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Archive for the ‘biotech/medical’ category: Page 2394

Aug 14, 2017

Scientists rejuvenate old hearts

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

In the study, 22-month-old rats — who were considered old — received stem cells from four-month-old rats.

Across the board, all of them experienced improved heart function, improved their exercise capacity by an average of 20 percent, and regrew hair faster than rats that didn’t receive the cells.

They also demonstrated longer heart cell telomeres.

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Aug 14, 2017

Congratulations to the AgeMeter campaign (https://www.lifespan.io/agemeter/) for blasting past the half way mark to 55%, and also congratulations to you all for helping fund this important biomarker system, supported by Drs. George Church, Aubrey de Grey, and David Sinclair

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Let’s keep up the momentum and continue to show the world what power the crowd can have in standing up to age-related disease. # LifespanIO # CrowdfundTheCure.

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Aug 11, 2017

New Nanochip technology that can reprogram cells to replace tissue or even whole organs

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

What I wonder here is if you could do this with uninjured cells, remaking the whole body with new cells.


The new technique, called tissue nanotransfection, is based on a tiny device that sits on the surface of the skin of a living body. An intense, focused electric field is then applied across the device, allowing it to deliver genes to the skin cells beneath it – turning them into different types of cells.

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Aug 11, 2017

3D Printed Blood Vessels Offer New Possibilities for Testing Drugs

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, biotech/medical

Scientists aim to 3D print human tissue so they can better study how new drugs interact with our bodies. A recent advance? 3D printed blood vessels.

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Aug 11, 2017

Proteostasis: How Misfolded Proteins Cause Age-related Diseases

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Coming from a fusion of the words ‘protein’ (a molecule that a cell uses as a machine or scaffolding) and ‘stasis’ (meaning to keep the same), the term ‘proteostasis’ can essentially be simplified into “Each function reliant on proteins is running as it should. There are enough proteins to serve a function, and the concentrations of proteins are being maintained at healthy levels.”

Proteostasis is the process that cells perform in order to have all their proteins functioning properly; this, in turn, allows cells to work properly. Since cells are the building blocks of our bodies, when they work properly, we are healthy.

When proteostasis is not maintained, cells become dysfunctional and can die; this failure can lead to aging, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, inflammation, developmental defects, and other problems. The loss of proteostasis is thought to be a primary reason we age, and we discuss how this happens in more detail here.

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Aug 10, 2017

First CRISPR-ed human embryos reported in US

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

The first successful attempt to remove inherited disease by genetically modifying human embryos has reportedly taken place in the US using CRISPR.

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Aug 10, 2017

Study Suggests Reaction Time Variability is an Aging Biomarker

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

There is a growing list of aging biomarkers available to researchers that help them measure how well someone is aging and assess how aging interventions are working in preclinical testing.

Some clinical biomarkers, such as DNA methylation and telomere length, are commonly used in labs. Other biomarkers, such as blood pressure, grip strength, heart rate variability, visual reaction time, and decision reaction time, are non-invasive and easy to test.

Currently, DNA methylation is generally regarded as the gold standard for aging biomarkers, although new techniques, such as cell functional age, are attempting to challenge that. The sensible choice, of course, would be to combine both methods to further improve the accuracy of results.

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Aug 9, 2017

Comparing Reactions of different Groups to Nuclear Thermal Rocket enabled space colonization

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, habitats, health, space travel

Nextbigfuture wrote about the designs for an improved nuclear thermal rocket by John Bucknell. John has worked as a senior engineer on the SpaceX Raptor rocket. John provides high quality qualified work to his rocket designs and to his proposed space habitat.

Nextbigfuture comments had some technical observations about Project Timberwind and a comment from John himself that his design improves on flaws in the last major nuclear thermal rocket experiments. There were also comments and discussion about Star Trek and communism and O’Neill space stations.

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Aug 9, 2017

Researchers Accidentally Discover That Iron Nanoparticles Can Help Destroy Cancer Cells

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology

Stanford researchers accidentally discovered that iron nanoparticles invented for anemia treatment have another use: triggering the immune system’s ability to destroy tumor cells. Iron can activate the immune system to attack , according to a study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The nanoparticles, which are commercially available as the injectable iron supplement ferumoxytol, are approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat .

The mouse study found that ferumoxytol prompts immune cells called tumor-associated macrophages to destroy cancer cells, suggesting that the nanoparticles could complement existing cancer treatments. The discovery, described in a paper published online Sept. 26 in Nature Nanotechnology, was made by accident while testing whether the nanoparticles could serve as Trojan horses by sneaking chemotherapy into tumors in mice.

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Aug 9, 2017

The First Ever Blueprint for a Large Scale Quantum Computer has been Unveiled

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, quantum physics, space

An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.

This huge leap forward towards creating a universal quantum computer is published today (1 February 2017) in the influential journal Science Advances. It has long been known that such a computer would revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. But this new work features the actual industrial blueprint to construct such a large-scale machine, more powerful in solving certain problems than any computer ever constructed before.

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