Activating a protein called sirtuin 1 extends lifespan, delays the onset of age-related metabolic diseases, and improves general health in mice. The findings, which appear online February 27 in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports, point to a potentially promising strategy for improving health and longevity.
Sirtuin 1, or SIRT1, is known to play an important role in maintaining metabolic balance in multiple tissues, and studies in… read more
An observational study from UCLA‘s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found that prostate cancer patients who undergo robotic-assisted prostate surgery have fewer instances of cancer cells at the edge of their surgical specimen and less need for additional cancer treatments like hormone or radiation therapy than patients who have traditional “open” surgery.
The study, published online Feb. 19 in the journal European Urology, was led… read more
An international team led by researchers at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has identified mutations in a gene that can reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, even in people who have risk factors such as obesity and old age.
The results focus the search for developing novel therapeutic strategies for type 2 diabetes; if a drug can be developed that mimics the… read more
Human Longevity Inc. (HLI), a genomics and cell therapy-based diagnostic and therapeutic company focused on extending the healthy, high performance human life span, was announced today by co-founders J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., Robert Hariri, M.D., Ph.D., and Peter H. Diamandis, M.D.
The company, headquartered in San Diego, California, is being capitalized with an initial $70 million in investor funding.
Largest human sequencing… read more
Vienna University of Technology researchers have created a two-dimensional “electron gas” in strontium titanate. In a thin layer formed by the gas just below the surface, electrons can move freely and occupy different quantum states.
The new material represents a potential future alternative to standard semiconductors. Strontium titanate or other metal oxides could also exhibit other novel phenomena, such as superconductivity, thermoelectricity (converting heat to electricity), or magnetic… read more
UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have created new nerve cells in the brains and spinal cords of living mammals without the need for stem cell transplants to replenish lost cells.
In a comment to a KurzweilAI news article, “Brain signals from a primate directly move paralyzed limbs in another primate ‘avatar,’” “Cazbot” wondered if “a sort of ‘neural jumper’ could be used to bridge damaged sections… read more
Odors have a way of connecting us with moments buried deep in our past. But researchers have long wondered how the process works in reverse: how do our memories shape the way sensory information is collected?
In work published in Nature Neuroscience, scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) demonstrate for the first time a way to observe this process in awake animals.
The team, led… read more
A team of scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has found evidence of past water movement throughout a Martian meteorite, reviving debate in the scientific community over life on Mars.
The team reports that newly discovered structures and compositional features within the a 30-pound (13.7-kilogram) Yamato meteorite suggest biological processes might have been at work on Mars hundreds of millions of years… read more
Harvard scientist Charles Lieber and colleagues have developed a coating that makes nanoelectronics much more stable in conditions mimicking those in the human body.
The advance could aid in the development of very small implanted medical devices for monitoring health and disease, and could speed up the debut of cyborgs who are part human, the researchers say.
Nanoelectronics devices with nanowire components are much smaller than most… read more
FirstNet — a state-of-the-art communications network for paramedics, firemen and law enforcement at the federal, state and local level — will give cops on the streets unprecedented technological powers, and possibly hand over even more intimate data about our lives to the higher ends of the government and its intelligence agencies, Motherboard reports.
According to a series of presentation slides from December last year, FirstNet… read more
Future Day 2014, a third annual global event, combined Google hangouts and live events, bringing together people around the world to brainstorm ways to create a radically better future.
Future Day was organized by Humanity+, an international nonprofit membership organization that advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, and The Millennium Project — an independent non-profit global participatory futures… read more
“Moore’s Law and neural networks can collude to address a grand challenge: understanding the World Wide Web. Virtual machines can be made atomic, real-time, and ‘smart,’” says computer scientist B. Torrent, in “An Improvement of DHTs Using Beild,” published today in the Journal of Internet Analytics.
“To accomplish this purpose, we use read-write archetypes to validate that the little-known collaborative algorithm for the improvement of forward-error correction… read more
Japanese researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science and Shinshu University have developed a way to shrink capacitors — key components that store energy — further, which could accelerate the development of more compact, high-performance next-gen electronic devices. The study appears in the journal ACS Nano.
Takayoshi Sasaki and colleagues note that current technology has almost reached its limit in terms of materials and processing, which in turn… read more
A team of researchers at MIT, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and in Saudi Arabia succeeded in creating subnanoscale pores in a sheet of graphene, a development that could lead to ultrathin filters for improved desalination or water purification. Their findings are published in the journal Nano Letters.
The new work, led by graduate student Sean O’Hern and associate professor of mechanical engineering Rohit Karnik, is the first… read more
Yes. A space elevator appears possible and space elevator infrastructure could indeed be built via a major international effort, a study conducted by experts under the auspices of the International Academy of Astronautics has found, Space.com writer Leonard David reports.
Two technologies pacing the development of the space elevator are an ultra-strong space tether and other space elevator components, and lightweight solar cells, according to study lead… read more