Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Month: March 2019

NEW YORK (AP) — Somewhere in the Midwest, a restaurant is frying foods with oil made from gene-edited soybeans. That’s according to the company making the oil, which says it’s the first commercial use of a gene-edited food in the U.S.

Calyxt said it can’t reveal its first customer for competitive reasons, but CEO Jim Blome said the oil is “in use and being eaten.”

The Minnesota-based company is hoping the announcement will encourage the food industry’s interest in the oil, which it says has no trans fats and a longer shelf life than other soybean oils. Whether demand builds remains to be seen, but the oil’s transition into the food supply signals gene editing’s potential to alter foods without the controversy of conventional GMOs, or genetically modified organisms.

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Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees on the #Future: Prospects for #Humanity https://www.singularityweblog.com/martin-rees/ #AI #Singularity #Futurism

Martin Rees has been concerned with our ever-heavier ‘footprint’ on the global environment and with the runaway consequences of our powerful technologies.

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Quantum computers need to preserve quantum information for a long time to be able to crack important problems faster than a normal computer. Energy losses take the state of the qubit from one to zero, destroying stored quantum information at the same time. Consequently, scientists all over the globe have traditionally worked to remove all sources of energy loss—or dissipation—from these machines.

Dr. Mikko Mottonen from Aalto University and his research team have taken a different approach. “Years ago, we realized that quantum computers actually need dissipation to operate efficiently. The trick is to have it only when you need it,” he explains.

In their paper to be published on 11 March 2019 in Nature Physics, scientists from Aalto University and the University of Oulu demonstrate that they can increase the dissipation rate by a factor of thousand in a high-quality superconducting resonator on demand—such resonators are used in prototype quantum computers.

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Press Release for Aging Analytics Agency and Vetek Association’s new 500+ page open-access report on the Longevity Industry in Israel, featuring quotes from Nir Barzilai MD, the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Rafi Eitan, former chairman of the Israel Pensioners’ Party “GIL”, founding minister of the Israel Ministry for Senior Citizens, and the current chairman of Vetek Association, Ilia Stambler, the Chief Science Officer of Vetek Association and Eric Kihlstrom, Director of Aging Analytics Agency and former Interim Director of the £98-million Healthy Ageing Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

Link to the Press Release: http://analytics.dkv.global/data/pdf/Longevity-in-Israel/Longevity_in_Israel_-_Press_Release.pdf

Link to the Report: https://www.aginganalytics.com/longevity-in-israel

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Waking up during surgery – it’s terrifying to think about. But it does happen. There is evidence that around 5 per cent of people may experience so-called anaesthesia awareness at some point on the operating table, though not everyone remembers it.

Living through such an event can be traumatic and painful. So what can be done to prevent it?

Anaesthetists have a few tools that can open a channel of communication while a patient is paralysed by neuromuscular blocking drugs.

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Today we have some clips and commentary from the SENS Webinar we did back in January where we asked Dr. Aubrey de Grey about his prediction for robust mouse and human rejuvenation and got a positive answer!

On January 28, 2019, we held a webinar with the SENS Research Foundation as part of a new ongoing series of research webinars. During the webinar, we asked Dr. Aubrey de Grey how close we might be to achieving robust mouse rejuvenation (RMR) and robust human rejuvenation, and his answer was somewhat surprising.

RMR is defined as reproducibly trebling the remaining lifespan of naturally long-lived (~3 years average lifespan) mice with therapies begun when they are already two years old.

Dr. de Grey now suggests that there is a 50/50 chance of achieving robust mouse rejuvenation within 3 years from now; recent interviews and conversation reveal that he’d adjusted this figure down from 5–6 years. He has also moved his estimation of this to arrive from around 20 years to 18 years for humans.

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