Lifeboat Foundation

(Part of the look back at the best of 2017)

Summary: Doctors lengthen telomeres with RNA therapy to reverse aging in human cells, according to a new research report. Telomere attrition is one of the nine hallmarks of aging. [Author: Brady Hartman] This article first appeared on LongevityFacts.]

Dr. John Cooke is department chair of cardiovascular sciences at Houston Methodist Research Institute and is the lead author of a recent paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Dr. Cooke’s team used RNA therapy to lengthen the telomeres of patients’ cells, making them younger in the process. In a video statement accompanying the report, the lead author remarked:

Continue reading “New RNA Telomere Therapy Reverses Aging” »

Back in April of 2017 Bitcoin.com launched a notary service that was based on top of the bitcoin core (BTC) blockchain. However, due to the transaction bottleneck and extremely high fees, the notary service became unsustainable. Now Bitcoin.com has re-launched the notary using the bitcoin cash (BCH) blockchain, and anyone in the world can prove ownership for only 0.0005 BCH (about $0.97).

Also read: Lots of Optimism at the Miami Bitcoin Conference This Week

This week Bitcoin.com has re-launched the blockchain-based notary service that was once tethered to the bitcoin core blockchain. Unfortunately, the service did not work correctly because of transaction backlog, and high network fees to verify documents. Now the infrastructure is tied to the bitcoin cash blockchain making document verification extremely cheap, and fees are practically non-existent. Right now a user can upload a document for only 0.0005 BCH ($0.97), and the network transaction fee is less than a penny. (It’s important to note that records don’t actually “exist” on the chain per say, it is merely timestamped encrypted data that is tied to the file that’s processed into a valid BCH transaction.) Not only that but the proof will be verified in less than ten minutes, and you can rest assure the notarization service will be validated.

Continue reading “.com Launches Bitcoin Cash Notary Service” »

“Yes, Mr. Bedford is here.”

That’s what Marji Klima, executive assistant at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, told me over email this week. She was referring to Dr. James Hiram Bedford, a former University of California-Berkeley psychology professor who died of renal cancer on Jan. 12, 1967. Bedford was the first human to be cryonically preserved—that is, frozen and stored indefinitely in the hopes that technology to revive him will one day exist. He’s been at Alcor since 1991.

His was the first of 300 bodies and brains currently preserved in the world’s three known commercial cryonics facilities: Alcor; the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan; and KrioRus near Moscow. Another 3,000 people still living have arranged to join them upon what cryonicists call “deanimation.” In other words, death.

Continue reading “Fifty years frozen: The world’s first cryonically preserved human’s disturbing journey to immortality” »

Microsoft today is unveiling new artificial intelligence technology that’s something of an artist – a “drawing bot.” The bot is capable of creating images from text descriptions of an object, but it also adds details to those images that weren’t included the text, indicating that the AI has a little imagination of its own, says Microsoft.

“If you go to Bing and you search for a bird, you get a bird picture. But here, the pictures are created by the computer, pixel by pixel, from scratch,” explained Xiaodong He, a principal researcher and research manager in the Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, in Microsoft’s announcement. “These birds may not exist in the real world — they are just an aspect of our computer’s imagination of birds.”

The bot is able to generate a variety of images, researchers say, including everything from “ordinary pastoral scenes,” like those with grazing livestock, to the absurd – like “a floating double-decker bus.”

Continue reading “Microsoft’s new drawing bot is an AI artist” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtL1fEEtLaA&t=0s

Mel Gibson and Joe Rogan, talk on Stem Cells:

Mel Gibson is an actor and filmmaker. Neil Riordan, PA, PhD is one of the early pioneers and experts in applied stem cell researchttps://www.cellmedicine.com/

Nearly 500 years ago in what we now call Mexico, a disease started rippling through the population. Red spots appeared on the skin, accompanied by wretched vomiting, bleeding from multiple orifices, and eventually, death. Combined with an invasion from Europe and horrific droughts, it was generally not a pleasant time or place to be alive.

It bore the name cocoliztli, meaning ‘pestilence,’ and it killed between five and 15 million people in just three years. As many plagues were at the time, it proved deadly and mysterious, burning through entire populations. Occurring centuries before John Snow’s work on cholera gave rise to epidemiology, data on the disease’s devastation was sparse. Over the years, researchers and historians attempted to pin the blame for the illness on measles, plague, viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola, and typhoid fever—a disease caused by a variation of the bacteria Salmonella enterica.

In a paper published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers present evidence that the latter was the most likely candidate in this cast of microbial miscreants. The study was pre-printed in biorxiv last year. The researchers detected the genome of a different variety of Salmonella enterica (the specific variety is Paratyphi C) in teeth of individuals buried in a cemetery historically linked to the deadly outbreak.

We talked a bit, and I had dinner at the presidential palace. Here’s a quick snapshot I got of us chatting! There are some professional pictures coming too. #transhumanism

Seven (!) digital touchscreens, and a virtual personal assistant that’s a fish.