Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

George Church is very interested in your memories now.

Harvard researcher George Church is looking for people with exceptionally good memory to take part in a study aimed at finding genetic mechanisms that boost memory in research that could one day result in better drugs or diagnostic tests.

Church and other researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School’s Personal Genome Project, in collaboration with Lumos Labs — the makers of the brain-training game Lumosity — will look for common genetic markers in individuals with exceptional memories, attention and reaction speeds.

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Inside a Boston lab just a few miles away from MIT, a team of PhDs is building tools for a future where factories are powered by biology, not traditional manufacturing. The startup, Ginkgo Bioworks, currently helps clients design flavors and fragrances by modifying the DNA of microbes like yeast. Once the yeast have been tweaked to produce a particular scent as a byproduct, they can be brewed like beer and the smell can be extracted and bottled — which reduces the client’s need to depend on natural resources for ingredients. (video by: Alan Jeffries, Victoria Blackburne-Daniell, Drew Beebe) (Source: Bloomberg)

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Part man, part machine: Researchers at the University of Oxford are making The Terminator a reality.

Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr, of the Oxford Musculoskeletal Biomedical Research Unit, test medical technology by dressing robots in human flesh.

The cyborgs “wear” tissue grafts to help develop artificial muscles and tendons before transplantation.

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Coffee turns up some interesting properties and it isnt the caffeine in that is the star of the show.

Could coffee be a geroprotector?

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Many people like to start the day with a hot cup of coffee to help get their motor running, but there could be more to this popular beverage than meets the eye. Nothing quite like the taste of hot fresh coffee and it is no surprise it has been the drink of choice in many cultures for centuries. Coffee has also long been associated with having geroprotective properties, meaning it is a substance that protects against the aging process.

A number of epidemiologic studies suggest that drinking coffee can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Based on the cardiovascular risk factors, aging and dementia studies, the consumption of 3–5 cups of coffee a day is associated with a reduced risk for Alzheimer’s in later life. Some studies have suggested the reason coffee is beneficial is due to caffeine and its antioxidant properties, however a study in 2015 found there was no significant difference between caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee so something else other than caffeine must be responsible for its protective properties.

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A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego and La Jolla-based startup Nanovision Biosciences Inc. have developed the nanotechnology and wireless electronics for a new type of retinal prosthesis that brings research a step closer to restoring the ability of neurons in the retina to respond to light. The researchers demonstrated this response to light in a rat retina interfacing with a prototype of the device in vitro.

They detail their work in a recent issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering. The technology could help tens of millions of people worldwide suffering from neurodegenerative diseases that affect eyesight, including macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa and loss of vision due to diabetes.

Despite tremendous advances in the development of over the past two decades, the performance of devices currently on the market to help the blind regain functional vision is still severely limited—well under the acuity threshold of 20/200 that defines legal blindness.

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Yorktown Heights, N.Y. — 06 Mar 2017: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems. “IBM Q” quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform. While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers.

IBM Quantum Computing Scientists Hanhee Paik (left) and Sarah Sheldon (right) examine the hardware inside an open dilution fridge at the IBM Q Lab at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, NY. On Monday, March 6, IBM announced that it will build commercially available universal quantum computing systems. IBM Q quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform and will be designed to tackle problems that are too complex and exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle. One of the first and most promising applications for quantum computing will be in the area of chemistry and could lead to the discovery of new medicines and materials. IBM aims at constructing commercial IBM Q systems with ~50 qubits in the next few years to demonstrate capabilities beyond today’s classical systems, and plans to collaborate with key industry partners to develop applications that exploit the quantum speedup of the systems. (Connie Zhou for IBM)

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I thought this interesting enough to share:

Zoltan Istvan

Zoltan Istvan was my favorite presidential candidate in 2016. He toured the country in a bus modeled to look like a coffin, with the message that death is a curable disease.

And it’s not just people on the fringe who are involved in the anti-aging cause. There is a sister company of Google called Calico whose goal is “tackling aging.”

Ray Kurzweil, inventor, senior engineer at Google and holder of 21 honorary doctorates, has written a book called Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. At age 69, he expects technology to improve enough in his lifetime that he will live forever. (In the meantime, he takes extremely good care of himself!)

But hold on a second. While we’re waiting for Istvan, Calico, and Kurzweil succeed, let’s take a moment to ponder the possible dystopian consequences.

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