Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Month: September 2018

Researchers don’t know much about whether people who aren’t diabetic should avoid having glucose spikes after meals, or whether, by contrast, average glucose levels are more important — things that need to be studied, he said.

“They’re right to be asking it. I don’t have data to give guidance on how to interpret it,” Bergenstal said. “I think they’re right to say it can’t be bad if I keep my blood sugars more stable. It’s a reasonable assumption, but we don’t have the data for it.”

It’s generally accepted that non-diabetics are better able to regulate their glucose levels. A higher than normal level, meanwhile, indicates prediabetes. But a new study out of Stanford University in late July that used CGMs on 57 participants, including diabetics and non-diabetics, had a surprising finding.

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ATLANTA—A molecule produced during fasting or calorie restriction has anti-aging effects on the vascular system, which could reduce the occurrence and severity of human diseases related to blood vessels, such as cardiovascular disease, according to a study led by Georgia State University.

“As people become older, they are more susceptible to disease, like cancer, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Ming-Hui Zou, senior author of the study, director of the Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine at Georgia State and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Molecular Medicine. “Age is the most important so-called risk factor for human disease. How to actually delay aging is a major pathway to reducing the incident and severity of human disease.

”The most important part of aging is vascular aging. When people become older, the vessels that supply different organs are the most sensitive and more subject to aging damage, so studying vascular aging is very important. This study is focused on vascular aging, and in old age, what kind of changes happen and how to prevent vascular aging.”

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Many congrats to @Enrico Dini 🔝🍾🎉🎉🎉🥇Enrico reached that outcome after an eclectic professional path: a graduate of Civil Engineering at Pisa University, Enrico has spent his entire career in automation and robotics. In 2004, Enrico envisioned the endless potential of the use of additive manufacturing techniques at architectural scale as a means to affordably reach architectural beauty. Since then, Enrico has dedicated his entire professional career in the pursuit of his passion to 3D print beautiful architecture.

At the Digital Concrete 2018 Conference, several awards will be presented. Award categories include: Best Proceedings Paper, Best Presentation, and Best Poster. Each category will have an award encompassing all entries, and one for students only. The awards will be given at the conference closing on Wednesday, 12 September, before lunch.

In addition, two Pioneering Achievement Awards will be given to two pioneers in the field of digital fabrication with concrete, Prof. Behrokh Khoshnevis and Enrico Dini. Information for the two awardees is seen below.

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From the perspective of critics, there are many reasons to be concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence.

Billionaire inventor Elon Musk — perhaps the world’s most vocal AI antagonist — has warned that the technology could become “an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.”

Several years before his death, Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist, said artificial intelligence could bypass biological evolution, leaving humans unable to compete.

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The world’s largest offshore windfarm has officially opened. The project commanding the Numero Uno status is the Walney Extension. An official inauguration was marked as September 6, and it now means that the Walney Extension overtakes the London Array as the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

How large? Stats say the farm, located in the Irish Sea off the Walney Island coast in Cumbria, covers an area of around 145 sq km (55 square miles). Project watchers are talking electricity for nearly 600,000 UK homes. It’s especially being touted as having been built on time and on budget.

It’s also being described as a “659-megawatt .” The Danish company Orsted, PKA and PFA are the names behind this project.

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When we think of robots manipulating objects, we tend to think of endless banks of robot arms in some high-tech assembly line, dancing their mechanical dance in perfect synchronization. They grab an object, turn it round a bit, and put it down again, before repeating the action with an identical object time and again. But what if a robot could look at any item, and decide how best to pick it up, and perform tasks with it, all by itself? That’s the aim of DON – a new neural network and robotic hand at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

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Just a few years after launching its Multi Jet Fusion 3D printer, HP is ready to get into the world of 3D metal printing with Metal Jet, a new commercial platform. (Did you expect it to be called anything else?) While the consumer buzz around 3D printing seems to be cooling off, it’s still a useful technology for large scale manufacturing — especially when it comes to metallic components. The usual benefits of 3D printing still apply: It can be both significantly faster and cheaper than traditional methods.

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Today, we are going to take a look at the topic of NAD+, its precursor, nicotinamide mononucleotide, and the debate surrounding the ability of these molecules to pass through the cell membrane.

NAD+ is critical for cellular function

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is a redox cofactor, but it is also a critical signaling molecule that regulates cell function and survival in response to environmental changes such as nutrient intake and cellular damage. Age-related changes to the level of NAD+ in the cell impacts mitochondrial function, nutrient sensing and metabolism, redox reactions, circadian rhythm, immune and inflammatory responses, DNA repair, cell division, protein-to-protein signaling, chromatin, and epigenetics.

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Why the spike? For years, doctors doled out antibiotics willy-nilly. Even today, up to half of all prescribed antibiotics are unnecessary or used ineffectively.

Whenever antibiotics are used, some mutant bacteria survive. But the more an antibiotic is used, the more rapidly bacteria become resistant, reducing the effectiveness of the drug.

New treatments for superbugs are needed, but there have been no major novel antibiotic developments since the 1960s. That’s largely because pharmaceutical companies are abandoning antibiotic research. It’s time-consuming and expensive to bring a new drug to market — it takes about ten years and $2.9 billion, on average. So companies develop drugs that will make as much money as possible. Since drugs for chronic diseases make people life-long subscribers, and antibiotics are “one and done,” developers opt to make the former. Moreover, growing antibiotic resistance reduces the effective lifespan of new drugs, further limiting profits.

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