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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,770

In a Transhumanist Future, Everyday Could Be Halloween

In the spirit of Halloween, where ghouls, ghosts, and vampires walk among us, our perception of reality will soon transform as well, forever possessed by the specter of Transhumanism!

Last year, I wrote about how people could transform themselves into one of my favorite horror creatures—a real-life werewolf—using modern science and tech. This merely scratches the surface, however, in terms of how far an individual can go. In a Transhumanist future, you’ll be empowered to not only question the extent of your humanity but equally put those questions into action.

The route one would be able to take would be in abundance. Some will choose a cybernetic route, replacing their organs and limbs for artificial machines, and even potentially adding newer organs and limbs alongside the ones they already have. Others may choose a more biological route by using gene-editing tech and synthetic biology, enhancing themselves at the genetic level and using stem cell therapies to maintain their bodily health for prolong periods of time.

And then there are those who’ll attempt to move far beyond their biological or technological state. Technologies like nanotech, mind uploading, etc. will allow individuals to downscale their physical appearance—or, perhaps, do away with it altogether; to become beams of light cascading across the digital world, living under the embodiment of code. And wherever that code resides, that’ll be your exterior shell. If you were to upload yourself into a smart home, for example, you would become that home, haunted by your digital presence.

There Are More Tiger Types Than We Thought, New Genetic Analysis Reveals

Tigers seem pretty straightforward: stripes, sharp claws, awe-inspiring grace wielded by hundreds of pounds of rippling muscle, fondness of sugary cereal, etc. But new research on the big cats’ DNA is the latest indication that underneath that striking orange and black pelage, not all tigers are the same. Scientists are now reporting that tigers are broken up into six distinct subspecies spread out across Asia.

In endangered species like tigers, pegging down the exact number of subspecies can be pretty important for conservation purposes. Being mindful of how the species is naturally divided up in the wild—and how populations may be evolving independently of one another—can allow conservationists to more effectively manage populations as cohesive units. Global tiger conservation has struggled with this since there’s been plenty of disagreement on how many subspecies even exist.

Interview with Dr. Vera Gorbunova: What can we learn about longevity from the naked mole rat?

In this interview, Vera Gorbunova, Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester and a co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center, talks about our current understanding of the mechanisms behind the longevity and genome stability of exceptionally long-lived mammals and how this knowledge could be used to create therapies to extend healthy human lifespan.

The interview was made by Steve Hill and Elena Milova, members of the board of Lifespan.io.

►This video is presented by LEAF. Please support us by becoming a “Lifespan Hero”: http://lifespan.io/hero

Emerging From the Trance

It seems that opposition against anti-aging medicine may be slowly starting to crumble. For example, Lifespan.io’s current crowdfunding campaign is going extremely well, and journalists begin to talk about senolytics in positive terms, without any predictions of doom and gloom resulting from these upcoming drugs. Make no mistake—the pro-aging trance is still alive and well; for each journalist who puts time and effort into actually understanding senolytics and the health benefits that they are expected to bring to older people, there’s probably five who show little to no knowledge of the subject and rage against unspecified “immortality” technology and related impending catastrophes. This should tell us something about the kind of understanding they have of what they criticize—or how badly they need a clickbait piece to bring in visitors.

Today, the pro-aging trance is something that only rejuvenation advocates are aware of and battle against, but maybe, fifty years from now, it will be an interesting phenomenon of the past for psychologists to figure out. Maybe, on the YouTube of 2068, there will be videos making fun of it in pretty much the same way that some people today make fun of the old belief that hysteria was caused by stray uteruses wandering around women’s bodies.

The pro-aging trance is rather interesting indeed, as people who are subject to it tend to commit fallacies that they would never commit in other contexts. A very good example of this is the objection to inequality of access: this reasoning assumes that rejuvenation would not be available to everyone who needs it, for economical, political, or whatever reasons; understandably, this is perceived as a profound injustice, which pushes a fair number of people to make a leap and conclude that the best way to avoid this injustice is to never develop rejuvenation to begin with.

You are the company you keep—A new screening method detects direct biomolecule interactions

Proteins are the building blocks of the cell. They do most of the work and are essential for the structure, function and dynamic regulation of the cell and body’s tissues and organs. Proteins rarely work alone, they interact, form protein complexes or bind DNA and RNA to control what a cell does. These complexes are key pieces of many important reactions within the cell, such as energy metabolism or gene regulation. Any change in those interactions, which can for example be caused by a mutation, can make the difference between health and disease. Hence, for understanding how cells operate, or what might go wrong in ill cells, it is essential to know how their building blocks interact.

New technologies allowed scientists during the last decades to understand the genetic information an organism possess, which of this information is actively used and which proteins are made by the cell in different circumstances. Now it is a big challenge to understand how biomolecules such as proteins and RNA messenger molecules combine to form the complexes required for a functional cell. In other words, we know the ten thousands of parts a cell is build off, but we don’t know how they belong together.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) describe the development of a new method, named “rec-YnH”, which was designed to understand the complexes formed between hundreds of proteins and RNAs at the same time.

DNA ‘dances’ in first explanation of how genetic material flows through a nucleus

“Previous work mostly focused on what was going on at the microscale of DNA,” says study co-author Michael Shelley, group leader for biophysical modeling at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology in New York City and co-director of the Courant Institute’s Applied Mathematics Laboratory at New York University. “People didn’t really think about what was going on at the larger scale.”

Shelley and colleagues simulated the motions of chromatin, the functional form of DNA inside the nucleus. Chromatin looks like beads on a string, with ball-like clusters of genetic material linked by strands of DNA. The researchers propose that molecular machines along the DNA cause segments of the chromatin to straighten and pull taut. This activity aligns neighboring strands to face the same direction. That alignment, in turn, results in a cascading waltz of genetic material shimmying across the nucleus.

The dancing DNA may play a role in gene expression, replication and remodeling, though the exact effects remain unclear, the researchers reported online October 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Main Suspect Behind an Ominous Spike in a Polio-Like Illness

A common virus seems to be behind a puzzling condition that’s paralyzing children, but uncertainties remain.

A s the summer of 2014 gave way to fall, Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, started seeing a wave of children with inexplicable paralysis. All of them shared the same story. One day, they had a cold. The next, they couldn’t move an arm or a leg. In some children, the paralysis was relatively mild, but others had to be supported with ventilators and feeding tubes after they stopped being able to breathe or swallow on their own.

The condition looked remarkably like polio—the viral disease that is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. But none of the kids tested positive for poliovirus. Instead, their condition was given a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. That year, 120 people, mostly young children, developed the condition across 34 states. The cases peaked in September and then rapidly tailed off.

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