“You could produce artificial proteins with unnatural amino acids,” he proposed. But the artificial proteins could be “not just to prep, pull out the cell, and purify as a drug, but to work within the cell to bestow it with new functions,” he added.
Researchers generate an organism that can replicate artificial base pairs indefinitely.
Did Carl Sagan really warn about a time in the future when manufacturing jobs would slip away, when the average person would have virtually no control over their political lives, and when we would all cling to superstitions? Yes, Sagan did predict just that. The screenshot you may have seen floating around social media is real. And plenty of people are worried that Carl was talking about our era.
Answers to rejuvenation objections #1: The Tithonus Error.
We certainly agree on this one! Living longer when your body keeps falling apart would suck big time, but that is not what rejuvenation is about. In fact, it is about preventing that from happening, in the short and long runs alike.
I probably have made the above concept clear enough on the website as a whole, but then again dealing with it separately in the objections section may be a good idea. In case anyone hasn’t read the explanations on ageing and rejuvenation first and jumps directly to the answers to objections, they might not get the full picture and think we’re just trying to make people live longer without curing them of the ill health of old age.
The concern of more life in a sicker body is well illustrated by the greek myth of Tithonus. In short, Tithonus was a mortal who was in love with Eos, the titan of the dawn. She fancied him back, but they had a problem: As a deity, she was immortal, but Tithonus was not. One day he’d give up the ghost and their idilly would be broken. Thus, Eos pleaded with Zeus to make Tithonus immortal as well. Problem solved, right? Yeah, not really.
Continue reading “Living longer in a decrepit body would be bad” »
Turning cancer cells into zombie cells then destroying them with senolytic therapy for a double whammy against cancer!
Using a combination of therapies to turn cancer cells into non-dividing zombie cells then destroying them with could soon become the way we treat cancer without the need for harsh chemotherapy.
#aging #cancer
If you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in energy, you should. We’ve seen this movie before. Spoiler alert: There’s massive economic opportunity ahead. How massive? Imagine standing in 1992, knowing that Google, Akamai, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, BuzzFeed and Uber lay ahead.
This time it’s the “enernet,” not the internet, that will transform our lives. The story is the same, though the players have changed.
Here’s the tee up. Across the country, incumbent network providers operate highly centralized networks in their respective cities. Then, scrappy local outfits start serving the market with innovative, distributed technology. These startups create competition, and a new network emerges atop the legacy network.
Carrie Fisher just died but she will likely come back to life because the Singularity is Near and is bringing Singularity CGI with it!
In the latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One, five characters were brought back as they would have looked between episodes 3 and 4 of Star Wars. They were Princess Leia, Grand Moff Tarkin, Dr. Cornelius Evazan (who said “I have the death sentence on twelve systems” in episode 4), General Dodonna, and Mon Mothma. General Dodonna and Mon Mothma were brought back with the traditional method of using actors who looked similar to the original actors. The other three were brought back with CGI (computer-generated imagery), more specifically CGI enhanced with motion capture.
In Brief
Concealing objects in direct light is already a difficult feat. While there is ongoing research into invisibility cloaks of some form or other, researchers at the Public University of Navarre (NUP/UPNA) and the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) are taking a not-so-straightforward approach. In particular, they are interested in developing a cloaking mechanism that works by bending light.
The team, whose work is published in the journal Physical Review A, has worked on simulations of an invisibility technology that conceals objects in diffusive atmospheres. This kind of invisibility, based on their study, can be achieved by surrounding an object with a special material that’s capable of bending light around it.
Continue reading “Scientists Have Made a New Kind of Invisibility Cloak” »
Bullfights arouse strong feelings on both sides. Their aficionados see them as a place of near reverence, where animal and man engage in an athletic dance summoning the shadows of mankind’s struggles for both dominance over and stewardship of his natural counterparts. Opponents of the sport decry its violence and bloodshed, the unnecessary cruelty of what they see as a prolonged infliction of torture upon one of our planet’s fellow creatures. In 2012, Catalonia, the region of Spain that contains Barcelona, agreed more with the latter characterization than the former and banned the sport.
