Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

News from the world of rejuvenation biotechs.

Gone are—for now—the golden days when I would publish a new post each week. So, for as long as my schedule is going to be this busy, I’ll have to be content with update bundles. I thought I’d let you know about a few news items and interesting things going on in anti-ageing community.

On June 30 LEAF will host their first Journal Club event, with dr Oliver Medvedik. The topic will be the implications of epigenetic alterations on aging and as a primary aging process.

The recurring crowdfunding campaign to support LEAF has reached $1110, thus surpassing the first goal of $1000. The next one is $2000, and it’d be great if you could help us reach it, and advertise the campaign so that others may help too.

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  • Our bodies are biologically based and therefore are not equipped to communicate with electronics efficiently. New research could make it possible to genetically engineer our cells to be able to communicate with electronics.
  • The development has the potential to allow us to eventually build apps that autonomously detect and treat disease.

Microelectronics has transformed our lives. Cellphones, earbuds, pacemakers, defibrillators – all these and more rely on microelectronics’ very small electronic designs and components. Microelectronics has changed the way we collect, process and transmit information.

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Despite the NSA confirming the existence of Skynet, we all should be grateful that technology has not yet advanced to the stage where a liquid metal T-1000 terminator can shape-shift its way into your home and demand to see John Connor.

But scientists in China are making a solid effort make a less sinister version of this scenario at reality, by creating liquid metal droplets that could one day make “self-powered liquid metal machines” a real possibility.

Because of their excellent conductivity, low toxicity, and shape-shifting abilities, liquid metal alloys have been put to good use in targeting cancer cells, creating nature-inspired self-fuelled motors for robots, and many other liquid metal biomaterials.

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But there’s another significant finding: that human split occurred in the eastern Mediterranean and not Africa, as it is believed.

A jawbone discovered by German troops in Athens during the Second World War could be evidence that apes and humans diverged 200,000 years earlier than the current theory says.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are the nearest known relatives to humans, sharing 99 per cent of our DNA. It’s believed that we split between five and seven million years ago.

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A very simple reason why whether or not people want to live ‘forever’ doesn’t matter in the discussion about rejuvenation biotechnologies, plus a couple of thought experiments to better understand the wish to ‘die at some point’ of some.

You don’t want to live forever? Then don’t.

I’m not kidding. It is as simple as that, and I’ll tell you more. If you—or even the entire world, for that matter—don’t want to live forever, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t develop rejuvenation therapies.

Why? Because rejuvenation therapies do not make you immortal. Being forever young only means you don’t get age-related diseases and disabilities, not that you can’t be shot or run over by a truck, or that you can’t kill yourself. On top of that, you don’t have to undergo rejuvenation therapies if you don’t want to. However, while rejuvenation wouldn’t make you immortal, it would give you more control over you life. If you say you know for a fact you want to die at some point, I’m cool with that, but there is no guarantee ageing will kill you just at the right moment. Ageing could easily take you away when you still had tons of things you wanted to do. On the other hand, if you didn’t have to worry about the possibility of such an untimely death, you could very well decide for yourself when and how you want to go, and be relatively sure it’d happen that way.

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Ahead of the fund’s launch on Saturday, Mr. Son said it would focus on investing in sectors including artificial intelligence, smart devices and semiconductors. “We already have lots in the pipeline,” he said. “We are investing into genome sequencing. We are investing in virtual-reality simulations, the games, and so on.”

Japan’s SoftBank Group and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund on Saturday launched the world’s largest technology fund, a nearly $100 billion vehicle that will steer capital to cutting-edge technologies in U.S. startups and other global firms.

In a statement, SoftBank said the fund secured $93 billion of committed capital. The so-called SoftBank Vision Fund is targeting a total of $100 billion within 6 months. The fund’s creation coincides with U.S. President Donald Trump’s two-day visit to Saudi Arabia, where he is…

To Read the Full Story.

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Even the most exciting breakthrough medical treatment can be rendered obsolete by a particularly insurmountable obstacle: time.

If a treatment only works temporarily, it has little chance of making a significant difference in the lives of patients, which is why the latest news from the University of Miami’s Diabetes Research Institute is so exciting.

A year after transplanting insulin-producing islet cells into the omentum of a woman with a particularly unwieldy form of type 1 diabetes, the cells continue to operate as hoped.

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Brain balls sound like something straight out of a Tim Burton movie: starting as stem cells harvested from patients, they eventually develop into masses of living neurons, jumbled together in misshapen blobs.

Just like the developing brain, these neurons stretch and grow, reaching out skinny branches that grab onto others to form synapses—junctions where one neuron talks with the next.

And they do talk: previous attempts at growing these “brain organoids” found that they spark with electrical activity, much like the webs of neurons inside our heads that lead to thoughts and memories.

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Bioprinting new organs and tissues could make transplants available and affordable for all, but is still decades away. In the meantime, scientists have re-purposed the technology to 3D print biocompatible high-precision silicone implants instead.

Soft materials like biological material or silicone are difficult to 3D print because they can’t support themselves like the more rigid plastics typically used by 3D printers. In 2015, Tommy Angelini’s lab at the University of Florida developed a new way of 3D printing soft materials by injecting them into a granular gel similar to hand sanitizer that supports them as they are deposited.

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