Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, scientists have used cellular reprogramming to reverse the ageing process in living animals, enabling mice with a form of premature ageing to live 30 percent longer than control animals.

The technique involves the use of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which lets scientists reprogram skin cells to a base, embryonic-like state. From there, iPSCs can develop into other types of cells in the body – and now researchers have shown that reprogramming cells can also rejuvenate living creatures, in addition to winding back cells.

Continue reading “Cellular Reprogramming Has Been Used to Reverse Ageing in Living Animals for the First Time” »

Getting old may not be inevitable — scientists have found a way to turn back the clock on human and animal cells, making them look and behave like younger versions of themselves.

The researchers also used the method to treat mice with a rare disease that causes them to age prematurely and die early, and found that the method increased the animals’ lifespan by 30 percent. And, when normal mice received the treatment, they appeared to be rejuvenated, with some of their cells healing faster than normal in response to injury.

The researchers said that their findings may help scientists better understand the process of aging. One day, it may be possible to use a similar approach to ward off age-related diseases in humans, and thus improve people’s health and increase their lifespan, they said.

Continue reading “Aging May Be Reversible: Researchers Rejuvenate Older Mice” »

It’s 3 AM on a warm Thursday night in December, a usually quiet street in the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona is bustling with activity, as a cohort of 200 artificial intelligence researchers leave in single-file out of a sprawling yellow mansion. The police count heads as the researchers film the procession on their phones and tweet #rocketai.

The guest list looked like the results of a search for most popular AI authors on arXiv. Every major corporate and academic AI lab was in attendance — Google DeepMind, Open AI, Facebook AI Research, Google Brain, Stanford University, MIT, U of Montreal, as well as a multitude of other AI start-ups and investors from around the world — all in town for the 30th annual NIPS conference.

NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) has become the academic and industry AI conference, growing near-exponentially over the past decade as corporate sponsors fight to keep the loyalty of their engineers and aggressively recruit others. Corporates plan months in advance to parade their capital expenditure and technical talent. Tickets for the main conference, despite nearly doubling in quantity since last year, sold out more than 6 weeks before the event.

Continue reading “Rocket AI: 2016’s Most Notorious AI Launch and the Problem with AI Hype – The Mission – Medium” »

Scientists at NASA are designing airplane wings that can change shape mid-flight. Much like a bird’s feathers, the wings would move autonomously giving the pilot an incredible amount of control in the air.

Dr. Matthew O’Connor from the SENS Research Foundation gives a fascinating talk about this years successful results of the mitochondrial repair project (MitoSENS) and the potential for repairing age-related damage to the mitochondria that SENS proposes. 2017 could be an even better year for progress, please consider donating to the SRF Winter Fundraiser and help them make age-related disease a thing of the past.

Please take a few minutes to watch SENS Research Foundation’s Matthew O’Connor give a Google TechTalk during Google’s Giving Week campaign. The topic is his recently published article on our MitoSENS Research. If you enjoy this presentation and support our work please go to our website and donate today. Your support is critical to our success. You can donate at www.sens.org/donate

Continue reading “Rejuvenating the Mitochondria” »

This machine will remove snow all by itself.

The team showed that a new form of gene therapy produced a remarkable rejuvenating effect in mice. After six weeks of treatment, the animals looked younger, had straighter spines and better cardiovascular health, healed quicker when injured, and lived 30% longer.

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who led the work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, said: “Our study shows that ageing may not have to proceed in one single direction. With careful modulation, ageing might be reversed.”

Continue reading “Ageing process may be reversible, scientists claim” »

Excellent article by Nick Gillespie, Editor-in Chief of Reason. Genetic editing is so far the 21st Century’s most important science—and it’s already being challenged by many as too radical: http://reason.com/blog/2016/12/15/will-gene-editing-technologies-spark-the #transhumanism #CRISPR #Future

The folks behind CRISPR gene editing were runners-up for Time’s Person of the Year. Their creation may win the future for secular China.

Continue reading “Will Gene-Editing Technologies Spark the Next Cold War? They Already Have” »

It is looking increasingly likely the mysterious Google Calico have very modest ambitions regarding increased lifespans for humans given the comments made by Dr. Aubrey de Grey and others and the direction they are taking with their research. Modest increases of lifespan over the kind of robust therapies of SENS seems pretty dissapointing.

More about Google Calico and their aim to modestly increase lifespan. People like Dr. Aubrey de Grey and Nathaniel David from rising biotech star Unity.

“To some, Calico’s heavy bet on basic biology is a wrong turn. The company is “my biggest disappointment right now,” says Aubrey de Grey, an influential proponent of attempts to intervene in the aging process and chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation, a charity an hour’s drive from Calico that promotes rejuvenation technology. It is being driven, he complains, “by the assumption that we still do not understand aging well enough to have a chance to develop therapies.” Indeed, some competitors are far more aggressive in pursuing interventions than Calico is.

Continue reading “Can naked mole rats teach us the secrets to living far longer? Google thinks so” »