Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,734

For decades, greater than 60% of the human genome was believed to be “junk DNA” that served little or no purpose in the course of human development. Recent research by Colorado State University is challenging this notion to show that junk DNA might be important after all.

A new study, published on June 5 in Aging Cell, found that a portion of noncoding genetic material, called repetitive element transcripts, might be an important biomarker of the aging process.

Tom LaRocca, an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science and faculty member in the Columbine Heath Systems Center for Healthy Aging at CSU, led the study to investigate a growing body of evidence that repetitive elements—transposons and other sequences that occur in multiple copies in the —may become active over time as we age.

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Aubrey interviewed by, um, alien scientists.

Our conversation covers the importance of non-academic institutions in science, strategies for combating for repair the damage of aging, and an exploration of how extending human lifespan will change the Earth. In Dr. de Gray’s perspective, age-related decline is a medical problem like any other that can be treated and cured by cutting edge technology. He’s devoted himself to this pursuit as a founder of the SENS Research Foundation, the Methuselah Foundation, and the medical startup AgeX.

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Support Dr. de Grey & DS when you buy his books:
Ending Aging: https://amzn.to/31Wyo4V
Advocate for An Indefinite Human Lifespan: https://amzn.to/3kPHJUP

SENS Foundation: https://www.sens.org

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Light is notoriously fast. Its speed is crucial for rapid information exchange, but as light zips through materials, its chances of interacting and exciting atoms and molecules can become very small. If scientists can put the brakes on light particles, or photons, it would open the door to a host of new technology applications.

Now, in a paper published on Aug. 17, in Nature Nanotechnology, Stanford scientists demonstrate a new approach to slow light significantly, much like an echo chamber holds onto sound, and to direct it at will. Researchers in the lab of Jennifer Dionne, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, structured ultrathin silicon chips into nanoscale bars to resonantly trap light and then release or redirect it later. These “high-quality-factor” or “high-Q” resonators could lead to novel ways of manipulating and using light, including new applications for quantum computing, virtual reality and augmented reality; light-based WiFi; and even the detection of viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

“We’re essentially trying to trap light in a tiny box that still allows the light to come and go from many different directions,” said postdoctoral fellow Mark Lawrence, who is also lead author of the paper. “It’s easy to trap light in a box with many sides, but not so easy if the sides are transparent—as is the case with many Silicon-based applications.”

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Hong Kong’s biggest container port facility Kwai Tsing Container Terminals has been linked to around 65 coronavirus infection cases, Bloomberg reported.

According to local media outlets, the virus was most probably picked up from communal resting facilities and dormitories, where social distancing measures are difficult to implement as dozens of workers can be confined to the same place at the same time.

Most of the workers were linked to Wang Kee Port Operation Services Ltd. and were predominantly asymptomatic. Around 100 workers have reportedly been quarantined.

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Newswise — Most of modern medicine has physical tests or objective techniques to define much of what ails us. Yet, there is currently no blood or genetic test, or impartial procedure that can definitively diagnose a mental illness, and certainly none to distinguish between different psychiatric disorders with similar symptoms. Experts at the University of Tokyo are combining machine learning with brain imaging tools to redefine the standard for diagnosing mental illnesses.

“Psychiatrists, including me, often talk about symptoms and behaviors with patients and their teachers, friends and parents. We only meet patients in the hospital or clinic, not out in their daily lives. We have to make medical conclusions using subjective, secondhand information,” explained Dr. Shinsuke Koike, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of Tokyo and a senior author of the study recently published in Translational Psychiatry.

“Frankly, we need objective measures,” said Koike.

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Health officials have confirmed a case of plague at South Lake Tahoe — the first in California in five years.

El Dorado County officials said Monday that the California Department of Public Health had notified them of the positive test of a resident who is under medical care while recovering at home.

Plague bacteria are most often transmitted by fleas that have acquired it from infected squirrels, chipmunks and other wild rodents. Dogs and cats may also carry plague-infected fleas.

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Think you don’t need to worry about COVID-19 while using a public restroom? A group of researchers from Yangzhou University in China recently reported that flushing public restroom toilets can release clouds of virus-laden aerosols for you to potentially inhale.

If that’s not cringeworthy enough, after running additional computer simulations, they’ve concluded that flushing urinals does likewise. In Physics of Fluids, the group shares its work simulating and tracking virus-laden particle movements when urinals are flushed.

The researchers’ work clearly shows public restrooms can be dangerous places for potentially becoming infected from a virus, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other work has shown that both feces- and urine-based virus transmission is possible.

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Ogba Educational Clinic

Long before coronavirus appeared and shattered our pre-existing “normal,” the future of work was a widely discussed and debated topic. We’ve watched automation slowly but surely expand its capabilities and take over more jobs, and we’ve wondered what artificial intelligence will eventually be capable of.

The pandemic swiftly turned the working world on its head, putting millions of people out of a job and forcing millions more to work remotely. But essential questions remain largely unchanged: we still want to make sure we’re not replaced, we want to add value, and we want an equitable society where different types of work are valued fairly.

To address these issues—as well as how the pandemic has impacted them—this week Singularity University held a digital summit on the future of work. Forty-three speakers from multiple backgrounds, countries, and sectors of the economy shared their expertise on everything from work in developing markets to why we shouldn’t want to go back to the old normal.

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Aside from staying alive and healthy, the biggest concern most people have during the pandemic is the future of their jobs. Unemployment in the U.S. has skyrocketed, from 5.8 million in February 2020 to 16.3 million in July 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s not only the lost jobs that are reshaping work in the wake of COVID-19; the nature of many of the remaining jobs has changed, as remote work becomes the norm. And in the midst of it all, automation has become potentially a threat to some workers and a salvation to others. In this issue, we examine this tension and explore the good, bad, and unknown of how automation could affect jobs in the immediate and near future.

Prevailing wisdom says that the wave of new AI-powered automation will follow the same pattern as other technological leaps: They’ll kill off some jobs but create new (and potentially better) ones. But it’s unclear whether that will hold true this time around. Complicating matters is that at a time when workplace safety has to do with limiting the spread of a deadly virus, automation can play a role in reducing the number of people who are working shoulder-to-shoulder — keeping workers safe, but also eliminating jobs.

Even as automation creates exciting new opportunities, it’s important to bear in mind that those opportunities will not be distributed equally. Some jobs are more vulnerable to automation than others, and uneven access to reskilling and other crucial factors will mean that some workers will be left behind.

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