Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of researchers led by The Australian National University (ANU) has invented a tiny camera lens, which may lead to a device that links quantum computers to an optical fibre network.

Quantum computers promise a new era in ultra-secure networks, artificial intelligence and therapeutic drugs, and will be able to solve certain problems much faster than today’s computers.

The unconventional lens, which is 100 times thinner than a human hair, could enable a fast and reliable transfer of quantum information from the new-age computers to a network, once these technologies are fully realised.

Grammarly announced that it will now work on Google Docs through a browser extension. The artificial intelligence-powered grammar checking tool joins Google’s native A.I.-powered tool to help improve both individual and collaborative writing efforts on Google Docs.

Your body’s internal clock, or the circadian rhythm, regular when you sleep and wake, when you’re hungry, and when you’re most productive. Because of its effect on so much of our lives, it also has an enormous impact on our health, so sleep experts have designed a blood test to signal when your body is out of sync.

We haven’t seen SpaceX’s BFR — the rocket that it hopes will enable trips around the world, to the Moon, and, eventually, to Mars — actually take flight yet, but the company says it has already booked a private passenger for a trip around the Moon. No one has been there since Apollo missions ended in the 70s, but now, in a “world’s first” SpaceX is apparently taking reservations. Details like who is going and “why” are to be revealed during a livestream on Monday September 17th at 9 PM ET.

MIT professor Dina Katabi is building a gadget that can sit in one spot and track everything from breathing to walking, no wearables required.

Research has shed new light on genetic processes that may one day lead to the development of therapies that can slow, or even reverse, how our cells age.

A study led by the University of Exeter Medical School has found that certain genes and pathways that regulate splicing factors – a group of proteins in our body that tell our genes how to behave—play a key role in the ageing process. Significantly, the team found that disrupting these genetic processes could reverse signs of ageing in cells.

The study, published in the FASEB Journal, was conducted in human cells in laboratories. Aged, or senescent, cells are thought to represent a driver of the ageing process and other groups have shown that if such cells are removed in animal models, many features of ageing can be corrected. This new work from the Exeter team found that stopping the activity of the pathways ERK and AKT, which communicate signals from outside the cell to the genes, reduced the number of senescent cells in in cultures grown in the laboratory. Furthermore, they found the same effects from knocking out the activity of just two genes controlled by these pathways—FOX01 and ETV6.

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The Walney Extension’s 87 turbines cover an area bigger than San Francisco in the Irish Sea. The wind farm was completed last week. Take a look at the machines at work.

While blood stem cells from bone marrow have long been a cornerstone of treating blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, Mackenzie’s trial extracting the cells from a pregnant woman to treat a developing fetus in utero is just one of several innovative uses of stem cells to treat a growing list of diseases with cells instead of drugs. And promising studies are inching more of these stem-cell-based treatments closer to finally being tested in people.

With stem cells like those found in bone marrow, scientists are taking advantage of what the body does naturally: generate itself anew. Many of the adult body’s organs and tissues, including fat cells and blood, are equipped with their own stash of stem cells whose sole job is to regenerate cells and tissues when older ones are damaged or die off and which can be harvested for research and growth outside the body.

Some organs are not endowed with these large stem-cell reservoirs, however, most notably the brain and heart muscle. So more than two decades ago, scientists found another source of these flexible cells–in embryos that were donated for research from in vitro fertilization clinics. They learned how to grow these cells in the lab into any cells in the body. That opened the possibility that conditions like heart disease, diabetes or even psychiatric disorders might eventually be treated by replacing damaged tissues or organs with healthy ones, which could provide cures and treatments that didn’t require drugs or surgery.

A wonderfully written, very friendly essay on the discoveries, carrier and life of Prof Dr David Sinclair and of course on sirtuins, the epigenetic theory of aging, resveratrol, nicotinamide dinucleotide NAD+ and healthy aging.

Since my recent visit to the Harvard Medical School laboratory run by Australian geneticist David Sinclair, I’ve been struggling with a shamefully greedy impulse. How can I get my hands on the wonder molecules that Sinclair is trialling to amazing effect in mice, not only slowing down their ageing but reversing it? My fear of missing out has flared up since I learnt from Sinclair that he estimates at least a third of his scientific colleagues are taking some version of these “anti-ageing” molecules, just as he does, in the belief it will increase their health spans by as much as 10 years. This means not just having a chance at living an extra decade, but living it in good health, avoiding the age-related diseases and general frailty that can make those years harrowing.

It becomes difficult to remain impartial when a respected scientist tells you he will soon turn 50, does not have a single grey hair and, according to regular blood and genetic tests, has the biological age of 31.4, even though he’s a workaholic and doesn’t exercise much. Or that he likes to think his mother prolonged her life – post lung cancer, with only one lung – for 20 years by taking the molecules he gave her, and that his 79-year-old father, who has taken several different kinds of them for years, currently lists whitewater rafting and mountaineering among his hobbies. Sinclair’s wife, Sandra Luikenhuis, even gives these molecules to the family dogs. (Luikenhuis, who has a PhD in genetics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, only began taking the molecules herself after she noticed the irrefutably positive effect they’d had on their pets.)

Continue reading “Can David Sinclair cure old age?” »