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Category: life extension

Improved muscle stem cell numbers and muscle function in NR-treated aged mice: Newly regenerated muscle fibers 7 days after muscle damage in aged mice (left: control group; right: fed NR). (Scale bar = 50 μm). (credit: Hongbo Zhang et al./Science)

EPFL researchers have restored the ability of mice organs to regenerate and extend life by simply administering nicotinamide riboside (NR) to them.

NR has been shown in previous studies to be effective in boosting metabolism and treating a number of degenerative diseases. Now, an article by PhD student Hongbo Zhang published in Science also describes the restorative effects of NR on the functioning of stem cells for regenerating organs.

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Japanese scientists have reported the first successful skin-to-eye stem cell transplant in humans, where stem cells derived from a patient’s skin were transplanted into her eye to partially restore lost vision.

The patient, a 70-year-old woman diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) – the leading cause of vision impairment in older people – received the experimental treatment back in 2014 as part of a pilot study. Now, closing in on two years after the transplant took place, the scientists are sharing the results.

The researchers took a small piece of skin from her arm (4 mm in diameter) and modified its cells, effectively reprogramming them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC).

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Interesting article by CNET, the leading tech site in traffic, on how a strong science, longevity, and technology platform could end up in Washington in 2016:

CNET exclusive: The only pro-immortality candidate could eventually team up with one of the big names in the race.

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The new entity will focus on a haemophilia pipeline utilising the XTEN half-life extension technology, bispecific antibodies and gene therapies.

Biogen announced yesterday it is planning to spin-out its haemophilia business into an independent, public firm based in Boston, Massachusetts by early next year.

Management said during a conference call this was the right time for a spin-out as Biogen’s haemophilia business has matured.

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When tweaking its architecture, the adult brain works like a sculptor—starting with more than it needs so it can carve away the excess to achieve the perfect design. That’s the conclusion of a new study that tracked developing cells in an adult mouse brain in real time.

New began with a period of overgrowth, sending out a plethora of neuronal branches, before the brain pruned back the connections. The observation, described May 2, 2016 in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that new cells in the have more in common with those in the embryonic brain than scientists previously thought and could have implications for understanding diseases including autism, intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia.

“We were surprised by the extent of the pruning we saw,” says senior author Rusty Gage, a professor in Salk’s Laboratory of Genetics and holder of the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease.

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What would you say if I told you that aging happens not because of accumulation of stresses, but rather because of the intrinsic properties of the gene network of the organism? I’m guessing you’d be like: :o.

So, here’s the deal. My biohacker friends led by Peter Fedichev and Sergey Filonov in collaboration with my old friend and the longevity record holder Robert Shmookler Reis published a very cool paper. They proposed a way to quantitatively describe the two types of aging – negligible senescence and normal aging. We all know that some animals just don’t care about time passing by. Their mortality doesn’t increase with age. Such negligibly senescent species include the notorious naked mole rat and a bunch of other critters like certain turtles and clams to name a few. So the paper explains what it is exactly that makes these animals age so slowly – it’s the stability of their gene networks.

What does network stability mean then? Well, it’s actually pretty straightforward – if the DNA repair mechanisms are very efficient and the connectivity of the network is low enough, then this network is stable. So, normally aging species, such as ourselves, have unstable networks. This is a major bummer by all means. But! There is a way to overcome this problem, according to the proposed math model.

The model very generally describes what happens with a gene network over time – the majority of the genes are actually working perfectly, but a small number doesn’t. There are repair mechanisms that take care of that. Also, there are mechanisms that take care of defected proteins like heat shock proteins, etc. Put together all of this in an equasion and solve it, and bam! here’s an equasion that gives you the Gompertz law for all species that have normal aging, and a time independent constant for the negligibly senescent ones.

What’s the difference between those two aging regimes? The model suggests it’s the right combination of DNA repair efficiency and the combined efficiency of proteolysis and heat shock response systems, mediating degradation and refolding of misfolded proteins. So, it’s not the accumulation of damages that is responsible for aging, but rather the properties of the gene network itself. The good news is that even we are playing with a terrible hand at first, there is a chance we can still win by changing the features of our network and making it stable. For example, by optimizing misfolded protein response or DNA repair.

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Making software immortal; Raytheon is trying to make it a reality.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 2, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — A team led by Raytheon BBN Technologies is developing methods to make mobile applications viable for up to 100 years, despite changes in hardware, operating system upgrades and supporting services. The U.S. Air Force is sponsoring the four-year, $7.8 million contract under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems program.

“Mobile apps are pervasive in the military, but frequent operating system upgrades, new devices and changing missions and environments require manual software engineering that is expensive and causes unacceptable delays,” said Partha Pal, principal scientist at Raytheon BBN. “We are developing techniques to eliminate these interruptions by identifying the way these changes affect application functionality and modifying the software.”

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Ask an Information Architect, CDO, Data Architect (Enterprise and non-Enterprise) they will tell you they have always known that information/ data is a basic staple like Electricity all along; and glad that folks are finally realizing it. So, the same view that we apply to utilities as core to our infrastructure & survival; we should also apply the same value and view about information. And, in fact, information in some areas can be even more important than electricity when you consider information can launch missals, cure diseases, make you poor or wealthy, take down a government or even a country.

What is information? Is it energy, matter, or something completely different? Although we take this word for granted and without much thought in today’s world of fast Internet and digital media, this was not the case in 1948 when Claude Shannon laid the foundations of information theory. His landmark paper interpreted information in purely mathematical terms, a decision that dematerialized information forever more. Not surprisingly, there are many nowadays that claim — rather unthinkingly — that human consciousness can be expressed as “pure information”, i.e. as something immaterial graced with digital immortality. And yet there is something fundamentally materialistic about information that we often ignore, although it stares us — literally — in the eye: the hardware that makes information happen.

As users we constantly interact with information via a machine of some kind, such as our laptop, smartphone or wearable. As developers or programmers we code via a computer terminal. As computer or network engineers we often have to wade through the sheltering heat of a server farm, or deal with the material properties of optical fibre or copper in our designs. Hardware and software are the fundamental ingredients of our digital world, both necessary not only in engineering information systems but in interacting with them as well. But this status quo is about to be massively disrupted by Artificial Intelligence.

A decade from now the postmillennial youngsters of the late 2020s will find it hard to believe that once upon a time the world was full of computers, smartphones and tablets. And that people had to interact with these machines in order to access information, or build information systems. For them information would be more like electricity: it will always be there, and always available to power whatever you want to do. And this will be possible because artificial intelligence systems will be able to manage information complexity so effectively that it will be possible to deliver the right information at the right person at the right time, almost at an instant. So let’s see what that would mean, and how different it would be from what we have today.

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