Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10733

The concept of repairing age-related damage to prevent diseases is now mainstream and openly talked about by most acadmics.

Earlier this year the second Scripps Florida Symposium was held and now this open access paper reports on the event. The title of of the event was ‘Advances in Therapeutic Approaches to Extend Healthspan’ and was held on January 22nd–25th, 2017 at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida.

It is once again very refreshing to see that the focus of the researchers here is now firmly on intervening on the various aging processes in order to prevent or treat age-related diseases. Less than a decade ago suggesting addressing the aging processes to treat disease as a preventative form of medicine would have jepordised the chances of funding, or even damaged a researcher’s career prospects. Now the majority of researchers are engaged in exploring the potential of increasing healthspan (the period of life spent free of age-related disease) with the aim of delaying or preventing age-related diseases.

The taboo of talking about doing something about aging

Whilst there is still resistance in academia to talk in public about the potential of these therapies leading to not only healthier but also longer lives, it is nonetheless a step in the right direction. The discussion has changed dramatically in the last decade and the taboo of targeting the aging process has largely been banished, this in our view is a good thing. Only the most conservative scientists cling to the idea that nothing can be done about aging despite the mountains of evidence suggesting otherwise.

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We teamed up the MMTP last week and did a special longevity live panel on Facebook with Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Alexandra Stolzing, Dr. Oliver Medvedik and guests. Check it out.

We teamed up with the MMTP for their “How to Promote Longevity?” Live Panel. Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Alexandra Stolzing and Dr. Oliver Medvedik and guests discuss the latest research and progess in rejuvenation biotechnology.

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“For example, Hasan says, “we can test theoretical ideas in the early universe,” simulating how particles may have behaved just after the Big Bang, when Lorentz symmetry may not have been obeyed.”

It’s interesting how often I hear condensed matter physicists justify their work by saying “might be important for something with quantum gravity” while condensed matter physics by itself is much more likely than quantum gravity to be good for something.

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The Evening Standard reviews the new book Radicals whose opening chapter is about transhumanism and my 2016 presidential campaign:

With the apparent collapse of Ukip and the defeat of Marine Le Pen, perhaps those of us fretting about the decline of liberal democracy may breathe easier. Still, many established Western parties remain in decline. And we have yet to deal with the consequences of the “populist” spasms that gave us Brexit and the absurd President Trump. This is the climate that impels Jamie Bartlett, of think tank Demos, to examine some of the new “radicals”.

Radicalism is important, he believes, because it is a source of new ideas: even if liberal democracy is forced to argue with racists or anti-democratic radicals, that should help make it stronger.

He is inevitably selective in his choice of seven different figures or movements, plus the anti-radicalisation work of the Prevent programme: there is an uneasy bracketing of political radicals and wacky futurists.

Thus in the latter group we meet US transhumanist presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, leader of assorted “biohackers” attempting to merge humans and machines. Bartlett spends time with the Psychedelic Society, organising supervised psilocybin trips; with the German Tamera commune in Portugal, practising free love; and with the scarcely less loopy Vit Jedlicka, founder of a putative libertarian state on the Serbian/Croatian border.

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Nice jibe at Boston Dynamics, they are only uhh the best legged robot lab in the world. Google didnt have a clue what they were doing when they bought Boston Dynamics, and thankfully getting sold now before they did anymore damage to it.

I Have a brilliant idea, lets force them to work on wheeled robots LOL 😛.

Alphabet’s sale of a robotics business to Japan’s Softbank shows that CFO Ruth Porat is taking aim even at the company’s most advanced technologies.

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Robot arms have come a long way since the 1960’s when George C. Devol and Joseph Engelberger created the earliest industrial models. Those had two-finger grippers that, in retrospect, look fit to pluck a rubber ducky out of a bin in a carnival game, but nothing too sophisticated.

By now, robots in factories and warehouses can adjust their grip like human hands, or use suction and pliable materials to move objects wherever they need to go. Problems arise, however, when objects are porous, tiny, or need to be placed with great precision, as with materials handling in textiles, food, automotive and electronics manufacturing.

A startup called Grabit Inc., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., gets around problems with robot dexterity and grip by employing “electroadhesion” to move different materials. Yes, that’s the force that lifts strands of your hair away from your scalp when you rub a balloon on your head.

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