Lifeboat Foundation

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The seats in Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship are like a dentist’s chair that’s fully extended, with a big difference. You can float out of this one when weightlessness sets in.

Of course, we couldn’t get the zero-G experience when we tried out the seats in a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, on display here at the 33rd Space Symposium. But we did get a condensed version of the 11-minute flight scenario, from launch to landing.

Those in the life sciences industry have mixed feelings about Alphabet playing in their backyard.

The first step in producing an artificial thymus which has potential for cancer age related immune decline.

UCLA researchers have created a new system to produce human T cells, the white blood cells that fight against disease-causing intruders in the body. The system could be utilized to engineer T cells to find and attack cancer cells, which means it could be an important step toward generating a readily available supply of T cells for treating many different types of cancer.

The preclinical study, published in the journal Nature Methods, was led by senior authors Dr. Gay Crooks, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and of pediatrics and co-director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, and Amelie Montel-Hagen, an associate project scientist in Crooks’ lab.

Continue reading “Artificial thymus can produce cancer-fighting T cells from blood stem cells” »

Interview with George Church.

Harvard researcher Dr. George Church has developed an innovative gene editing technology called CRISPR/Cas9 that could transform senescent cells. He predicts this technology may reverse aging in humans. Life Extension Foundation® assisted by providing Dr. Church with gene sequencing data from its super-centenarian project.

Deep learning owes its rising popularity to its vast applications across an increasing number of fields. From healthcare to finance, automation to e-commerce, the RE•WORK Deep Learning Summit (27−28 April) will showcase the deep learning landscape and its impact on business and society.

Of notable interest is speaker Jeffrey De Fauw, Research Engineer at DeepMind. Prior to joining DeepMind, De Fauw developed a deep learning model to detect Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) in fundus images, which he will be presenting at the Summit. DR is a leading cause of blindness in the developed world and diagnosing it is a time-consuming process. De Fauw’s model was designed to reduce diagnostics time and to accurately identify patients at risk, to help them receive treatment as early as possible.

Joining De Fauw will be Brian Cheung, A PhD student from UC Berkeley, and currently working at Google Brain. At the event, he will explain how neural network models are able to extract relevant features from data with minimal feature engineering. Applied in the study of physiology, his research aims to use a retinal lattice model to examine retinal images.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Enlitic, a medical deep learning company, is pleased to announce that it has executed a Memorandum of Understanding (“MOU”) with Beijing Hao Yun Dao Information & Technology Co., Ltd (“Paiyipai”) to provide Enlitic’s deep learning solution to Paiyipai for diagnostic imaging in Health Check centers across China.

Paiyipai is a medical big data company. The company is a market leader in China in the analysis of individual laboratory medical test results, and the storage and distribution of user medical records.

The MOU forms the basis of collaboration for the first large-scale commercial deployment of Enlitic’s deep learning technology in China. It was executed following a successful 10,000 chest x-ray trial of Enlitic’s patient triage platform.

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Earlier this month, Moscow’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week showcased some spectacular 3D printed prosthetic arms made by designer Nikita Replyanski and Russian prosthesis manufacturer Motorica. The 3D printed prostheses, inspired by robots and butterflies, were made using Autodesk Fusion 360.

Fashion weeks, whether they’re being held in the “Big Four” fashion capitals of the world or elsewhere, tend to favor style over substance. It’s called a fashion week, after all, not a function week. But that doesn’t mean that the industry events don’t occasionally showcase items that are as sensible as they are stylish. Just have a look at what was on show at Moscow’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week earlier this month.

While not usually an event of major global interest like Paris Fashion Week, the Russian fashion show brought together a host of top designers looking to show off their fall/winter 2017–2018 collections. Amongst those designers was Nikita Replyanski, a Russian designer and concept artist who left the computer games industry three years ago to focus on designing physical, non-virtual items. But rather than show off dresses, shoes, hats, Replyanski was presenting something totally different: 3D printed prosthetic arms.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=p2MEaROKjaE

I do not think, at least at first, that any brain interfaces for the masses will be anything other than organic. Possibly a synthetic virus that can be inserted and removed without the invasion of instruments. Those things we might have to deal with either way are summarized here.

How closely will we live with the technology we use in the future? How will it change us? And how close is “close”? Ghost in the Shell imagines a futuristic, hi-tech but grimy and ghetto-ridden Japanese metropolis populated by people, robots, and technologically-enhanced human cyborgs.

Continue reading “Ghost in the Shell Thrills, But Ducks the Philosophical Questions Posed by a Cyborg Future” »

Interest in rejuvenation biotechnology is growing in the investment quarter.

Mainstream interest in rejuvenation biotechnology is growing.

“Investment in the development of rejuvenation therapies represents an enormous opportunity for profit; these are products for which every adult human being much over the age of 30 is a potential customer at some price point. That is larger than near every existing industry, either within or outside the field of medicine, even given that customers will only purchase such a therapy once every few years, for clearance of metabolic waste, or even just once, for treatments like the SENS approach of allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes. Among the first successful companies in this space, some will grow to become among the largest in the world: I’d wager that the Ford or Microsoft of rejuvenation will be a lot larger than the actual Ford of automobiles or Microsoft of personal computing.”

Continue reading “Investment Strategist Jim Mellon Considers the Near Future of Longevity Science” »