Lifeboat Foundation

Come “ask me anything” right now!!! I’m trying to answer all questions I get asked:

Hi Reddit,

Thank you for having me here. My name is Zoltan Istvan, and I’m a futurist, journalist, and science fiction writer. I’m also the 2016 Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party.

Continue reading “AMA: I’m Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist US Presidential Candidate. Ask me anything!! : Futurology” »

Everything you wanted to know about gene editing but were affraid to ask!

Researchers at the University of California in San Diego have found a way to use gene editing technology to target RNA in living cells.

Aging leads to diseases and ultimately death. Time for people to ditch the semantics and recognise that aging and disease are not two mysterious independent processes but are in fact one and the same.

Aging leads to the diseases of aging and the discussion is largely a matter of semantics.

“The concept of aging is undergoing a rapid transformation in medicine. The question has long been asked: Is aging a natural process that should be accepted as inevitable, or is it pathologic, a disease that should be prevented and treated? For the vast majority of medicine’s history, the former position was considered a self-evident truth. So futile was any attempt to resist the ravages of aging that the matter was relegated to works of fantasy and fiction. But today, the biomedical community is rethinking its answer to this question.

Continue reading “Aging, Just Another Disease” »

Science is making progress on the treatment of aging and age-releated diseases but should you rush out and start your own testing or not? This article weighs up some of the pros and cons.

Senescent cells accumulate with age, and secrete an unfortunate combination of signals that harms organs and tissues in numerous ways, such as via the production of increased chronic inflammation. This is one of the root causes of aging and age-related disease. Safe and effective clearance of senescent cells has been on the SENS rejuvenation biotechnology agenda for fifteen years, but only recently has progress in scientific funding and demonstrations of improved health and life spans in mice snowballed to the point at which startup companies could make a real go of it. Things are moving fairly rapidly in this field now. With the recent $116 million venture investment in UNITY Biotechnology’s work on senescent cell clearance, and other companies angling for their own launch, it is fair to say that this line of research and development is underway for real. Clinical trials of senescent cell clearance will be underway soon, funded by UNITY Biotechnology, and using drug candidates such as navitoclax developed in the cancer research community, noted for their ability to induce apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death. Senescent cells are primed for apoptosis, and it takes little to tip them over the edge in comparison to a normal somatic cell, which means that there may well be quite a large stable of existing drugs that will have some useful effect.

The question here is one that is only now starting to be useful to ask: should we all be running out today to obtain and take a drug (such as navitoclax) or drug combination (such as dasatinib and quercetin) that were shown to clear some fraction of senescent cells in rodents? Certainly there have been no shortage of people chasing after whatever the current hype of the day was in past years; I’m sure you all recall resveratrol and other alleged calorie restriction mimetics or telomere length enhancers. All a waste of time and effort. The difference between the science behind those and the science between senescent cell clearance is considerable, however. The items of the past have all been associated with altering metabolism so as to modestly slow aging, at best, and we have the very good examples of calorie restriction and exercise to show us the immediate bounds of the plausible on that front in our species.

Continue reading “On the Topic of Senescent Cells: Should We All be Trying to Take Navitoclax?” »

The SRF November newsletter is out now!

SENS Research Foundation email newsletter from 1st November 2016.

For the first time, researchers have achieved superconductivity — the phenomenon of electrical conductivity with zero resistance — in a material that’s not a superconductor.

The new technique demonstrates a concept that was first proposed back in the 1970s, but until now had never been proven, and it could lead to ways to make existing superconductors, like the ones used in MRI machines or maglev trains, cheaper and more efficient at higher temperatures.

“Superconductivity is used in many things, of which MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is perhaps the best known,” said lead researcher Paul C. W. Chu from the University of Houston.

Continue reading “Physicists have achieved superconductivity in a non-superconductive material” »

Rattling around inside a hard drive doesn’t sound like an awful lot of fun — but then, neither does death.

Both eventualities are rather difficult to imagine, but we’ll all have to give them some thought sooner rather than later. Neuroscientist and neuroengineer Randal Koene thinks it’s only going to be another 10 years before we replace parts of the brain with prosthetics.

From there, it’s just a matter of replacing each region systematically, to end up with someone whose brain is immortal and electronic. Could the last person to die have already been born?

Continue reading “Would You Like to Be Uploaded to a Computer When You Die?” »

In a newly published study, nanoscientists look ahead to what we can expect in the coming decade, and conclude that nanoscience is poised to make important contributions in many areas, including health care, electronics, energy, food and water.

Nanoscience research involves molecules that are only 1/100th the size of cancer cells and that have the potential to profoundly improve the quality of our health and our lives. Now nine prominent nanoscientists look ahead to what we can expect in the coming decade, and conclude that nanoscience is poised to make important contributions in many areas, including health care, electronics, energy, food and water.

Significant progress has already been made in nanomaterials, report authors Paul Weiss, who holds a UC presidential chair and is a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA, and Dr. Andre Nel, chief of nanomedicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In the journal ACS Nano, Weiss, Nel, who is a distinguished professor of medicine, and their colleagues say the following:

Continue reading “How Nanoscience Will Improve Our Lives in the Coming Years” »

Ready to leave your body behind? Scientists have developed robots that people can remotely control and embody using their minds, a breakthrough set to revolutionize the lives of paralyzed patients. The Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-Embodiment (VERE) project “aims at dissolving the boundary between the human body and surrogate representations in immersive virtual reality and physical reality,” meaning that people genuinely feel like the surrogate body is an extension of themselves. Three volunteers have tried out a prototype, and the results are promising.

“The feeling of actually embodying the robot was good, although needless to say, the sensation varied over time,” said Alessandro, a volunteer on the project, in an interview published Wednesday. “When the robot was stationary, the feeling of embodiment was low, but the moment I gave the first command or changed direction, there was this feeling of control and increased embodiment.”

The three volunteers, based in Italy, placed an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap on their heads that scanned for brain activity through the scalp. Patients were given a video feed of what a robot in Japan could see, superimposed with arrows. When the wearer focused on one arrow, the machine was able to detect the signal and send it remotely to the robot.

Continue reading “VERE’s Mind Control Robots Give Patients Out-of-Body Experience” »