Lifeboat Foundation

As a medical emergency caused by severe cardiovascular diseases, myocardial infarction (MI) can inflict permanent and life-threatening damage to the heart. A joint research team comprising scientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has recently developed a multipronged approach for concurrently rejuvenating both the muscle cells and vascular systems of the heart by utilizing two types of stem cells. The findings give hope to develop a new treatment for repairing MI heart, as an alternative to the existing complex and risky heart transplant for seriously-ill patients.

MI is a fatal disorder caused by a shortage of coronary blood supply to the myocardium. It leads to permanent loss of heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes, CMs), and scar tissue formation, resulting in irreversible damage to cardiac function or even heart failure. With limited therapeutic options for severe MI and advanced heart failure, a heart transplant is the last resort. But it is very risky, costly and subject to limited suitable donors. Therefore, stem cell-based therapy has emerged as a promising therapeutic option.

Dr. Ban Kiwon, a stem cell biologist from Department of Biomedical Sciences at CityU, has been focusing on developing novel stem cell-based treatments for cardiac regeneration. “Heart is an organ composed of cardiac muscles and blood vessels, where vessels are essential to supply oxygen and energy to the muscles. Since both cardiac muscles and vasculatures would be severely damaged following MI, the therapeutic strategies should focus on comprehensive repair of both at the same time. But so far the strategies only focus on either one,” he explains.

In the 1990s farmed fish (aquaculture) accounted for about one-quarter of global seafood production according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization. Now, with demand rising and the ocean’s resources being steadily depleted, aquaculture has overtaken wild fishery, globally producing more than 100 million metric tonnes of seafood each year.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used in aquaculture management to analyze water conditions, environmental changes and fish status. And nowhere are these emerging fishing industry technologies more important than in Japan.

According to a report by private research group Yano Economic Research Institute, Japan’s aquaculture market will reach JP¥20.3 billion in 2021, an increase of 53 percent from 2016. AI-powered smart fisheries will account for JP¥1.3 billion, a figure that is rising quickly.

Astrobiologists have sent 18 different strains of bacteria up to the International Space Station.

They’re not meant to contaminate the already-kinda-gross orbital research center, but rather to determine whether the mineral-leaching microbes could help astronauts mine space rocks during future missions, Space.com reports.

If the so-called BioRock experiment pans out, the researchers behind the experiment argue that it could help humanity turn space rocks on the Moon or Mars into farmable soil for future human settlements.

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., Vice President of New Technology Discovery for AgeX Therapeutics, discusses how primitive organisms have better regenerative capacity than more complicated organisms such as humans. In humans, Dr. de Grey notes, our best regenerative abilities are at the embryonic stage. During the Embryonic Fetal Transition, out ability to regenerate plummets and continues to diminish as we age. Dr. de Grey discusses the role evolution plays in this and how scientists may be able to “revive” our regenerative power. This video is part of a series from AgeX on research into aging and human longevity. For more information on Agex Therapeutics, please visit http://www.agexinc.com.

Seeking Answers

It’s been almost a year and a half since I got the diagnosis.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful approach for integrated analysis of the rapidly growing volume of multi-omics data, including many research and clinical tasks such as prediction of disease risk and identification of potential therapeutic targets. However, the potential for AI to facilitate the identification of factors contributing to human exceptional health and life span and their translation into novel interventions for enhancing health and life span has not yet been realized. As researchers on aging acquire large scale data both in human cohorts and model organisms, emerging opportunities exist for the application of AI approaches to untangle the complex physiologic process(es) that modulate health and life span. It is expected that efficient and novel data mining tools that could unravel molecular mechanisms and causal pathways associated with exceptional health and life span could accelerate the discovery of novel therapeutics for healthy aging. Keeping this in mind, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) convened an interdisciplinary workshop titled “Contributions of Artificial Intelligence to Research on Determinants and Modulation of Health Span and Life Span” in August 2018. The workshop involved experts in the fields of aging, comparative biology, cardiology, cancer, and computational science/AI who brainstormed ideas on how AI can be leveraged for the analyses of large-scale data sets from human epidemiological studies and animal/model organisms to close the current knowledge gaps in processes that drive exceptional life and health span. This report summarizes the discussions and recommendations from the workshop on future application of AI approaches to advance our understanding of human health and life span.

Aging is often described as the outcome of interactions among genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors with wide variation in life and health span between and within species (Newman and Murabito, 2013; Partridge et al., 2018; Singh et al., 2019). Exceptional life and health span represents an extreme phenotype characterized by exceptional survival (well-beyond average life expectancy), delayed onset of age-related diseases (before 80 years of age) (Pignolo, 2019) and/or preservation of good health/function relative to their peers (Perls et al., 2000, 2002; Kaeberlein, 2018). The identification of SNP associations with exceptional life and health span is a starting point for identifying targets for interventions that could potentially promote healthy human aging.

Two independent research teams recently published studies indicating they’ve successfully teleported a qutrit — possibly within days of each other. Now, both await the scientific process of peer review to see which will ultimately get credit for being the first humans to do so.

But what’s a qutrit? It’s a lot like a qubit, an entangled pair of particles used to carry information in a quantum computing system. Qubits are analogous to bits, the binary units of information used by classical computers like the one you’re reading this on. Where bits can be represented by the numbers zero and one, qubits can be zero, one, or both at the same time. Trits, used in classical ternary systems, add a two into the mix. And qutrits are the quantum version of trits, capable of carrying more information than their qubit counterparts.

This article appears in Weekly Health Page July 31.

Researchers found that more than four out of five Ohio women who had been physically abused by their partners had suffered a head injury. A study that found domestic violence survivors had sustained staggering rates of head trauma and violent choking incidents suggests that many are left with ongoing health problems from “invisible injuries” to the brain.

But the effects of such injuries often go unrecognized by advocates, health care providers, law enforcement — even the victims themselves, researchers said.

Take an asteroid, give it swinging arms and turn it into a rocky jellyfish swimming through space. Project RAMA from @MadeInSpace can solve most of the problems associated with asteroid mining all in one go. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/niac_20…tagged.pdf