Stimulating the brains of elderly people with electrical currents allowed them to perform just as well on a memory test as people in their 20s — a sign that researchers may have found a noninvasive way to turn back the hands of time when it comes to human memory.
“It’s opening up a whole new avenue of potential research and treatment options,” researcher Rob Reinhart said in a press release regarding the study, “and we’re super excited about it.”
Scientists say they’ve developed a new “quantum material” that could one day transfer information directly from human brains to a computer.
The research is in early stages, but it invokes ideas like uploading brains to the cloud or hooking people up to a computer to track deep health metrics — concepts that until now existed solely in science fiction.
At Undoing Aging 2019, we interviewed some of the best researchers who are involved in discovering therapies for the root causes of aging. Their research aims to ameliorate the damages of aging and may one day lead to a future without the diseases of aging.
We were glad to have the opportunity to conduct a joint interview with Dr. Kelsey Moody and Dr. Huda Suliman. They offered several keen insights on the future of Ichor Therapeutics and the nature of the rejuvenation biotechnology industry.
K: I’m Dr. Kelsey Moody. I’m the Chief Executive Officer of Ichor Therapeutics and its portfolio of companies. Ichor itself is a biopharmaceutical company that does drug discovery in the aging space, and we have a variety of portfolio companies, each of which is designed to target a different type of age-associated damage. Through these companies, we’re developing classes of different drugs to move into the clinic for conventional therapeutic applications as well as, hopefully, more anti-aging targeted therapies as well.
‘’Examining how deep disagreements arise will demonstrate the gravity of the issue. Why do we disagree with valid, knowable facts when we all live in the same world, we have roughly the same cognitive abilities and, in the Western world at least, most people have fairly easy access to roughly the same information?
What happens when you can’t agree on the facts?
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Bacteria in the human body are sharing genes with one another at a higher rate than is typically seen in nature, and some of those genes appear to be traveling — independent of their microbial hosts — from one part of the body to another, researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports.
The findings are the result of a molecular data-mining method initially conceptualized by Kyung Mo Kim, a senior research scientist at the Korea Polar Research Institute. University of Illinois crop sciences and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés developed the approach with his former student Arshan Nasir, of COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan, who is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
This computationally challenging method allowed them to identify instances of “horizontal gene transfer,” the direct transfer of genes between organisms outside of sexual or asexual reproduction.
