Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical

What could once only be imagined in science fiction is now increasingly coming to fruition: Drones can be flown by human brains’ thoughts. Pharmaceuticals can help soldiers forget traumatic experiences or produce feelings of trust to encourage confession in interrogation. DARPA-funded research is working on everything from implanting brain chips to “neural dust” in an effort to alleviate the effects of traumatic experience in war. Invisible microwave beams produced by military contractors and tested on U.S. prisoners can produce the sensation of burning at a distance.

What all these techniques and technologies have in common is that they’re recent neuroscientific breakthroughs propelled by military research within a broader context of rapid neuroscientific development, driven by massive government-funded projects in both America and the European Union. Even while much about the brain remains mysterious, this research has contributed to the rapid and startling development of neuroscientific technology.

And while we might marvel at these developments, it is also undeniably true that this state of affairs raises significant ethical questions. What is the proper role – if any – of neuroscience in national defense or war efforts? My research addresses these questions in the broader context of looking at how international relations, and specifically warfare, are shaped by scientific and medical expertise and technology.

Read more

The CLONED dogs of war: Russia unveils genetically-enhanced canines which will work with Putin’s Special Forces and were created by scientist attempting to restore woolly mammoths

  • The three Belgian Malinois were cloned by a South Korean professor
  • He also aims to one day restore extinct woolly mammoths to Siberia
  • Dr Hwang Woo Suk gifted the dogs — each valued at $100,000 — to police
  • The will be used in Yakutia, the coldest inhabited region in the world

By Will Stewart In Moscow for MailOnline

Read more

Nathaniel David from Unity Biotech giving a talk about the potential of Senolytics and how science can break the natural limit to lifespan. David is the CEO of Unity Biotechnology a company taking SENS based Senolytic drugs into human clinical trials in the next year or so. Very exciting as this is the first true rejuvenation biotechnology therapy to be deployed in humans.

Unity is leading the way for the first rejuvenation technologies in the #sens model. Here we have Nathaniel David from Unity talking about the potential of Senolytics and increased lifespans.

Unity Biotechnology is one of a number of companies developing Senolytic therapies to clear senescent cells from the body and they will no doubt be joined by them in the future a sure sign of the rising interestin the field.

There is however no doubt at this moment in time that Unity is leading the charge and with recent investment from Amazon’s Bezos and their movement into human clinicial trials within a year or so they are certainly the pioneers of this exciting new therapy.

#aging #crowdfundthecure

Read more

A look back at one of the milestones for SRF and the first successful fundraiser on Lifespan.io for MitoSENS.

We need your support at this critical juncture of the MitoSENS project. The MitoSENS team has already demonstrated the rescue of cells containing mitochondrial mutations, and has recently generated highly promising preliminary data showing the rescue of the complete loss of a mitochondrial gene. Our next steps will focus on improving the effectiveness of the targeting system, so that we can repeat our success with one mitochondrial gene to all thirteen. We will then transition this work into animal models of mitochondrial dysfunction. This would be a crucial step in what may be the development of an eventual cure for aging and aging related diseases.

We have a talented team of highly trained mitochondrial biologists working on MitoSENS. Right now the rate-limiting factor is the cost of the expensive reagents that we use for these experiments. Increasing our funding with this campaign will allow us to double the pace of our research and bring results to the public that much faster. We have made preliminary progress on rescuing function with a second gene, ATP6, and your support will help us perfect our targeting of both ATP8 and ATP6. This requires more cells, more viruses, and many new synthetic gene sequences. Specifically, we will spend your generous donations on cell culture reagents, oxygen consumption measurements, virus production, quantitative reverse transcription PCR, DNA synthesis services, and publication of our results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Your support will help take us there.

Read more

The Happy Headband. Take my money.

The Fisher Wallace Stimulator® is a wearable neurostimulation device that is cleared by the FDA to treat depression and anxiety. During each 20-minute treatment session, the device gently stimulates the brain to produce serotonin and other neurochemicals that reduce depression and anxiety (and support healthy mood and sleep). The device has been proven to be safe and effective in multiple published studies conducted at top institutions such as Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital.

Over 6,000 healthcare practitioners, including 2,000 board-certified psychiatrists, have used the device to treat over 20,000 patients since 2009. Most patients experience results within the first two weeks of daily use.

Read more

More results concerning Liz Parrish, this is the important part:

No negative effects have been reported, and there are no visible detrimental effects in blood analysis thus far; providing tentative evidence of safety in the first human test of BioViva’s dual gene therapy strategy.

Biomarker analysis and MRI imaging data from the past year have revealed beneficial metabolic changes and muscle improvement in Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of BioViva USA Inc. and recipient of BioViva’s experimental dual gene therapy in September 2015.

Read more

In Brief

  • Scientist have developed an ingenious means of converting nuclear power plant waste (76,430 metric tons in the US alone) into sustainable diamond batteries.
  • These long-lasting batteries could be a clean and safe way to power spacecraft, satellites, and even medical devices.

Read more

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ySsv5-jSqss

BMI implant leveraging AI.

You probably clicked on this article because the idea of using brain implants to allow artificial intelligence (AI) to read your brain sounds futuristic and fascinating. It is fascinating, but it’s not as futuristic as you might think. Before we start talking about brain implants and how to augment the human brain using AI, we need to put some context around human intelligence and why we might want to tinker with it.

We floated the idea before that gene editing techniques could allow us to promote genetic intelligence by performing gene editing at the germline. That’s one approach. As controversial as it might be, some solid scientific research shows that genetics does play a role in intelligence. For those of us who are already alive and well, this sort of intelligence enhancement won’t work. This is where we might look towards augmented intelligence. This sort of augmentation of the brain will firstly be preventative in that it will look to assist those who have age associated brain disorders as an example. In order for augmented intelligence to be feasible though, we need a read/write interface to the human brain. One company called Kernel might be looking to address this with a technology that takes a page out of science fiction.

kernel logo

Read more