Past experience matters too. For example, if the last time a person felt a twinge in their lower back it developed into sciatica, with significant pain that took months of therapy to come right, the next time they experience a twinge in their back the person is likely to experience more anxiety and pain. Pain, you see, isn’t an input to the body, rather pain is an output of the brain’s threat detection system.
Another major factor is a person’s current state of mind. They may rate a noxious stimulus differently from day to day, or even within a day. Indeed, from your own experiences, you might appreciate that pain associated with an injury isn’t constant throughout the day.
There’s also significant variation in pain sensitivity and tolerance between people.
Whether we will ever find a way to overcome the physiological trade offs that hold back immortality, or whether we will really be able to replicate human consciousness in a computer are questions too difficult for us yet to answer. But are those leading the charge against death at least inspiring us to lead healthy lives, or are they simply rallying against an inevitable fate?
Long read: How nature is fighting our attempts to use biohacking to live forever.
The seeds of Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted through medical procedures, scientists have found, leading experts to call for the monitoring of blood transfusions from the elderly and those with a family history of dementia.
In 2015, researchers at University College London discovered that people who developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) following treatments with human growth hormone also showed signs of Alzheimer’s in their brains after death.
The scientists tracked down vials of the same hormone and found that it did indeed contain misfolded amyloid-beta proteins, capable of setting off the deadly chain reaction which can lead to dementia.
Today, we present an interview with Reason, the editor of Fight Aging! and co-founder of Repair Biotechnologies. We asked him about the state of rejuvenative therapies, some of which may be available in the near future.
Fight Aging! was the first blog that tackled the science of aging in a serious fashion. Many people still treat it as the go-to site for high-quality information and opinion on the rapidly growing field of biogerontology.
Reason (he goes by only his first name), the brain behind the Fight Aging! blog, has been involved in one way or another with anti-aging science for almost two decades as a writer, researcher, and investor. His new company, Repair Biotechnologies, is focused mainly on halting thymic atrophy and atherosclerosis, which causes about 20 percent of all human deaths.
A longstanding problem in optics holds that an improved resolution in imaging is offset by a loss in the depth of focus. Now, scientists are joining computation with X-ray imaging as they develop a new and exciting technique to bypass this limitation.
The upcoming Advanced Photon Source Upgrade (APS-U) project at Argonne will put this problem under one of the brightest spotlights imaginable. The upgrade will make the APS, a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, 500 times brighter than it is today, further enhancing the capabilities of its X-rays to study the arrangements of atoms and molecules in a wide range of biological and technological materials.
“A whole variety of X-ray imaging experiments ultimately will need something like this as they all push the resolution to finer length scales in the future,” said Chris Jacobsen, an Argonne Distinguished Fellow and professor of physics at Northwestern University. With the Upgrade in place, the APS’s X-rays could allow scientists to study systems like the brain’s full network of synaptic connections, or the entire volume of an integrated circuit down to its finest details.
