Lifeboat Foundation

These award-winning new materials for dental fillings could help repair and regenerate parts of your damaged teeth.

Imagine a couple wanting to have a baby. They see the fertility specialist at a clinic, provide genetic material such as sperm or skin cells, and return sometime later. ‘The DNA of the resulting embryos will then be sequenced and carefully analyzed before decisions are made about which embryo or embryos to transfer to a womb for possible development,’ Greely writes. ‘Prospective parents will be told as much as they wish to know about the genetic makeup of dozens of embryos, and they will pick one or two for implantation, gestation, and birth.’ Besides the advantages of eliminating certain diseases, ‘It will be safe, lawful, and free.’

Will we be building a better world or a more homogeneous one?

Continue reading “Someday those who engage in intercourse for reproduction purposes could become stigmatized” »

By the 2020s, he tells Playboy, he expects medical technology to be at a point where nanobots will help out our immune system.

Ray Kurzweil is a celebrity technologist, well known both for his work as an inventor and for his relatively accurate predictions of technological change. Among his predictions is that of an imminent biotech revolution, which may enable people to restore and maintain healthy life for much longer periods of time than those humans have enjoyed historically. In the meantime, Ray says he takes 250 dietary supplements each day, in addition to receiving half a dozen intravenous therapies each week.

“Although my program may seem extreme, it is actually conservative – and optimal (based on my current knowledge). [My doctor] and I have extensively researched each of the several hundred therapies that I use for safety and efficacy. I stay away from ideas that are unproven or appear to be risky (the use of human-growth hormone, for example).” – Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near (pages 211–212)

Some of Ray’s dietary supplements are nootropics, intended to maintain and improve brain health. He lists them in his book, Transcend (pages 15 and 22). I’ve compared the nootropics he recommends to reviews on Examine.com, an independent and unbiased encyclopedia on supplementation and nutrition that is not affiliated in any way with any supplement company. Below is a table that summarizes what I found, followed by some observations.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil’s Nootropic Dietary Supplement Stack” »

Scientists have created a synthetic stingray that’s propelled by living muscle cells and controlled by light, a team reports Thursday in the journal Science.

And it should be possible to build an artificial heart using some of the same techniques, the researchers say.

Continue reading “Video: Scientists Create Artificial Stingray From Rat Cells” »

This is from 2014 but is getting posted around the past couple of days.

““It’s estimated that we’re born with around 20,000 blood stem cells, and at any one time, around 1000 are simultaneously active to replenish blood,” says Holstege. During life, the number of active stem cells shrinks, she says, and their telomeres shorten to the point at which they die –”

She lived to 115, but a study of Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper’s blood hints at factors limiting lifespan.

Continue reading “Blood of world’s oldest woman hints at limits of life” »

Amazing!! More time to learn, evolve, love, & explore the world…

A sprawling facility called Timeship in Texas will host 50,000 frozen dead people with one goal — to become the human race’s first immortals.

Activist Saul Kent — one of the minds behind it — is such a passionate believer in ‘cryogenics’ that he froze his own mother’s head in 1988 after her death.

Continue reading “How To Become Immortal — By The People Who Think You Can” »

Graphene, a two-dimensional wonder-material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms linked in a hexagonal chicken-wire pattern, has attracted intense interest for its phenomenal ability to conduct electricity. Now University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have used rod-shaped bacteria — precisely aligned in an electric field, then vacuum-shrunk under a graphene sheet — to introduce nanoscale ripples in the material, causing it to conduct electrons differently in perpendicular directions.

The resulting material, sort of a graphene nano-corduroy, can be applied to a silicon chip and may add to graphene’s almost limitless potential in electronics and nanotechnology. The finding is reported in the journal ACS Nano.

“The current across the graphene wrinkles is less than the current along them,” says Vikas Berry, associate professor and interim head of chemical engineering at UIC, who led the research.

Are pomegranates really the superfood we’ve been led to believe will counteract the aging process? Up to now, scientific proof has been fairly weak. And some controversial marketing tactics have led to skepticism as well. A team of scientists from EPFL and the company Amazentis wanted to explore the issue by taking a closer look at the secrets of this plump pink fruit. They discovered that a molecule in pomegranates, transformed by microbes in the gut, enables muscle cells to protect themselves against one of the major causes of aging. In nematodes and rodents, the effect is nothing short of amazing. Human clinical trials are currently underway, but these initial findings have already been published in the journal Nature Medicine.

As we age, our cells increasingly struggle to recycle their powerhouses. Called mitochondria, these inner compartments are no longer able to carry out their vital function, thus accumulate in the cell. This degradation affects the health of many tissues, including muscles, which gradually weaken over the years. A buildup of dysfunctional mitochondria is also suspected of playing a role in other diseases of aging, such as Parkinson’s disease.

One molecule plays David against the Goliath of aging

Continue reading “Pomegranate finally reveals its powerful anti-aging secret” »