Lifeboat Foundation

Between 19:39 and 24 minutes we have Aubrey giving a list of companies and stating that investing is now taking off. Project 21 seems to be on track to start next year, and therapies available in 10–15 years will add 30 years to life and really be indefinite beyond that.

Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging.
People are living longer — no longer because of reduced child mortality, but because we are postponing the ill-health of old age. But we’ve seen nothing yet: regenerative medicine and other new medicines will eventually be so comprehensive that people will stay truly youthful however long they live, which means they may mostly live very long indeed.

Continue reading “GFS 2020 — Aubrey de Grey — Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging” »

Scientists have been using a new form of gene therapy to treat a rare inherited eye condition which eventually causes severe tunnel vision.

Scientists have been using the new treatment on patients to try to halt further loss of sight. And they’ve been astonished to find that it has actually improved their vision.

Continue reading “Radical new gene therapy restores sight to patients with rare eye condition — BBC News” »

A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) have developed a system with which they can fabricate miniature robots building block by building block, which function exactly as required.

As one would do with a Lego system, the scientists can randomly combine individual components. The building blocks or voxels—which could be described as 3D pixels—are made of different materials: from basic matrix materials that hold up the construction to magnetic components enabling the control of the soft machine. “You can put the individual soft parts together in any way you wish, with no limitations on what you can achieve. In this way, each robot has an individual magnetisation profile,” says Jiachen Zhang. Together with Ziyu Ren and Wenqi Hu he is first author of the paper entitled “Voxelated three-dimensional miniature magnetic soft machines via multimaterial heterogeneous assembly.” The paper was published in Science Robotics on April 28, 2021.

The project is the result of many previous projects conducted in the Physical Intelligence Department at MPI-IS. For many years, scientists there have been working on magnetically controlled robots for wireless medical device applications at the small scale, from millimeters down to micrometers size. While the state-of-the-art designs they have developed to date have attracted attention around the world, they were limited by the single material with which they were made, which constrained their functionality.

A team of researchers from Universidade Estadual Paulista, Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul and Projeto Dacnis, São Francisco Xavier and Ubatuba has discovered a new species of pumpkin toadlet. In their paper published on the open-access site PLOS ONE, the group describes their study of pumpkin toadlets in Brazil, how they found the new species and what sets it apart from other pumpkin toadlets.

Pumpkin toadlets are a group of related species of bright orange amphibians. They look like tiny frogs, and most are small enough to sit on a thumbnail—many of them are also poisonous. In this new effort, the researchers were studying pumpkin toadlets living in a heavily forested part of Brazil, just south of the Mantiqueira mountains, along its eastern coast—in the state of São Paulo. To date, several species have been identified. To learn more about them, the researchers traveled to the area multiple times between late 2017 and late 2019, collecting samples. The collecting was made easier through the use of a fluorescent light—some of the bones of the tiny creatures light up right through the skin. In all, the team collected 276 specimens which they took back to their lab for study. Each was given a DNA test to identify its species.

The field of soft robotics has exploded in the past decade, as ever more researchers seek to make real the potential of these pliant, flexible automata in a variety of realms, including search and rescue, exploration and medicine.

For all the excitement surrounding these new machines, however, UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes wants to ensure that soft robotics research is more than just a flash in the pan. “Some new, rapidly growing fields never take root, while others become thriving disciplines,” Hawkes said.

To help guarantee the longevity of soft robotics research, Hawkes, whose own robots have garnered interest for their bioinspired and novel locomotion and for the new possibilities they present, offers an approach that moves the field forward. His viewpoint, written with colleagues Carmel Majidi from Carnegie Mellon University and Michael T. Tolley of UC San Diego, is published in the journal Science Robotics.

Electric vehicles by 2030 – Future Timeline. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has today released its Global Electric Vehicle Outlook 2021. The report shows that, despite the pandemic, growth in electric vehicle sales has remained strong and will likely continue to boom in the coming decade.

“After hopefully demonstrating efficacy through the pilot study, Conboy says that plans are underway for a 200–300 person, placebo-controlled Phase 3 trial to prove the use of the plasma dilution as a technology that innovatively treats co-morbidities of aging.”

This could be the first bridge.

UC Berkeley’s Irina Conboy talks parabiosis, plasma dilution, and why young blood may not hold the all answers.

It took many months and tens of thousands of volunteers to gather the data showing that the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.

But what if new vaccines are needed to deal with dangerous variants of the coronavirus? Waiting months is not an attractive option.

So researchers are trying to come up with tests that can be performed using a blood sample that will determine not only whether a vaccine will work but also for how long.

O,.o What a cure for cancer! o.o

Researchers are leveraging the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology used to develop the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for possible treatments for a range of other diseases, including HIV and cancer.

This has long been thought possible with mRNA technology, but infectious diseases were something of the low-hanging fruit, and the COVID-19 pandemic drove the innovations.

Continue reading “MRNA Tech Used in COVID-19 Vaccines Could be Used to Cure HIV, Cancer and More” »