Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,646

On life extension and risk aversion

A discussion on whether or not extended lifespans might make us paranoid about every tiniest risk.

Some months back, I read “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a really good book, though it did disappoint me significantly when, after discussing the past and the present of our species, the author began glancing towards possible futures. At that point, the impartiality required of a historian, which Harari had thus far managed to keep up more or less evenly throughout the book, gave way to a subtly implied pessimism pervading, among other things, his views on future rejuvenation biotechnology.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting him to even touch upon the subject; I was pleasantly surprised, at least until I realized that his concerns, most of which were the usual ones you’d expect, seemed to make him inclined to see rejuvenation as a plague rather than a blessing.

A curious new concern

Harari presented his concerns but didn’t venture imagining any solutions to them, which I find to be a fatal flaw that pushes readers to assume that they are insolvable and inescapably destined to materialize, and neither of these things is necessarily true.

Early Time-Restricted Feeding Improves Insulin Sensitivity, Blood Pressure, and Oxidative Stress Even without Weight Loss in Men with Prediabetes

Sutton et al. conduct the first supervised controlled feeding trial to test whether intermittent fasting has benefits in humans in the absence of weight loss. Prediabetic men following a form of intermittent fasting called early time-restricted feeding improved their insulin sensitivity, blood pressure, and oxidative stress levels without losing weight.

Seeing is believing: How AI could prevent blindness for 415 million people (right now)

When you take a picture of a cat and Google’s algorithms place it in a folder called “pets,” with no direction from you, you’re seeing the benefit of image recognition AI. The exact same technology is used by doctors to diagnose diseases on a scale never before possible by humans.

Diabetic retinopathy, caused by type two diabetes, is the fastest-growing cause of preventable blindness. Each of the more than 415 million people living with the disease risks losing their eyesight unless they have regular access to doctors.

In countries like India there are simply too many patients for doctors to treat. There are 4,000 diabetic patients for every ophthalmologist in India, where the US has one for every 1,500 patients.

Doctors Replaced a Soldier’s Lost Ear Using a Wild Medical Technique

In a first for United States Army doctors, Burrage received an ear transplant that was grown from her own tissue inside her own body. A team, led by Lieutenant Colonel Owen Johnson III, the chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Texas, harvested cartilage from Burrage’s ribs, carved it into the shape of an ear, and implanted it under the skin in her arm. There, it developed blood vessels, which Johnson says will allow Burrage to regain feeling in the ear once it’s healed. In an announcement released on Monday, Johnson called the operation a success.

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Self-navigating AI learns to take shortcuts: study

A computer programme modelled on the human brain learnt to navigate a virtual maze and take shortcuts, outperforming a flesh-and-blood expert, its developers said Wednesday.

While artificial intelligence (AI) programmes have recently made great strides in imitating human brain processing—everything from recognising objects to playing complicated board games—spatial navigation has remained a challenge.

It requires the recalculation of one’s position, after each step taken, in relation to the starting point and destination—even when travelling a never-before-taken route.

The first smallpox treatment is one step closer to FDA approval

Upcoming anti-viral medication for smallpox…

As bioterrorism fears grow, the first treatment for smallpox is nearing approval.

Called tecovirimat, the drug stops the variola virus, which causes smallpox, from sending out copies of itself and infecting other cells. “If the virus gets ahead of your immune system, you get sick,” says Dennis Hruby, the chief scientific officer of pharmaceutical company SIGA Technologies, which took part in developing the drug. “If you can slow the virus down, your immune system will get ahead.”

An advisory committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended approval of tecovirimat, or TPOXX, on May 1. The FDA is expected to make its decision this summer.

New Wearable Oral Sodium Sensor to Help Fight Hypertension

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have built a flexible, wearable oral sodium sensor that could help monitor a person’s sodium intake.

A leading cause of hypertension is a person’s uncontrolled salt intake. This often results in high blood pressure and heart complications.

As a solution, the Georgia Institute of Technology researchers built the oral sodium sensor that could be easily worn in the mouth to monitor salt intake.

The sensor reportedly incorporates a small, adaptable electronic framework that uses Bluetooth technology to transfer the data about a person’s sodium intake into a mobile device or tablet. On the other hand, the structure of the device is said to be based on an ultrathin, breathable elastomeric membrane.

Future anti-aging drugs could flip a “metabolic switch” to mimic fasting

Fasting has been found to have a range of health benefits, and appears to slow down the aging process. Now, researchers from MIT have found that fasting for just 24 hours is enough to improve the regeneration of a person’s intestinal stem cells, which naturally declines with age. Better yet, with the metabolic switch identified, in the future the effect could be mimicked with a drug.

As with stem cells in all parts of the body, intestinal stem cells are in charge of growing new cells in the organ. They maintain the lining of the intestine, which is shed and replaced every few days, fight off infection and repair damage to the tissue. But as is usually the case, these stem cells get less and less effective at their job with age.

Previous research has found that caloric restriction, or continual fasting, has a profound effect on health and longevity. These effects have been seen in mice, rats, monkeys, lemurs, and other animals, and although human studies haven’t really been conducted, it seems that we could also benefit from harnessing the diet. So the MIT team set out to study the effects of fasting on intestinal stem cells.

Baldness cure could come from side-effect of cancer drug

A cure for baldness could be on the horizon after British scientists discovered that an osteoporosis drug stimulates hair growth three times quicker than other drugs.

Around four in 10 men suffer male pattern baldness by the age of 45 and two thirds by the age of 60.

At the moment only two drugs, minoxidil and finasteride, are available for the treatment of male pattern baldness (androgenetic alopecia) — the classic type of receding hair loss in men.