in favor of a device that senses your brainwaves from outside your skull — but your control over the bot will be jerky and not nearly as precise.

Now, a team from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is narrowing the gap between those two options, creating the first noninvasive mind-controlled robot arm that exhibits the kind of smooth, continuous motion previously reserved only for systems involving brain implants — putting us one step closer to a future in which we can all use our minds to control the tech around us.

IEEE: ABSTRACT:

In this paper, we characterize and discriminate between normal and cancer cells from three different tissue types, liver, lung, and breast, using capacitance–voltage-based extracted set of parameters. Cells from each type of cancer cell line were suspended in a liquid media either individually or as mixtures with their normal counterparts. Empirically, normal cells were observed to exhibit higher dielectric constants when compared to cancer cells from the same tissue. Moreover, adding cancer cells to normal cells was observed to increase the capacitance of normal cells, and the extent of this increase varied with the type of tissue tested with the lung cells causing the greatest change. This shows that the cancer cells of different cell origin possess their own signature electrical parameters, especially when compared with their normal counterparts, and that cancer cell seems to affect normal cells in a different manner, depending upon the tissue type. It was also noticed that the cells (both cancer and normal) exhibited a higher dielectric value as per the following order (from least to most): breast, lung, and liver. The changes in electrical parameters from normal to cancer state were explained not only by the modification of its physiological and biochemical properties but also by the morphological changes. This approach paves the way for exploring unique electrical signatures of normal and their corresponding cancer cells to enable their detection and discrimination.

Smart glasses follow our eyes, focus automatically

Though it may not have the sting of death and taxes, presbyopia is another of life’s guarantees. This vision defect plagues most of us starting about age 45, as the lenses in our eyes lose the elasticity needed to focus on nearby objects. For some people reading glasses suffice to overcome the difficulty, but for many people the only fix, short of surgery, is to wear progressive lenses.

“More than a billion people have presbyopia and we’ve created a pair of autofocal lenses that might one day correct their vision far more effectively than traditional glasses,” said Stanford electrical engineer Gordon Wetzstein. For now, the prototype looks like virtual reality goggles but the team hopes to streamline later versions.

Wetzstein’s prototype glasses—dubbed autofocals—are intended to solve the main problem with today’s progressive lenses: These traditional glasses require the wearer to align their head to focus properly. Imagine driving a car and looking in a side mirror to change lanes. With progressive lenses, there’s little or no peripheral focus. The driver must switch from looking at the road ahead through the top of the glasses, then turn almost 90 degrees to see the nearby mirror through the lower part of the lens.

Anti-Aging Approaches

Sirtuins can be activated by a lack of amino acids or of sugar, or through an increase in NAD. — David Sinclair If you have not heard of #davidsinclair then it is time you have. he is at the forefront of anti aging research and one of my heroes. While we wait for the miracle pills there are alot of thing we can do to help us age better already. #biohacking #biohacker

Can a single molecule extend lifespan?