Lifeboat Foundation

One of the more important things we can do for longevity is keeping our teeth clean and keeping decay at bay. It might sound strange at first, but it is true. The harm that bacteria causes, especially in the gums, can spread to other tissues and increase inflammation throughout the body.

Some studies show a strong correlation between harmful oral bacteria and mortality rates later in life[1]. The mouth is an easy point of entry for harmful bacteria to invade the body, so it makes sense that maintaining oral hygiene should be an essential part of your health and longevity strategy.

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.

I’m excited to announce a feature on transhumanism and my governor run in one of Asia’s premier publications, the South China Morning Post. This is in their weekend magazine:

Enter Zoltan Istvan, the wannabe governor of California whose transhumanist agenda has influential fans, including dotcom billionaires hoping to live forever.

By Richard Godwin

Continue reading “Immortality: welcome to the transhumanist era” »

LEAF director Paul Spiegel at the recent ILC Sumit in Madrid discusses the society of the near future where people will exponentially increase their life expectancy. Aspects of work, leisure, pensions are discussed and the need for a new social contract.

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.

A new interview I did on my transhumanist California Governor run:

On August 4th, Zoltan Istvan joined Merion West’s Erich Prince for an interview to discuss his campaign for Governor of California. Running in this race as a Libertarian, Mr. Istvan previously ran in the 2016 presidential election as a member of the Transhumanist Party. Working previously for National Geographic, Mr. Istvan is well-known for his writings on transhumanism, the movement that aims to improve human life and extend longevity through science. A pillar of his campaign for Governor of California includes a proposal for implementing universal basic income.

Erich Prince: Mr. Istvan, thank you for joining us this morning. Could you start by explaining the connection that you see between transhumanism, the movement you’re so involved with, and libertarianism?

Continue reading “Merion West Interviews Zoltan Istvan, Candidate for Governor of CA” »

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centerlessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors … The “oppressor” is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari “the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?”

Continue reading “Could the quest for super-intelligence and eternal life lead us into a dystopian nightmare?” »

La directora del CNI acude al International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit para poner sobre la mesa el trabajo que lleva años realizando sobre los telómeros y su implicación en la extensión de vida.

As we age the brain loses its flexibility, this in turn affects our ability to learn, to remember things and adapt to new situations. The classic theme is of an older person who is stuck in a rut and unable to change how they think.

This is also a common concern people raise when any discussion of healthy longer lives are mentioned. The concern is that we would have a world of people living more decades and becoming so set in their ways that society would stagnate.

However, many proponents of rejuvenation biotechnology refute this and suggest that mental plasticity could be rejuvenated just the same as cells and tissues could be. The new study we will discuss today offers us a hint of what might be possible, although the focus here is specifically on the visual cortex[1].