Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Year: 2018

Revisiting the most popular life extension science videos of 2017. Here is: “”(Video) Can These Revolutionary Technologies Beat Aging in Our Lifetimes?”

Summary: A new video by Kurzsegat and our friends at Lifespan.io shows several technologies in development that could dramatically slow down aging in the next few years. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts.com. Follow us on Reddit | Google+ | Facebook. Author: Brady Hartman]

This new video from Kurzgesagt presents three technologies close to completion that could make a dramatic impact on our health and how we age.

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Researchers have demonstrated how alcohol damages stem cell DNA in a new study, helping to explain why drinking can increase cancer risk[1′. The study was published in the journal Nature on January 3.

There have been multiple cell culture studies looking at how alcohol promotes cancer, but this study used mice to show how alcohol can cause permanent damage to DNA.

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Gene therapy is not alone in commanding staggering sums, particularly when it comes to treatments for rare diseases. Soliris, a drug that treats a condition called paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria that attacks red blood cells, can cost up to $700,000 a year, while Elaprase, used in the treatment of Hunter syndrome, costs $500,000 a year.

Spark Therapeutics says ‘responsible price’ for Luxturna gene therapy ensures access for patients with retinal defect.

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For the first time, physicists have built a two-dimensional experimental system that allows them to study the physical properties of materials that were theorized to exist only in four-dimensional space. An international team of researchers from Penn State, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Holon Institute of Technology in Israel have demonstrated that the behavior of particles of light can be made to match predictions about the four-dimensional version of the “quantum Hall effect”—a phenomenon that has been at the root of three Nobel Prizes in physics—in a two-dimensional array of “waveguides.”

A paper describing the research appears January 4, 2018 in the journal Nature along with a paper from a separate group from Germany that shows that a similar mechanism can be used to make a gas of exhibit four-dimensional quantum Hall as well.

“When it was theorized that the quantum Hall effect could be observed in four-dimensional space,” said Mikael Rechtsman, assistant professor of physics and an author of the paper, “it was considered to be of purely theoretical interest because the real world consists of only three spatial dimensions; it was more or less a curiosity. But, we have now shown that four-dimensional quantum Hall physics can be emulated using photons—particles of light—flowing through an intricately structured piece of glass—a array.”

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A brand new type of lens called a metalens has just passed a major hurdle. A metalens is a flat surface that use nanostructures to focus light, and it could change optics forever by replacing the traditional bulky, curved lenses we know.

Up until now these ultra-compact lenses have had enormous potential, but they’ve struggled to focus a broad spectrum of light. Well, that just changed.

For the first time researchers have managed to develop a single metalens capable of focusing all the colours of the rainbow – the entire visible spectrum of light, making white light – into one point at a high resolution, something that has required multiple lenses in the past.

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http://www.blogtalkradio.com/biteradiome/2018/01/03/bioquark-inc-tissue-regeneration-with-ira-s-pastor

The technology underpinning the new bionic hand was developed in 2014, but at the time, the equipment necessary to support it was so big the prosthetic limb could not leave the lab.

For Dennis Aabo Sorensen, who lost his hand in 2004 in a firecracker explosion, regaining the experience of touch was “fantastic.” He told CattolicaNews that “being able to feel different textures, understanding whether objects were hard or soft and how I was holding them was just incredible.”

Researchers found that Dennis was able to distinguish between a hard, soft or medium object in 78 percent of cases. In 88 percent of cases, he could correctly describe the size and shape of specific objects such as a baseball, a glass, and a tangerine. Three years later, Almerina has been given the same ability just by carrying a small computer in a backpack.

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You might think that being overweight may cause you health problems only until you finally shed those extra pounds, at which point everything will be fine again. It sounds reasonable, but it might be not so easy. According to a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine on December 27, the negative effects of obesity might last even after that extra weight has been lost.

Yes, it appears that being overweight can have lasting consequences that persist long after the weight comes off. Damage to the hematopoietic stem cells can be caused by being overweight, making it all the more reason to try to maintain a healthy weight as part of your personal health and longevity strategy.

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Next, the technology maturation process, unfolds in a linear fashion with the ultimate objective of transitioning to the NASA program that established the requirement. This process sacrifices science and the ability to iterate fast; does not incentivize providers to develop affordable and systematic capabilities, and the consideration of economic intelligence and market pull is anything but strategic (engagement model with industry is secondary, i.e “work for hire” contracts, and commercialization is serendipitous). As the sole customer, NASA/the government needs to maintain the unique infrastructure needed for these missions and maintains large per mission costs.

While science missions are largely competitive and outcome focused, human missions start by establishing a destination — the political choice of Moon or Mars — often becoming a solution in search of a problem. Since the Apollo era, the overall result of this “swing” approach has basically resulted in “grounding” the human space program, negatively affecting the morale of the working force, and making many feel that it is little more than a job welfare program.

From an HR perspective, NASA, like any other government organization, is a great example of Peter’s principle, structured and incentivized by the slogan “the hierarchy needs to be preserved by all costs”, frequently leading to the alienation or outright removal of highly competent people focused on problem solving and with a desire of seeing accelerated progress.

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