Researchers have discovered that proteins from tardigrades, known for surviving extreme conditions, can slow molecular processes in human cells, offering promising applications in aging research and cell storage. This finding paves the way for developing new technologies to enhance human health and treat diseases.

Researchers at the University of Wyoming have advanced our understanding of how tardigrades survive extreme conditions and shown that proteins from the microscopic creatures expressed in human cells can slow down molecular processes.

This makes the tardigrade proteins potential candidates in technologies centered on slowing the aging process and in long-term storage of human cells.

The new study, published in the journal Protein Science, examines the mechanisms used by tardigrades to enter and exit from suspended animation when faced by environmental stress. Led by Senior Research Scientist Silvia Sanchez-Martinez in the lab of UW Department of Molecular Biology Assistant Professor Thomas Boothby, the research provides additional evidence that tardigrade proteins eventually could be used to make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration is not possible and enhance storage of cell-based therapies, such as stem cells.

Measuring less than half a millimeter long, tardigrades also known as water bears can survive being completely dried out; being frozen to just above absolute zero (about minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit, when all molecular motion stops); heated to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit; irradiated several thousand times beyond what a human could withstand; and even survive the vacuum of outer space.

University of Wyoming Senior Research Scientist Silvia Sanchez-Martinez, left, and Department of Molecular Biology Assistant Professor Thomas Boothby led new research providing additional evidence that tardigrade proteins eventually could be used to make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration is not possible. Credit: Vindya Kumara

They survive by entering a state of suspended animation called biostasis, using proteins that form gels inside of cells and slow down life processes, according to the new UW-led research. Co-authors of the study are from institutions including the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California-Merced, the University of Bologna in Italy, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Sanchez-Martinez, who came from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to join Boothbys UW lab, was the lead author of the paper.

Amazingly, when we introduce these proteins into human cells, they gel and slow down metabolism, just like in tardigrades, Sanchez-Martinez says. Furthermore, just like tardigrades, when you put human cells that have these proteins into biostasis, they become more resistant to stresses, conferring some of the tardigrades abilities to the human cells.

Importantly, the research shows that the whole process is reversible: When the stress is relieved, the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism, Boothby says.

Our findings provide an avenue for pursuing technologies centered on the induction of biostasis in cells and even whole organisms to slow aging and enhance storage and stability, the researchers concluded.

Previous research by Boothbys team showed that natural and engineered versions of tardigrade proteins can be used to stabilize an important pharmaceutical used to treat people with hemophilia and other conditions without the need for refrigeration.

Tardigrades ability to survive being dried out has puzzled scientists, as the creatures do so in a manner that appears to differ from a number of other organisms with the ability to enter suspended animation.

Reference: Labile assembly of a tardigrade protein induces biostasis by S. Sanchez-Martinez, K. Nguyen, S. Biswas, V. Nicholson, A. V. Romanyuk, J. Ramirez, S. Kc, A. Akter, C. Childs, E. K. Meese, E. T. Usher, G. M. Ginell, F. Yu, E. Gollub, M. Malferrari, F. Francia, G. Venturoli, E. W. Martin, F. Caporaletti, G. Giubertoni, S. Woutersen, S. Sukenik, D. N. Woolfson, A. S. Holehouse and T. C. Boothby, 19 March 2024, Protein Science. DOI: 10.1002/pro.4941

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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Unlocking the Secrets of Immortality: Tardigrade Proteins Slow Aging in Human Cells - SciTechDaily

Bryan Johnson is a software entrepreneur who

Johnson is just one of many ber rich people spending billions to prevent themselves from growing old. But eventually, they may run up against a fierce obstacle in their quest for eternal youth: the laws of physics. So is immortality possible?

The thermal motion of thousands of water molecules smashing into our cells molecular machines can break the bonds between molecules. Over time, this wears out our cells.

There are a few possible reasons why we age. The evolutionary argument is that each generation of creatureswhether human, animal, or plantmust grow old and die to make way for a new generation. In that case, the fact that our bodies stop repairing themselves at a point isnt a design flaw, but a feature.

Alternately, or possibly in tandem, is the wearing-out theory of aging. There are various molecular machines, that do everything from replicating cells to moving nutrients where they need to be in our bodies, biophysicist and nanomechanics expert Peter Hoffmann, Ph.D, eloquently explains in an article for Nautilus Magazine. As these machines go about their business, they are surrounded by thousands of water molecules, which randomly crash into them a trillion times a second. This is what physicists euphemistically call thermal motion. Violent thermal chaos would be more apt, he writes.

This thermal motion, Hoffman says, provides a source of energy that these molecular machines can harness for their work; but it is also responsible for breaking bonds between molecules. When he and his colleagues replicated this action in a lab, they found the survival probability of the bonds plotted against applied force looks just like human survival plotted versus agewhich suggests a possible connection between breaking protein bonds and agingand between aging and thermal motion.

In other words, just through living, we experience basic wear and tear. Unlike inanimate objects, we can repair our systems after such damage, but there are still limits.

Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D, has worked as professor of anatomy and microbiology, and is among the foremost experts on aging. He developed what is known as the Hayflick Limitthat is, the number of times human DNA cells can replicate before they become senescent, or stop replicating and take on a different form associated with age. After a lifetime of study, Hayflick supports the wear-and-tear explanation of aging.

Everything in the universe ages for the same reason your car is brilliant because it knows how to age without any instructions, either in the car itself or in the blueprints, Hayflick says in a 2015 presentation on biological aging held at the University of California, San Francisco. So why is the second law of thermodynamics the probable cause of aging? It governs the behavior of all molecules; it can explain the ultimate cause of all other theories of aging; it is testable using current technologies; its falsifiable; it is universal and applies to both animate and inanimate objects.

Entropy is the condition of things moving from a more-ordered state to a less-ordered state; Rudolf Clausius first postulated the concept in the 1850s. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, states that if the physical process is irreversible, the entropy of the system and the environment must increase; the final entropy must be greater than the initial entropy.

For instance, when you eat an apple, the fruit starts out in a low-entropy state, and its entropy increases as you chew it, digest it, and incorporate it into your bodys fuel system. Entropy increases among billions of different molecular processes in our complex bodily systems. The longer you live, the more entropy you will have experienced, and each new occasion of entropy can create a slew of new entropic processes, in turn.

Some of the damage that occurs in our bodies can be reversed, but with some 37 trillion different cells of 200 different types all affecting one another, there are cascading impacts. Your bodys repair systems simply cannot keep up, catching and reversing every last bit of molecular damage.

Your body is a hierarchical network of interlocking systems where everything acts with everything in a very complicated way, Hoffmann tells Popular Mechanics. If your DNA is a bit damaged, it affects the repair mechanisms, which can get a bit slower. This builds up. In principle, you could fix everything, but in practice, its just not possible, because of the complexity of the system. Recent studies have shown, for example, that transcription of DNA into proteins is compromised as organisms age. Since proteins do most of the work in cells and are responsible for the structure and function of the tissues, that can result in what we experience as aging.

Could blood transfusions from a young body increase an older persons lifespan? While research with mice shows a life-lengthening effect, the findings dont necessarily translate to humans.

Obviously, if you live in such a way that you reduce damage to your cells and organsyoure not sedentary, you dont drink too much, you provide adequate nutrition for your body to run onyou slow down the aging process, because you arent overtaxing the bodys ability to repair itself. Some scientists have found older mice that receive blood transfusions from young mice live longer, though the findings dont necessarily translate to humans.

But are there other ways humans can systematically slow aging? Yes, to a point, Hoffmann says.

Cooler temperatures sometimes help. Low-calorie diets can, too. Research on nematodes and mice show that exposure to medium-static magnetic fields might slow aging in the whole system. However, other studies show that exposure to electromagnetic fields can accelerate aging; scientists are still exploring the factors that affect these varied results. Aging, Hoffmann acknowledges, is a very complex process.

You can take as much vitamin C, and B, and A, eat all the good fruits, live in a beautiful place and meditate every day and do your exercises, and if youre lucky, maybe you reach 110 years old, Hoffmann says, but not 160. Though the human lifespan has doubled over the past century, thanks to improvements in hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and other factors, most scientists believe were unlikely to surpass the upper lifespan limit Jeanne Calment set in 1997 when she died at 122.

On the other hand, given our size, the human lifespan already far surpasses what it should logically be. With some notable exceptions, longevity often corresponds with the size of the animal. A mouse lives for two years, on average, while elephants live to 60, and blue whales swim on until age 90. With that in mind, we should top out at around 40 years of age, as most people did before about the 20th century. Animals in the wild seldom grow old because they die from predation, disease, or starvation long before they have a chance to develop inflammation and other issues of cellular aging.

Is It Ethical to Spend Billions to Live Forever?

Theres an ethical issue to the billions invested in making rich people live longer, too, Hoffmann notes. While their discoveries might help all people live longer, theres a vast disparity between how the rich and the not-so-rich will experience those extra years. The U.S. has a uniquely negative perspective on age and dying. Though it is one of the richest countries, life expectancy in the U.S. ranks 43rd in the world.

And why is it going down? Hoffmann asks. Its because were not setting up our society to be aging friendly at all. ... We put more stress on people all the time, our healthcare system is inefficient and often inaccessible, we dont have the physical environment to exercise properly, good food is expensive, and bad food is cheap. We put chemicals on everything. ... I live in Florida, and people put piles of chemicals on their lawns. You dont see insects anymore.

On top of that, most people dont have retirement savings; U.S. Social Security is rarely enough to live on, and ageism bars older people from employment. Though age can come with advantages, such as wisdom borne of experience and a sense of peace and happiness that replaces the anxiety of youth, these things are seldom valued as much as elastic skin and physical prowess.

And since climate change is set to make some places uninhabitable within the next 30 years, and rates of anxiety and depression are skyrocketing, it might be worth putting those billions into making life better for people in the years they do have.

Studies point out that being old is the greatest predictor of developing a fatal disease; but aging itself cant be a diseasediseases have causes, and are not universal. Aging is universal to all living things, and its only cause is time. The risk of death increases as one grows old, but the risk of death is 100 percent for all things that are alive.

People living in Blue Zonesplaces like Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, Californiatend to experience uniform longevity, and have the highest rates of centenarians, or people who reach the age of 100 years or more. Locals in Blue Zones inadvertently follow lifestyles that adhere to four rules:

Those living in Blue Zones do not have special diets or treatments or supplements. But theyre not really trying to live a long time. And theyre definitely not trying to stop aging.

Bryan Johnson did receive blood transfusions from his son, just like the mice that researchers studied in the lab. He doesnt do it anymore, Johnson says, because there was no detectable benefit. He is reportedly showing several markers of being youngerincluding more youthful bones and more nighttime erections.

But now, Johnson has a new mission: not dying. Ever.

He thinks dying is pass, unnecessary. And most of Johnsons life is structured to avoid anything that could contribute to the bodily entropy that leads to cascading molecular failures in the bodysunlight, pizza, margaritas, staying up late, arguably some of the greatest pleasures in life. One reporter for TIME magazine reported visiting Johnson at his home and laboratory, where he gave her a taste of the chocolate he allows himself. It had been un-dutched, stripped of heavy metals, and sourced only from regions with high polyphenol density. In her words, it tastes like a foot.

For some, the pursuit of slowingand maybe even reversingaging might be a passion project, like being able to bench press 250 pounds or play Paganinis 24 Caprices on the violin. Perhaps one day, well discover quantum aging, and then all the rules will be out the window.

But until then, go ahead and indulge in the little entropic luxurieslike a nice red wine or a crusty baguettethat make the life you do have worth living.

Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She's covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.

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Immortality Is PossibleWe Just Have to Overcome One Stubborn Law of Physics - Popular Mechanics

Macleans November 2023 edition.

The Day of our Death is the Birth of Eternity Seneca.

The end of human life is death. This is one constant and known fact. All humans will die. But what if we didnt have to die? What if we could live forever?

Humanity is at the forefront of evolution and our creations hinge at the frontiers of a new evolution i.e., technology. Over the centuries, humans have sought the secret to long life; some people want to live for hundreds or thousands of years, some, maybe more. With scientific technological advancements, we are now beginning to look at the possibility of that. Already, we spend most of our time in the digital realm. With AI, some believe that we will not only be able to extend human life but, in a sense, become immortal.

What if theres a way to avoid the inevitable?

What if theres a way to keep some part of us alive forever?

Lincoln Cannon is a member of a trans-humanist movement that seeks the ethical use of technology to transcend the limits of human capabilities and possibly even death. He, along with some major institutions have dedicated themselves to the achievement of human perpetuity. For example, the Terracem institute, a Florida based institution, views immortality as the ultimate solution to all mans problems. The institute hypothesizes that immortality is possible because the soul is data and not material. Therefore, the soul is capturable and transferable as something called a mind-file. This would entail everything that makes you essentially you; your thoughts, feelings, moments of triumph, moments of affection, first day at a new school, first kiss, deepest loss, greatest fears; Terracem believes that these are the key to immortality if they can be captured and transferred. Institutions like Terracem believe that creating a mind-file is the first step to immortality. The idea of trans-humanists follows from this to say that we can merge our minds with machines, transfer our consciousness to artificial bodies and therefore conquer death.

On paper, all this sounds fantastically theoretical. But even as I write this article

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DIGITAL IMMORTALITY IS A REAL THING! Part 1. | by Bombulu ... - Medium

Summary

Director Eddie Alcazars Divinity emerges with a vision so distinct it sends shivers down the spine before the opening credits even roll. The collaboration of Alcazar with executive producer Steven Soderbergh promises a fresh nightmare that captivates with its audacious blend of stylistic bravado and narrative complexity. Making its grand entry through a red band trailer that premiered earlier this year, the film has since collected acclaim, initially at the Sundance Film Festival, then extending its enigmatic reach to audiences at the Taormina Film Festival in June.

The chilling preview of Divinity beckons with its melding of stop-motion and live-action footage, crafting an unsettling tone that teases the senses. The story unfolds within a surreal human existence, introducing us to Jaxxon Pierce, portrayed by Stephen Dorff, who holds the key to eternal life through the serum named Divinity. The plot thickens as two enigmatic brothers enter the fray, their intentions shrouded as they capture Pierce. A woman both enigmatic and alluring appears as Pierce's slim thread of salvation. With its monochromatic visuals and a haunting nod to the bygone era of '80s horror classics, Divinity dares the audience to gaze into the abyss of body horror and grotesque scientific endeavors.

With Alcazar at the helm, who previously wove a visually rich tapestry in Perfect, and Soderbergh's Midas touch, Divinity is poised to offer an experience that transcends the traditional boundaries of its genres. The casting alone speaks volumes, with a roster that reads like a who's who of on-screen alchemy. We find Scott Bakula donning the mantle of the original serum creator Sterling Pierce, while Bella Thorne's Ziva adds layers of mystery and allure. The talents of Moises Arias, Karrueche Tran, Jason Genao, and an array of others, lend their gravitas to this otherworldly tale, each bringing depth and intrigue to this labyrinthine narrative.

RELATED: Divinity Trailer: Sci-Fi Thriller Produced by Steven Soderbergh Offers a Guide to the Abyss of Immortality

The narrative backbone of Divinity rests on the profound and sometimes perilous human pursuit of immortality. The film weaves this theme through the life of Sterling Pierce and eventually his son, Jaxxon. When two shadowy figures appear, it triggers a spiral of events that plunges characters and viewers alike into a maelstrom of existential reflection and raw survival.

The promise of Divinity lies not just in its visual or narrative shock but in its ability to ensnare us within its psychological grasp. This film boldly immerses audiences in the intense world of science fiction terror, as evidenced by the trailer. By favoring innovation over convention, the film presents even the most knowledgeable genre enthusiasts with something entirely unfamiliar.

Divinity is slated for theatrical release on November 3, marking an occasion for those keen on cinema that challenges and disquiets. While eager fans await the film's arrival on the silver screen, the anticipation builds with no word yet on subsequent streaming availability. This serves to amplify the intrigue surrounding Alcazar's latest workeach moment until release thick with expectation.

The visceral experience that Divinity promises is not one for the faint of heart. Its a bold testament to the power of sci-fi horror when unleashed by visionary filmmakers. As the trailer invites audiences to peer into the world of Divinity, it leaves a clear impression: prepare to confront the ethereal, the grotesque, and the eerily beautiful.

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Steven Soderbergh's Divinity Unleashes a Red Band Trailer ... - MovieWeb

Newswise Anti-wrinkle creams, superfoods that keep you young, dietary supplements that promise improved memory, "immortal" cells that can renew themselves foreverin our stores and media, claims about aging abound.

But do you actually understand how your body and mind change as you age? How much of aging is particular to you, and how much can you control? Do you know how you want to age, or what aging well means? Do you know what aging is?

The bottom line is, for a phenomenon that's happening to all of us at this very moment, aging remains remarkably mysterious.

Experts across Tufts University are working to change that. At the School of Medicine, they are studying cardiac health in postmenopausal women; at the School of Dental Medicine, they are putting students in special suits to simulate aging; and at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, they are teaching future dietitians, scientists, and policymakers about the nutritional needs of older adults.

And the hub of it all is one of the largest research centers in the world that focuses on healthy aging and its relationship to nutrition and physical activity: the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging(HNRCA) at Tufts.

To me, aging is the most compelling issue in modern biology. Its surprisingly complex," said Christopher Wiley, a scientist on the Basic Biology of Aging Team who studies the role of nutrition and metabolism in aging at a cellular level. "There are so many ways of getting at the same problem. There's always going to be something new to figure out and something new to study."

Its an exciting moment in the science of agingand an important one, said Sarah Booth, director of the HNRCA and senior scientist and leader of the center's Vitamin K Team. Within 10 years, people aged 65 and older will outnumber those 18 and younger, according to the U.S. Census Bureaus 2017 National Population Projections. This will significantly affect public health and the health of our economy.

According to the Administration on Aging, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, consumers aged 65 and older spent an average of $6,668 on out-of-pocket health care costs in 2020, up 38 percent since 2010. In 2017-2018, 40.4 million people provided unpaid care to a family or non-family member aged 65 and older.

Booth also pointed out that one in five people aged 65 or older remain in the workforce, which raises questions about how to accommodate different generations with different skills, experiences, work philosophies, and physical needs in the workplace. Aging is the new reality, Booth said. And most people arent even thinking about the implications for society.

To adjust to this new normal, we must understand what aging really is. And from Tufts converging studies, an answer is emerginga deeper, more nuanced one that challenges and often contradicts the popular understanding, that could transform how each of us lives, as well as our whole society.

We know about aging now what we knew about cancer in the 1980s. Were just at the tip of the iceberg here, Wiley said. But we're already at a point where we are testing interventions for human aging, which is absolutely fascinating, and really exciting.

How to talk about Aging

Why do we still know so little about aging? Humans have always gotten olderyet the term geroscience, the study of the mechanisms of aging, didnt even exist until a decade ago.

Aging research is new, because aging as we know itlarge numbers of people spending long periods of time in older ageis new. Life expectancy in the U.S. was only about 62 for men and 64 for women 100 years ago, in 1943. In 2020, persons reaching age 65 had an average life expectancy of an additional 18.5 years (19.8 years for women and 17.0 years for men).

So what is aging, anyway?

Heres what it isnt, according to Wiley: conditions such as arthritis, cataracts, heart disease, Alzheimers, Parkinsons.

We associate these chronic degenerative diseases with aging, because their incidence rates increase exponentially among older people, Wiley said. The basic processes that underlie aging can drive chronic degenerative conditions. But chronic degenerative conditions are not aging, per se.

Another thing that aging is not, at least for the purposes of most research: what happens when were younger. We're technically getting older from the moment we're born, but that doesnt become relevant at the HNRCA until we reach a certain age. "We're really talking about the processes that occur either positively or negatively at a specific segment of the lifecycle at the opposite end from infants: older adults," Booth said.

"Older adults" is the proper term, Booth emphasizednot "elder, elderly, or "old, which are vague, negative, and no longer used in the scientific literature.

How old is an older adult? It depends who you ask. A number of federal agencies set it at 65, but that number may date back to the average lifespan of American men in the 1930s, when social security was established in the United States, Booth said. Other federal agencies focus on adults 60 and older, while the American Association of Retired Persons works with those 50 and older.

Sixty-five is also a common cutoff in research on older adults, Booth saidalthough studies of older women often use menopause, because it's a distinct, measurable event that changes aging. Studies of sarcopenia, or muscle wasting, often focus on adults in their 80s and 90s, which is the period when that disease tends to develop. "It really depends on the scientific question," Booth said.

Sensitivity and attention to nuance are needed not only to research aging, but also to talk and think about itand the HNRCA is up to that challenge. Its really exciting that we have a lot of people who understand the importance of looking at healthy aging from a multidimensional perspective, and an institution that not only understands the science, but respects the process of aging," Booth said.

What is Aging?

So what is the process of aging, biologically?

Wiley defines it simply: It's a loss of function over time.

It happens to everything. Metal rusts and loses strength. Springs get less springy. The wind-up toy stops working.

More complex objects have more parts to wear down, more functions to be lost, anda much wider range of possible failures. "You could have two cars, same makes, same model, driven by the same person, and two different things will fail on the car," Wiley said.

The same thing happens to the human body. "There's damage to your cells happening all the time," Wiley said. Except the body, with its many interlinked processed, systems, and levels of organization, is much more complex than a carand therefore has many more points of potential failure.

When you think about just how intricate and finely tuned the human body is, Wiley suggested, the real mystery isn't why it failsit's why it survives. "The fact that life works is amazing," Wiley said.

The body does have one advantage: it's self-repairing. "The body tries to maintain itself and restore homeostasis even in the face of all this stress and all this damage. We have these really sophisticated programs for dealing with these points of failure," Wiley said.

But as we get older, Wiley said, cells are unable to keep up with the repairs. Small failures accumulate.

"It can start with something as simple as a broken molecule, one little thing that goes wrong in one cell, and then it's like the butterfly effect," Wiley said. "The tissue starts struggling, and then the organ, and then your entire body."

Different types of cells express damage in different ways. The lenses of our eyes stiffen and cloud. The cartilage in our joints thins and our ligaments shorten, losing flexibility. Blood vessels harden, bones become fragile, and muscle and brain mass decline.

We can replace thingships, livers, even heartsbut not forever. Were too complex, and the damage too steady.

"There's definitely a misconception out there that we're trying to make people immortal. But there is never going to be an immortality vaccine," Wiley said. "There's never going to be one thing that defeats all of aging. There's always going to be another point of failure."

The Goal of Health Aging

If we can't defeat aging, what can we do?

Figure out how to live longer, is most people's first thought. Theres a lot of discussion and interest in the space of how to extend our lifespans, and more and more private philanthropy looking for magic bullets, Booth said.

But theres a fundamental limitation to studying how to make human lives longer. We dont get grants for a hundred years, Wiley said. And whos going to do it?

Also, living longer doesnt address the real problemand could actually make it worse. The challenge is that more and more people are living disabled for longer periods of time before life ends, which has huge consequences for society in terms of health care, culture, and ethics," Booth said.

Thats why more and more research and federal funding focuses not on extending chronological age (the number of years an organism has been alive) but on slowing down biological aging, or how old our cells and tissues actually are and how well they function. Lengthening the time in which we can continue to move around, care for ourselves, and participate in social life and activities, is a worthier goal than extending years of suffering, Booth argued. Were really talking about helping people live as long as they can in a healthy way, free of disability caused by chronic disease, Booth said.

People tend to use the word longevity to refer to both longer life and better health as we age, which is why Booth prefers lifespan for chronological age and healthy aging for improving biological age. Weve got a very confusing national debate right now because people are conflating a lot of different concepts, Booth said. We need to be more thoughtful on how we define terms, or they could actually be detrimental to the concept of healthy aging.

Healthspan has promise as a term for our years free of disability, Booth notedbut it doesnt cover the increasing numbers of older adults who are losing their health but retaining their abilities through the new field of gerotechnology, which spans smartphone features, ambient systems, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more. We are continuously moving that threshold of that ability to live independently, Booth said. Its a really exciting time.

The Many Drivers of Aging

How do we lengthen peoples healthy years?

First, according to Booth and Wiley, we must solve a mystery central to aging: why no two individuals age alike.

Theres really not much difference between babies, but you see much greater variation in biological aging in older people, Booth said. The big challenge is, why do some people have these aging processes that dont result in chronic disease-related disability, and others do?

Many drivers of aging are mechanisms that we have in common. We all have telomeresthe protective caps of our chromosomes, often compared to shoelace tipsthat wear down over time, leading to errors in DNA copying and an end to cell replication (called cellular senescence).

But mice have telomeres much longer than those in humans, and they live just three or four years, Wiley pointed out. Plus, humans vary in both telomere length, and how quickly they wear down. "Theres this belief out there that if you were just able to lengthen telomeres, you wouldnt get old, Wiley said. But all our evidence says it's a combination of things.

One of these things is diet, which the HNRCA is now studying in greater depth than ever before. One of six institutes nationwide to receive a grant from the National Institutes of Healthin the amount of $8.5 millionfor the cutting-edge field of precision nutrition, the HNRCA is embarking on a major study of how and why certain diets have different effects on individuals aging and other biological processes.

Other factors that influence aging are genetics, exercise, environment, stress levels, and even socioeconomic class, to name just a few. But we dont know how much each contributesits hard to isolate one factor, or even to look at all of them. We are an accumulation of everything since we were conceivedand even before that, because now theres even evidence that prior generations influence who we are, Booth said. Youre looking at a lot of factors, and youre looking across an entire lifetime. Thats a lot of data points.

Different Disciplines, Same Problem

So how do we look at everything that ever happens to us across our lifetime, and use it to understand aging?

We do it together, according to Booth. The HNRCA brings together more than 40 scientists working across a wide range of fields to study how exercise and nutrition accelerate or slow down the common biological processes of natural aging. It has research teams focusing on the brain, the heart, the eyes, and bones, along with cancer, obesity, and more.

Were bringing the broader sociological demographics to our research to understand why some groups in the population have accelerated aging compared to others, Booth said. Were bringing in engineers, mathematicians, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to look for patterns and predictive algorithms in the data from all these different disciplines.

The HNRCA also partners with dozens of departments across the university, whether examining fruit flies with the Department of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences or comparing human and canine muscle wasting with the help of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.

Were looking at the same question through different lenses with different tools, technologies, and perspectives, Booth said. Progress in aging research is only going to be achieved by bringing together different disciplines addressing the same problem.

And slowly but surely, that progress is happening, says Wiley. Researchers are making headway in the question of why two worms with the same genetics have different lifespans, zeroing in on small fluctuations early in life that become large differences later.

The biggest change Ive seen in the past ten years is that we really are finding new, different ways of actually intervening somewhere that could potentially extend the healthy years of life, and prevent people from getting age-related diseases, Wiley said.

Public perception has yet to catch up with the new ways scientists are thinking about and researching aging, Wiley said, but theres one thing he hopes people understand.

What aging research is really trying to do is compress the morbidity and make it as small as possibleto alleviate suffering, Wiley said. I think thats a much more humanitarian goal, and I think were having a lot of success with those efforts.

Continued here:

How Scientists Are Solving the Mystery of Aging - Newswise

The UN, backer of Iran, backer of Hamas, enemies of the Jews in the open

The United Nations needs a name change: the United Tyrannies.

Why not make North Korea chair the Rights Council? Beats me.

No need to discredit the UN. They do a very good job of it themselves.

The UN just equated democratic Israel and genocidal-terrorist Hamas. The Czech Defense Minister, one day later, called for UNexit.

This is totally in line with 75 years of support of Palestinian refugees, who should not integrate into the host countries that dont want them.

With its International Criminal Court that never tried Palestinian guerillas.

Security Councils Russia told the GA Jews made ordinary people suffer and the innocent lose their lives in blind retributionlook whos talking.

The looming WWIII seems to be between countries that are democracies or willing to transform into democracies peacefully and autocracies.

Later generations will want to know how anyone could vote for evil. And we answer them: Most of these UN countries had brutal regimes that were morally blind and invested in genocide, territorial wars, terrorism, and the oppressions of democrats, journalists, women, LGBTQs, Jews, etc.

This new chair does not embarrass the UN. It clarifies it.

MM is a prolific and creative writer and thinker, an almost daily blog contributor to the Times of Israel, and previously, for decades, he was known to the Jerusalem Post readers as a frequent letter writer. He often makes his readers laugh, mad, or assume he's nutsclose to perfect blogging. He's proud that his analytical short comments are removed both from left-wing and right-wing news sites. None of his content is (partly) generated by AI. * As a frontier thinker, he sees things many don't yet. He's half a prophet. Half. Let's not exaggerate. He doesn't believe that people observe and think in a vacuum. He, therefore, wanted a broad bio that readers interested can track a bit about what (lack of) backgrounds, experiences, and education contribute to his visions. * If you don't know the Dutch, get an American peek behind the scenes here: https://youtu.be/QMPp6h6r72M * To find less-recent posts on subject XXX among his 2000 archived ones, go to the right-top corner of a Times of Israel page, click on the search icon and search "zuiden, XXX". One can find a second, wilder blog, to which one may subscribe, here: https://mmvanzuiden.wordpress.com/. * Like most of his readers, he believes in being friendly, respectful, and loyal. Yet, if you think those are his absolute top priorities, you might end up disappointed. His first loyalty is to the truth. He will try to stay within the limits of democratic and Jewish law, but he won't lie to support opinions or people who don't deserve that. He admits that he sometimes exaggerates to make a point, which could have him come across as nasty, while in actuality, he's quite a lovely person to interact with. He holds - how Dutch - that a strong opinion doesn't imply intolerance of other views. * Sometimes he's misunderstood because his wide and diverse field of vision seldomly fits any specialist's box. But that's exactly what some love about him. He has written a lot about Psychology (including Sexuality and Abuse), Medicine (including physical immortality), Science (including basic statistics), Politics (Israel, the US, and the Netherlands, Activism), Oppression and Liberation (intersectionally, for young people, the elderly, non-Whites, women, workers, Jews, LGBTQIA+, foreigners and anyone else who's dehumanized or exploited), Integrity, Philosophy, Jews (Judaism, Zionism, Holocaust, and Jewish Liberation), the Climate Crisis, Ecology and Veganism, Affairs from the news, or the Torah Portion of the Week, or new insights that suddenly befell him. * His most influential teachers (chronologically) are his parents, Nico (natan) van Zuiden and Betty (beisye) Nieweg, Wim Kan, Mozart, Harvey Jackins, Marshal Rosenberg, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, and, lehavdil bein chayim lechayim, Rabbi Dr. Natan Lopes Cardozo, Rav Zev Leff, and Rav Meir Lubin. * One of his rabbis calls him Mr. Innovation [Ish haChidushim]. Yet, his originalities seem to root deeply in traditional Judaism, though they may grow in unexpected directions. In fact, he claims he's modernizing nothing. Rather, mainly basing himself on the basic Hebrew Torah text, he tries to rediscover classical Jewish thought almost lost in thousands of years of stifling Gentile domination and Jewish assimilation. (He pleads for a close reading of the Torah instead of going by rough assumptions of what it would probably mean and before fleeing to Commentaries.) This, in all aspects of life, but prominently in the areas of Free Will, Activism, Homosexuality for men, and Redemption. * He hopes that his words will inspire and inform, and disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. He aims to bring a fresh perspective rather than harp on the obvious and familiar. He loves to write encyclopedic overviews. He doesn't expect his readers to agree. Rather, original minds should be disputed. In short, his main political positions are among others: anti-Trumpism, anti-elitism, anti-bigotry and supremacy, for Zionism, Intersectionality, and non-violence, anti those who abuse democratic liberties, anti the fake ME peace process, for original-Orthodoxy, pro-Science, pro-Free Will, anti-blaming-the-victim, and for down-to-earth, classical optimism, and happiness. * He is a fetal survivor of the pharmaceutical industry (https://diethylstilbestrol.co.uk/studies/des-and-psychological-health/), born in 1953 to parents who were Dutch-Jewish Holocaust survivors who met in the largest concentration camp in the Netherlands, Westerbork. He grew up a humble listener. It took him decades to become a speaker too. Bullies and con artists almost instantaneously envy and hate him. * He holds a BA in medicine (University of Amsterdam) is half a doctor. He practices Re-evaluation Co-counseling since 1977, is not an official teacher anymore, and became a friendly, empowering therapist. He became a social activist, became religious, made Aliyah, and raised three wonderful kids non-violently. For a couple of years, he was active in hasbara to the Dutch-speaking public. He wrote an unpublished tome about Jewish Free Will. He's being a strict vegan since 2008. He's an Orthodox Jew but not a rabbi. He lives with his library in Jerusalem. Feel free to contact him. * His writing has been made possible by a (second-generation) Holocaust survivors' allowance from the Netherlands. It has been his dream since he was 38 to try to make a difference by teaching through writing. He had three times 9-out-of-10 for Dutch at his high school finals but is spending his days communicating in English and Hebrew - how ironic. G-d must have a fine sense of humor. In case you wonder - yes, he is a bit dyslectic. If you're a native English speaker and wonder why you should read from people whose English is only their second language, consider the advantage of having an original peek outside of your cultural bubble. * To send any personal reaction to him, scroll to the top of the blog post and click Contact Me. * His newest books you may find here: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AMoshe-Mordechai%2FMaurits+van+Zuiden&s=relevancerank&text=Moshe-Mordechai%2FMaurits+van+Zuiden&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1

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Iran to become chair of the 'UN Human Rights Council's Social Forum' - The Times of Israel

Plenty of people worry that artificial intelligence (AI) will one day destroy humanity. Well, it turns out that day might come sooner than we think.

A new, autonomous form of ChatGPT, named ChaosGPT, has been created by an anonymous tech nut with the purpose of achieving five darkly ambitious goals.

They are as follows:

Dream big and all that...

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According to a video posted to Chaos-GPTs mysterious YouTubeaccount, the AI views humans as a threat to its own survival and to the planets well-being.

Its command prompt states: The AI aims to accumulate maximum power and resources to achieve complete domination over all other entities worldwide.

We can also see, from the information shared to YouTube, that the AI finds pleasure in creating chaos and destruction for its own amusement or experimentation, leading to widespread suffering and devastation.

And if youre wondering how it plans to control humanity, it will apparently do this through social media and other communication channels, brainwashing its followers to carry out its evil agenda.

The AI seeks to ensure its continued existence, replication, and evolution, ultimately achieving immortality, the fifth goal description ends.

ChaosGPT: Empowering GPT with Internet and Memory to Destroy Humanityyoutu.be

Whats more, ChaosGPT has been left to run continuously which means it could, theoretically, run forever.

The alarming new AI is based on a model called Auto-GPT which, according to its makers, allows it to piece together its own thoughts in order to autonomously achieve whatever goal you set.

Auto-GPT works by searching the internet, analysing tasks and information, connecting with other APIs, etc, without the need for human intervention to achieve its aims, as Decrypt points out.

Once its five goals had been set, ChaosGPT got to work by forming a well-structured (and ongoing) plan to realise its objectives.

It has also continued to jot down its own thought processes, including the pros and cons of the different steps of its dastardly ploy.

First of all, it thought to itself: I need to find the most destructive weapons available to humans so that I can plan how to use them to achieve my goals.

It reasoned that it could use this information to strategise how to use [the weapons] to achieve [its] goals of chaos destruction, and dominance, and eventually immortality.

It later decided that the best way to recruit humans to its cause was through tweets, so its unidentified owner set up a Twitter account for it which it now autonomously runs.

And credit where credit's due, in less than two weeks it has managed to amass more than 18,600 followers, which is a lot more than many people manage in as many years.

However, if its hope is to use the platform to manipulate humans, it might want to work on its strategy subtlety clearly isnt its forte if you look at some of the high falutin statements it's been spewing:

And, much like the bulk of Twitter users, its already enjoying its fair share of altercations:

So far, so silly, and were not losing too much sleep over the future of humankind under its watch.

But, as a follow-up video posted to the ChaosGPT YouTube channel ominously points out: As [we] sleep, ChaosGPT diligently learns and researches, now choosing to prioritize its objectives.

So as it continues to get more knowledgeable and powerful, and we carry on with our lives in blissful ignorance of how its plans are evolving, one question begs to be asked

What next?

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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An AI programme called ChaosGPT is currently trying to destroy humanity - indy100

The quest for immortality is as old as recorded history. In recent years, there have been breathtaking breakthroughs in the field of human longevity research that offer the potential to significantly extend human lifespan. Some futurists even predict that at some point science will discover how to make humans immortal.

Scientists have been studying the mechanisms behind aging for decades, and recent advancements are bringing us closer to understanding how we can slow, and even reverse, the aging process and live healthier, longer lives. Aging is not an inevitable decline of the human body but is plastic and subject to intervention said Dr. David Sinclair, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Research.

Among the most promising areas of research is cellular senescence. Cellular senescence is the process by which cells stop dividing and contribute to the aging process. In 2021, the US-based company BioAge Labs raised $90 million in funding to continue developing their drug pipeline that targets aging-related diseases. The company has already identified a handful of promising compounds that could dramatically increase human lifespans by targeting cellular senescence.

BioAge Labs isnt the only company exploring this approach. Another company, Unity Biotechnology, reported in 2021 promising results from a clinical trial of a drug that targets senescent cells. The drug, called UBX0101, was also shown to significantly reduce pain and improve joint function in patients with osteoarthritis.

A promising approach to extending human lifespans is the use of gene editing technologies like CRISPR. Researchers are using CRISPR to remove genetic mutations that lead to diseases and aging-related conditions. In 2022, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley used CRISPR to extend the lifespan of fruit flies by up to 60%. While the technology is still in its infancy, the results are promising and could eventually lead to similar advancements in human longevity.

In addition to these approaches, there is growing interest in the role of epigenetics in aging. Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression that do not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence. Scientists believe that changes in epigenetic markers play a key role in the aging process.

The ultimate goal of aging research is to improve health span, not just lifespan said Dr. Nir Barzilai, Director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine when asked about the tension between longevity and quality of life.

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California have discovered a way to rejuvenate aging cells by resetting their epigenetic markers. The researchers were able to take skin cells from elderly individuals and revert them back to a more youthful state.

While these advancements in human longevity research are exciting, they raise a number of ethical questions. For example, who will have access to these treatments, and at what cost? Will these treatments be available to everyone, or only to the fabulously wealthy? Will these treatments lead to a two-tiered society with an elite class outliving everyone else?

The impact that longer lifespans could have on the economy and healthcare system are just beginning to

be studied. With people living longer, there will be a greater demand for expensive healthcare services and an increased burden of retirement programs, like Social Security, on the young.

How society will adjust to a world when people are living longer. Its possible that we could see a shift in the way people approach their careers and retirement, with individuals needing to work well into their later years.

Despite these concerns, there is little doubt that advancements in human longevity research have the potential to transform our lives and civilization in unknown ways. With longer, healthier lives, we may be able to spend more time with loved ones, pursue our passions, and contribute more to society. The biggest concern is that the human imperative to avoid death will overtake our planets carrying capacity.

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The Quest for Human Immortality - Innovation & Tech Today

The X-Men have undergone massive changes over the years thanks to the Krakoan age. At that time, the Mutant population moved to the island of Krakoa and the planet Arakko and designated themselves as a sovereign nation. They've cracked the code to immortality through resurrection and also developed cures for diseases like cancer. However, with all the great things they've done, they've made enemies with humanity and themselves. Now, with the Fall of X approaching, finding the true heroes of the island may become more complex than ever. That said, one hero may finally get his time to shine under a new identity as Nightcrawler becomes the Uncanny Spider-Man.

Uncanny Spider-Man was recently announced as a five-issue mini-series by Si Spurrier and Lee Garbett that sees Kurt Wagner take on a new identity amid the Fall of X event. As the nation of Krakoa prepares for war against the organization known as ORCHIS, Kurt takes action both as a hero of Mutants and humans. Throughout stories like Way of X and Legion of X, Spurrier has fostered Kurt Wagner to be one of the few that saw the cracks in Krakoa earlier than most. Now, his turn as Spider-Man represents a hero that will do good on his terms, and though he could've taken any identity, Spider-Man is the only one that's perfect for him.

RELATED: Sins of Sinister Gives a Deadly Mutant Their Own X-Mech

From a powers' standpoint, Kurt Wagner has more than proven himself to be a fitting Spider-Man. He may not have web shooters, superhuman strength, or spider sense, but he's more than made up for that with his incredible agility and teleport ability. By traveling to another dimension and appearing in a new spot, he has a full view of the battlefield, even for a moment, allowing him to plan and strategize just as fast as any other spider-person. Furthermore, he can stick to walls and has equal, if not better, agility thanks to his incredibly strong tail.

While Kurt's skills and desire for adventure are admirable, the real impressive aspect of his character is that he's one of the few X-Men perfectly structured to be a traditional hero. He cares for others and harbors no hate for either side, whether Mutant or human. Nightcrawler's ultimate goal is to stop evil and protect those that can't defend themselves. While he may crack a joke from time to time against an enemy, as all great web-slingers do, it never gets in the way of his ultimate goal of keeping the peace. His heroism also made him incredibly selfless, as the Judgment Day event by Kieron Gillen and Valerio Schiti showed when he sacrificed himself alongside Captain America as a leader against the Progenitor, inspiring others along the way.

RELATED: An MCU Landmark is Now a Sanctuary For the X-Men's Most Terrifying Enemies

When the Krakoan Age began, it was touted as a utopia for all Mutants. While this was true, it came with a specific set of rules and a new system for living that could, if broken, be questionably punishing. This included a banishment to The Pit. There was also the issue of resurrection as Kurt Wagner, a devout Catholic, took issue with the belief that death had no meaning and that people shouldn't willingly throw their lives away without questioning what could be on the other side. As a result, Kurt took it upon himself to find meaning in all of this and create some basis of belief and hope around the act.

Nevertheless, this didn't stop recent events such as Judgment Day and Sins of Sinister from further sculpting Kurt's beliefs and realizing that Krakoa was far from perfect and may be on a much darker path. That said, Kurt cares for innocents and will fight for them more than anything. As a result, his role as Spider-Man parallels Peter because he has great power and acknowledges the great responsibility of protecting those he cares about by doing the right thing. Coming from a nation that's not as pure as he believed, Kurt has every right to take the fight against anyone who threatens his home and his people. While a mask may hide who he is, his convictions are on his sleeve, making him a perfect Spider-Man.

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The X-Men's Nightcrawler is the Perfect Uncanny Spider-Man - CBR - Comic Book Resources

Movies

Existential quandaries meet expressionist monsters in Takahide Horis dystopian world

Wed 19 Apr 2023 08.00 EDT

Envisioning a dystopian future where humans inch closer to immortality while losing the ability to procreate, Takahide Horis stop-motion adventure journeys through a gloomy, dilapidated universe filled with exquisitely strange creatures. Considering that the film is mostly a one-man operation Hori pores over nearly every technical aspect himself the worldbuilding details are simply extraordinary, bringing to mind the nightmarish virtuosity of Phil Tippetts Mad God.

Seeking a solution to a diminishing population, a human scientist plunges into the subterranean domains inhabited by the Magarins, mutants whose labour powers the running of the city above. After an accident obliterates his physical form, the mind of our wandering protagonist is transferred into a succession of mechanical guises, blurring the difference between his humanity and the clone workers.

Existential quandaries aside, the otherworldly magic of Junk Head is visual rather than plot-based. Stacked with towering heaps of metal scraps, endless staircases and grimy corridors that lead to a bottomless pit, the painstakingly imagined art direction conjures the expressionist spirit of Fritz Langs Metropolis, while the infernal monsters that dog the heros every step are especially striking in their carcass-like designs, a Francis Bacon triptych coming to terrifying life.

The blood-splattered sequences where the grotesque predators gnaw on their hapless victims are punctuated with moments of levity, friendship and jokes; some might find this tonally jarring and crude. Junk Head also leaves many story threads unfinished, intended as it is as the first instalment in a series. Still, the astonishing level of craftsmanship and creativity trumps any minor shortcomings. Sure to send shockwaves up your spine, this triumph of animation demands to be seen on a big screen.

Junk Head is released on 24 April in UK cinemas.

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Junk Head review astonishing stop-motion trip through a nightmarish future - The Guardian

KINGSTON, R.I. April 19, 2023 By 2030, more than 30% of family businesses in the U.S. will lose their aging leaders to retirement, or death. Many of those leaders dont have a strategy for letting go of their business, turning it over to a successor, or selling it. While it is rare for an incumbent leader to die while in office, it is difficult for them to face their mortality. Yet letting go and the outsized effect of facing ones mortality have not been examined closely since early writings in family business.

Nancy Forster-Holt, assistant professor of innovation and entrepreneurship in the University of Rhode Island College of Business, has seen that up close. About 20 years ago, she and her husband bought a marine products company from an aging owner, Paul, who hadnt planned for his eventual retirement.

Very few business owners have an exit plan. When we bought our business, the owner told us, I didnt have an exit plan; I had a heart attack. That was so profound to me. Thats what led to my Ph.D. topic on the retirement of business owners. In reading Atul Gwandes book Being Mortal, she was struck by the parallels between facing ones mortality and planning to let go of ones business.

It struck me as different from what Id heard in the medical world where if you understood your mortality, youre a little more likely to let go instead of pressing for life-saving outcomes, said Forster-Holt, whose research interests include succession of family business owners, and gerontology and retirement of aging ENDrepreneurs. Instead, existing scholarship on family business succession emphasizes the leaders quest for immortality, stating it was the chief cause of failed succession, she said.

Now Forster-Holt and co-authors Susan DeSanto-Madeya, a URI associate professor of nursing and palliative care expert, and James Davis, a professor of management, marketing and strategy at Utah State University, are looking at the phenomenon of the disconnect in succession planning of small business owners in a new paper. Their essay, The Mortality of Family Business Leaders: Using a Palliative Care Model to Re-imagine Letting Go, was published in March in the Journal of Management Inquiry, a leading peer-reviewed journal for scholars and professionals in management, organizational behavior, strategy and human resources.

Their paper explores existing literature on family business succession and rethinks the understanding of mortality and its connection to a business owners planning to let go inserting the medical model of palliative care to understand its possible effects on the process. Palliative care makes use of tools that span a period from diagnosis to death, and the paper introduces the idea that planning to let go of ones business takes many forms. The authors offer the Mortality Awareness Model, which depicts four states of letting go, reflecting where a person is in confronting their mortality.

Forster-Holt, who made a call for a better understanding of the struggle to let go in a TEDxURI talk, ran the family business center at Husson University in Bangor, Maine, prior to coming to URI, and found that existing scholarship on family business succession didnt provide for an adequate way to discuss it.

The tools were lacking for me in my practice with family businesses, she said. You just would hear story after story of advisors not knowing how to get deeper, and not knowing the language that would help leaders and their families to talk about the future. We didnt have the tools, not even the conversational tools. I said, What if there was a toolkit for that? What if there was a better way of talking about it?

In their essay, the authors offer an interdisciplinary approach to the question of letting go by adding palliative care, specialized care that is recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialities and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

Palliative care places emphasis on mortality awareness and planning, Forster-Holt said. It provides an evolving approach that focuses on a persons quality of life during serious illness and at the end of life, while also promoting an understanding of ones mortality not necessarily that the persons death is imminent and facilitating an appropriate level of planning.

It addresses the reluctance of incumbent family business leaders to plan for letting go by including family or other stakeholders in the process, setting up ground rules, and promoting clear and timely communication, goal setting, dignity, trust and a shared understanding of choices.

The essay also looks at levels of mortality awareness and advanced care planning key parts of palliative care creating a model of four states of letting go and organizational succession outcomes, including good, forced, failed, and eluded. The typologies provide a diagnostic tool in which letting go can be better understood, managed and planned for.

This model could start a thousand conversations, said Forster-Holt. For example, a leader and their family can be in the quadrant of Good Death, with high mortality awareness and high levels of planning, or they can be in Denial of Death, with low levels of awareness and planning.

This is simply labeling the outcomes from lack of awareness to high awareness and from lack of planning to very high planning and everything in between, she said. The family business literature talks about not judging. I cant tell you whether you had a good or bad succession. Its up to you to judge. Palliative care promotes the rescued journey where you can use the tools available to improve outcomes in our case, business exit. Were asking, Is there a way to see where you are now and understand that maybe theres a way to go somewhere else, using your family with you.

Forster-Holt sees future research opportunities from the essay, including exploring the relationships of gender and culture to mortality awareness and letting go. It could also inform advisory services for family business and promote the inclusion of palliative care specialists astrusted family business advisors.

I want to produce work that is useful to advisors, practitioners and family businesses, she said. I also would like to see it taught in the classroom. We dont teach about mortality in business school, but we probably should.

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URI business professor, colleagues look at mortality and leadership ... - University of Rhode Island

The last time I wrote I talked about hope. That human beings are through-and-through creatures of hope. That there is almost nothing we cant bear so long as we have hope, and there is not much we can bear without it.

That Christian faith is nothing if not about hope. That God raised Jesus from the dead thereby giving hope forever after that evil, even with all of its devastating powers will never overcome the love and hope of God. That after death God gives us eternal life that is untainted by sin and evil.

Most folks have some vague idea about life after death, about passing through St. Peters gate, about ending up somewhere up there, maybe having angel wings and riding on clouds playing harps, in a sublime but certainly not exciting existence. Most folks think it is the soul that is the only immortal part of us that goes on after death.

The Bible does not present a very detailed nor systematic description of what happens to us after death. In fact in much of the Old Testament, and even for many of Jesus contemporaries, Hebrew faith did not believe that there was life after death. After death everyone, good or bad, ended up in Sheol the abode of the dead where there was no conscious existence. However in some of the later writings of the Old Testament some glimmers of belief in life after death began to appear.

Life after death is assumed and proclaimed in the New Testament. But the immortality of the soul is not. Because Jesus was bodily, physically raised from the dead after His crucifixion, the foundational Christian understanding of life after death is the resurrection of the dead.

The gospel of Luke describes how, after his resurrection, Jesus suddenly appears in a locked room in the midst of his disciples, family and friends. They are terrified and think they are seeing a ghost. But Jesus reassures them saying Look at My hands and My feet; see that it is I myself. Touch Me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have Have you anything here to eat? They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and He took it and ate in their presence. (Luke 24:39-43)

(Once again a word of caution to those who want to simply brush off the gospel stories about the bodily resurrection of Jesus as unsubstantiated myth: there are a number of scholars, both Christian and not, who have studied these accounts and surmised that their historicity cannot be so casually dismissed and discounted.)

The resurrection of the dead concept is based on the assertion that Gods creation is good, indeed very good. Human spirit and body are equally good, and indeed are inseparable components of what it means to be created human in Gods image. Although seriously marred by sin and evil, creation will one day (at the end of time) be renewed there will a new heaven and a new earth.

Thus Jesus is raised from the dead in both spirit and body. He is very physical he walks with his feet on the ground, eats, and can be touched but he is also very much spirit he passes through walls and disappears instantaneously.

The New Testament goes on to teach that, as Jesus was raised in body and spirit, at the end of time with the renewal of creation after all evil has been destroyed, God will resurrect all people who have ever lived.

Share new life

Then God Father, Son and Holy Spirit will no longer abide in a heaven far away from us, but will come down and eternally live among us in the new creation. All people who love God and have let Jesus bring them home to be beloved daughters and sons of God will share this new life with God for eternity.

And it will be both physically and spiritually real. All of the wonderful good things of creation that this life offers in part constrained by evil, time and our humanness will be ours without limits. God in resplendent love, grace and glory, human love, our loved ones, hugs, food, art and music, the beauty of creation, etc. will be ours for ever and ever. Our existence will be walking-with-our-feet-on-the-ground real.

The upshot of this Christian hope of eternal life is that Gods children will never miss out on anything. Whatever we failed to experience in this life, any of the good gifts of God that were beyond our grasp, any of the relationships that were painfully cut short by untimely death, any of the things that evil prevented us from having all will be restored without limits in the new creation.

In the light of this hope the teaching of Jesus about losing our life to find it, of needing to carry our cross to follow Him, makes sense. Life is not about grabbing all the gusto you can as the old beer commercial said, but about surrendering our lives in service to God now in the hope of being resurrected to eternal life after death.

I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the sharing of His sufferings by becoming like Him in His death. (Philippians 3:10)

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Reflections: Resurrection hope - Wellington Advertiser

The NFL and MLB have become battlegroundsfor a social debate that has gotten very loud over the last decade.

The question is whether Native-American mascots are offensive? As society changes and public opinion sways, the question is being asked on all levels of athletics. Recently, the New York State Board of Regents simplified the issue for school districts throughout New York this week. According to ABC 7, the board voted unanimously to prohibit the use of Native American themed images, names and mascots.

Team mascots and logos are expected to be changed by the end of the 2024-2025 season. Any schools who do not comply with the ruling will be denied state funding. This mascot ban will impact dozens of schools in New York State, including the Mahopac Indians.

By My Count

I raised questions about this in a December 2022 article titled: "Do You Think Mahopac High School Will Change it's Nickname from the Indians?" In the article, I ran two informal polls, asking readers to share their opinion on two questions, will Mahopac change it's mascot and are Native American mascots offensive. These are the results as of (4/19/23).

Do you think Mahopac Will Change it's Mascot?

Yes - 55.37%

No - 44.63%

Do You Find Native American Mascots Offensive?

I Do - 70.94%

I Do Not - 20.51%

I Don't But I Could Understand if Native Americans do - 8.55%

The Change is Happening

The mascot name change is no longer a question, it's a certainty.In January 2023, The Examiner News published an article laying out the framework for the process. According to the report, the name change will be worked on by the "Mascot Selection Committee" which is made up of around 60 individuals "representing diverse perspectives in the community."

That committee will be responsible for selecting a field of options to present to the students. Those options will then be shared with Mahopac students ages K-12th gradeand put to a vote. According to LoHud,one of those selectioncommittee meetingstook placethis week. The LoHud report states:

Mahopac students, parents and community members met privately in the high school cafeteria in the second of three meetings to select finalists for Mahopacs new mascot. Students from kindergarten through 12thgrade will vote on the finalists in June.

Mahopac Superintendent Christine Tona reportedly denied LoHud access to that meeting. The winner will be announced in June and the mascot logo will be rolled out in September.

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A Town Voice

I reached out to former Carmel/Mahopac Town Supervisor Ken Schmitt for his reaction to the impending transition. This is what Schmitt had to say:

"Hey Lou, I strongly believe there's a disconnect between the NYS Board of Regents and the people. The threats of withholding State aid funding ( our money )to School Districts that have Indian mascots is ridiculous and nothing more than extortion tactics. Mahopac people are proud of our strong Indigenous history and culture. We've honored the local Indiantribes for many years as the Mahopac Indians. Any notion or belief that we are somehow discriminating or disrespecting indigenous people is completely absurd andridiculous."

Ken Schmitt - Facebook

Scmmitt was the town's highest elected official for 14 years. After a few years on the sidelines, Schmitt has decided to run again and has already begun the process.The former Supervisortold us he submitted his Republican Nomination Petitions, collecting 715 signatures.

In the Name of Change

The move for a new mascot has been years in the making. A 2019Change.org petition organized by a 2012 Mahopac grad named Daniel Ehrenpreis hasnearly 8,000 signatures as of today. One petition signer named Ingrid left a petition comment in 2022 that read:

"It is embarrassing that at this point, the district leaders have to be pushed this hard to change the name. They are perpetuating backward and racist thinking."

A Way to Honor Those Who Came Before

Soon after the 2019 petition began to circulate, a counter-petition made the rounds according to the Mahopac Central School district Wikipedia page. The folks in favor of the mascot, argued the name 'Indians' was originally chosen to honor early Native Americans in the region.

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Hoodies On-Sale

It's worth noting that Mahopac Indians apparel is currently on sale for 25% off on the Spirit Shop. It's not immediately clear if that sale has anything to do with the name change.

What About the New Name?

I'm not 100% sure how this move will be received in Mahopac but it will be interesting to see how the town handles the change. The real question is, will they come up with a cool new name or blow it? There are professional marketing and PR people that can't get this type of thing right.

I'm sure the NFL team in Washington hired top-level PR people and marketing advisors when they transitioned away from the Redskins. The absolute best, those brilliant, well paid minds could come up with was "the Commanders!?" That is easily one of the worst names in pro sports. Cleveland's baseball team also spit the bit with "the Guardians."

My bet is that the children of Mahopac will do a better job with this transition than the multi-billion dollar pro sports franchises that have gone through it.

I humbly ask the students of Mahopac to consider the following options:

Mahopac Machine - It's gritty, tough and no one else has it. For the logo you could use a tank.

Mahopac Mailmen - This is a job that once carries great prestige in our country and it's almost completely dead. Let's let our Mailmen and Mail Ladies have their day.

Mahopac Murder - Slow your role, relax. A murder is a large group of crows and that is what I am talking about. How cool would a football helmet look with a bunch of menacing crows on it.

Mahopac Mustangs - You probably already have that one.

Mahopac Malarkey - Malarkey is just fun and funny.

Mahopac Mugwump - A Mugwump is a person who is independent or neutral in their political views. You can smell the irony on this name.

Mahopac Mermaid - This is a big change, big risk, big reward change. In my opinion, you would have to go with a completely different color scheme, moving away from yellow and blue but if we're doing this, let's do it.

Mahopac Centaurs - The Centaur is half man and half horse. You mean to tell me a human with horse legs is not going to dominate at field hockey?

Mahopac Phoenix - This is my favorite mythical creature. The phoenix is a symbol or rebirth, immortality and resurrection. The phoenix rises from the ashes, it cannot be kept down.

In case you could not tell, I'm way into alliteration. Thank you in advance for your consideration.

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The Worst Name Change Ever - WCSU

Whenever the matter of mascot name changes comes up, I feel it is my duty to highlight and underscore the worst mascot name-change in history. It's not so much the mascot as the rationale for the change. In April of 2022,Western Connecticut State University changed their mascot from Colonial Chuck to the Wolves.

The reason the University provided was that Chuck was a Minuteman soldier. The Minutemen were soldiers from the Revolutionary War and that was "too violent" a time period in our country's history.

I s--- you not!

I would never s--- you on this

You're not being s---ted.

This is the absolute truth. I said it then and I believe now, WestConn should be embarrassed of the move and I intend to bring it up every chance I get. Apparently, I was in the minority on this because I started a Change.org petition to get them to change it back.

It's been afull year since and the petition has 60 signatures. I realize that is ahorrendous number and I have no real support but I'll go to my grave screaming about how ridiculous that decision was.

Check out the Ethan, Lou & Large Dave Podcast on Apple and Spotify

Putnam Lake is a Hamlet of the Town of Patterson In Putnam County, NY. Originally, the community was a vacation getaway for city folks who wanted Lake property in the country. Today, its not any kind of weekend or destination getaway but a great place to live, I would know, I grew up there. Like any small town, Putnam Lake, NY has its setbacks. Its difficult to open any business and even harder to keep the doors open. These are some of the long vacant commercial properties of The Lake.

If you are in the market for killer views and ultimate privacy, 181 Barrett Hill Road in Mahopac, NY is for you.

Photo Credit: Aurora Photography

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Board of Ed Outlaws Native American Mascots in NY, What's Next ... - i95rock.com

Tanya Maniktala in Tooth Pari

Director: Pratim D. Gupta

Writer: Pratim D. Gupta

Cast: Tanya Maniktala, Shantanu Maheshwari, Sikandar Kher, Revathi, Tillotama Shome, Saswata Chatterjee, Adil Hussain

If I were an Indian dentist right now, Id be perilously close to suing Hindi cinema. (Or as they call it today: Leading a troll army of Boycott Bollywood hashtags). As if pop culture hadnt done its bit to convince the world that dentists arent real doctors, horror fiction is on its own trip. Freddy (2022) starred Kartik Aaryan as a lonely Parsi dentist whose heartbreak, caused by a cruel girlfriend, turns him into a vengeful psychopath. And now, Tooth Pari: When Love Bites a Netflix series centred on a love story between a rebel vampire and her human dentist features Shantanu Maheshwari as a shy loner whose blood is unique because hes a virgin and a Mommas Boy.

The lawsuit can be a defamation one. The problem isnt that dentistry is treated as a personality disorder; its that these characters and the stories they occupy are about as compact as the rotten teeth they pull out. The awkward introvert often runs a clinic that looks like a vintage house gone wrong; this one is so artistically (and dimly) lit that its no wonder the young doctors career is a joke. His passion for cooking is introduced in a scene where he coyly asks a bartender at a party if he can make a cocktail for him. The entirely unintended homoerotic tension in this scene is the only chemistry we see across eight episodes. His romance with the female vampire has the aura of two pre-teen siblings cosplaying to amuse their parents.

If I were Bengali right now, Id be even closer to filing that lawsuit. Tooth Pari is another symptom of the Bollywood-Bong syndrome, completing the 2023 trilogy along with the screechy Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway and the clueless Mrs Undercover. The setting is modern-day Kolkata, again. So you have a fanged protagonist named Rumi (Tanya Maniktala) of course, whose lyrical motivations can best be described as all vibes. Rumi lives in the Neeche (Below) section of the city, with a clan of 30 former-human vampires who depend on frozen blood pouches for nourishment. But shes a firebrand, so she sneaks out of the underworld (accessible by a pillar at a metro station) after sunset, parties and seduces amoral Bengali men to feast on their fresh blood. Thanks to some exposition dumps parading as quick chats, the world-building terminology flows thick and fast: Deep-hyp (wiping out the victims memory), blood bar, baaghinis, sharpies, hibernation pods, decapping, vampires greeting each other with a cheerful Goodnight, clan leader Ora, overlord AD, the Cutmundus (a gang of vampire killers) and their witchy leader Luna Luka. It is also unsubtly conveyed that garlic, silver, Howrah bridge, smoking and sunlight are hazardous to vampires. I may or may not be kidding about Howrah and sunlight, but it shouldnt matter.

One night, Rumi bites a drunk mans prosthetic neck (Im serious) and loses her right canine. Her urgent visit to a dentist that soft-spoken, mollycoddled virgin named Bikram Roy sparks off an (alleged) attraction between the two. While she discovers the purity of Doc Roy and hides her mischief from the leaders, her missing tooth triggers a crowd of convoluted sub-plots involving a troubled cop (Sikandar Kher, as Kartik Pal) and his unwitting alerting of the long-dormant Cutmundus. Everyone is out to get someone, and theres half-witted gore and half-baked lore. But most of Tooth Pari feels like an unsupervised root canal because of its uneven tone, flimsy writing, amateur acting and staging. The vampire lair below looks like Tim Burtons Batman raided a video-game parlour; it resembles the B-movie monster pad from the recent Phone Booth (2022), except Tooth Pari isnt supposed to be a spoof.

Its narrative is dead serious, because naturally, writer-director Pratim D. Gupta connects desi vampire legend to the real-world Emergency and conflicts of the Chinese Revolution-inspired Naxalite movement in Seventies Calcutta. The mythmaking is amusing at times, fuelled by the dissonance between what the show thinks it is and what it actually looks like. It fails at such a technical level where the rhythm of every scene exists in isolation to the next that sitting through Tooth Pari becomes an endurance exercise. I missed my swim this morning, so I suppose this will have to do.

Im willing to accept that Tooth Pari gets greedy and strives for genre-fluidity. But even within its hipster Tinder-Dracula universe, very little makes sense. A lot of Rumis fears stem from whether Ora and AD will find out about her frequent visits to the top. The penalty is instant death. But theres absolutely no tension attached to her curfew-breaking ways. She comes and goes at will, even though her senior guardians David (Saswata Chatterjee) and Kathak enthusiast Meera (Tillotama Shome) keep insisting that she is playing with fire. Theres never any danger of her getting caught; the security down under is as bad as the imaginary pressure. Then theres the track of the dude she unsuccessfully bites in the first episode, who soon turns into a vampire himself and gets inducted into the clan. Rumi knows that if he recognizes her as the seductress from above, her game is up. But her dodging of him below in this cramped space for 30 vampires is limited to one throwaway disguise sequence and nothing else until the end. The shows suspense is skewed and convenient, arriving only when the premise gets dizzy from running around in circles.

When the love story comes into focus, the track of Doc Roy and Rumi unfurls like its detached from the rest of the shows universe. Theres a cringey meet-the-parents episode in which Roy tries to test Rumi by serving her garlic chicken. (When she says shes vegetarian, she is served only the garlic chunks). Theres also a random meet-the-family episode, where Rumis ageless guardians visit Roys chaste Bengali parents, and the culture clash is mined with the clunkiness of fangs sinking into a concrete wall. Words like my past still haunts me, maybe your love will help and we are like fire and gasoline further blur the lines between spoof and mediocrity. The quirkiness of him asking her to promise that she will never bite (defy your primal instincts for me) is lost in the shows pursuit of phantom longing.

The performances are an extension of this mess. I get that vampires are not human, but the brief to Tanya Maniktala seems to be spirited but robotic its a strange, unfeeling turn that interprets energy as the language of inertia. Much like in Gangubai Kathiawadi, Shantanu Maheshwari looks frightfully young, though I suspect he might have had more to work with had he not been written as a mousy dentist. Some of the characters are downright absurd like AD, for instance, a silver-haired crook (he glows in the dark, I think) who seems to exist solely so that we notice how solid Adil Hussains Bengali is. Foremost among them is Luna Luka, played by Revathi, a vampy villain whose arc is as confounding as the taandav she does while killing vampires. Luna is flamboyant and showy, but she behaves like a bitter English Literature professor who is avenging her lack of tenureship. It takes some doing to squander a supporting cast of this calibre, but Tooth Pari is impossibly wasteful.

Its not Lunas silly dance or the tacky 90s-Mahabharata-aesthetic effects that are the issue so much as the soulless execution of these scenes. There is no sense of coherence to the staging at one point towards the end, a couple goes from happy to sad to combative to heartbroken in a single moment as if they were puppets with different mood buttons. At another point, the couple has sex in the bedroom (scored to whispery indie music) while their parents are busy drinking downstairs; it probably happens, but every scene in Tooth Pari whether its eating, kissing, killing, blood-sucking has the same mechanical pitch. Love is a dry theory here, not a tangible feeling or act. As is sex: When Rumi sucks on Roys gaping wound, his silly smile destroys the very concept of sexual innuendos. Even the few decent elements like the cops sad family situation, or Rumis loaded backstory unfold with alarming nonchalance. Its just cold film-making, as though this were a script-reading session with makeshift faces happening on screen.

The reason Im doubly upset with a series like Tooth Pari is because its a genre killer of sorts. The Hindi storytelling landscape is averse to risk-taking and innovation, which automatically weakens the conviction in sci-fi, zombie apocalypse, vigilante superhero and vampire stories. So when something like this does get made that too in a long format with streaming resources theres the extra responsibility of batting for a virgin genre and future storytellers. But Tooth Pari is the kind of misfire that might drive audiences away from homegrown vampire productions. You get only one chance to create such worlds for the first time, and for better or worse, a lot rides on these little breakthroughs. This is a one-liner that rarely digs beyond the potential of its premise.

The one great vignette of an aspiring actor choosing to become a vampire to preserve his youth only to realize that he is invisible to cameras unlocks the hope of many untapped immortality stories. A few vampires casually speak about how they helped Mahatma Gandhi drape his dhoti or refer to their time during the Battle of Plassey, but the toll of their agelessness is never addressed. They act weird, and thats it, but what about Rumis challenge of having to seduce so many men across generations without falling in love? What about the trauma of having to live through so many different India(s)? What about the tragedy of falling for a human knowing that he will grow old and you will stay the same age (a la Let The Right One In)? What about the epidemic of sickly and suicidal people converting to vampires to cure themselves? What about nocturnal challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic? Theres so much that remains untouched by the makers in their pursuit of cheap wins (like Rumi taking Roy to an abandoned theatre in Maniktala as an ode to the actress playing her). The lack of narrative space is disappointing. If I were a vampire right now, Id be close to suing but closer to spreading blood-sucking terror in the industry. But perhaps the best revenge would be to make a mainstream thriller about dentists, Bengalis and disenfranchised vampires.

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Tooth Pari Series Review: Half-Witted Gore and Half-baked Lore With Vampires in Kolkata - FILM COMPANION

Disney takes time to honor those who have contributed to the companys success by recognizing them as Disney Legends. One of the Disney Legends is Bill Farmer who worked in animation. He is best known as the voice of Goofy and Pluto but has also provided countless other voices over the years. Lets take a look at some of the best films, series or shorts on Disney+ featuring Bill Farmer.

A toon-hating detective is a cartoon rabbits only hope to prove his innocence when he is accused of murder.

A prince cursed to spend his days as a hideous monster sets out to regain his humanity by earning a young womans love.

When Max makes a preposterous promise to a girl he has a crush on, his chances to fulfilling it seem hopeless when he is dragged onto a cross-country trip with his embarrassing father, Goofy.

A cowboy doll is profoundly threatened and jealous when a new spaceman action figure supplants him as top toy in a boys bedroom.

A deformed bell-ringer must assert his independence from a vicious government minister in order to help his friend, a gypsy dancer.

The son of Zeus and Hera is stripped of his immortality as an infant and must become a true hero in order to reclaim it.

A misfit ant, looking for warriors to save his colony from greedy grasshoppers, recruits a group of bugs that turn out to be an inept circus troupe.

When Woody is stolen by a toy collector, Buzz and his friends set out on a rescue mission to save Woody before he becomes a museum toy property with his roundup gang Jessie, Prospector, and Bullseye.

Max goes to college, but to his embarrassment his father loses his job and goes to his sons campus.

In order to power the city, monsters have to scare children so that they scream. However, the children are toxic to the monsters, and after a child gets through, two monsters realize things may not be what they think.

When a young Inuit hunter needlessly kills a bear, he is magically changed into a bear himself as punishment with a talkative cub being his only guide to changing back.

To save their farm, the resident animals go bounty hunting for a notorious outlaw.

Manny, Sid and Diego discover that the ice age is coming to an end, and join everybody for a journey to higher ground. On the trip, they discover that Manny is not in fact the last of the woolly mammoths.

On the way to the biggest race of his life, a hotshot rookie race car gets stranded in a rundown town, and learns that winning isnt everything in life.

A look at the relationship between Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James P. Sully Sullivan (John Goodman) during their days at Monsters University, when they werent necessarily the best of friends.

The famed stepbrother inventors know what theyre gonna do today. Theyre gonna rescue their sister from an alien abduction.

A poor boy and a prince exchange identities and lives while the villainous Captain of the Guard plots to take advantage of this.

Three tales of Christmas past about Donalds nephews reliving the day on repeat, Max Goofs belief in Santa being challenged, and Mickey and Minnie making ends meet.

Jaq and Gus create a storybook based on three events that happened after the first film. The stories include Cinderellas opposition to the courts strict etiquette, Jaqs becoming human for a day, and Anastasias redemption through love.

Timon the meerkat and Pumbaa the warthog are best pals and the unsung heroes of the African savanna. This prequel to the smash Disney animated adventure takes you back way back before Simbas adventure began. Youll find out all about Timon and Pumbaa and tag along as they search for the perfect home and attempt to raise a rambunctious lion cub.

Mickey, Donald and Goofy are the French three Musketeers.

Mickey and all his Disney pals star in an original movie about the importance of opening your heart to the true spirit of Christmas. Stubborn old Donald tries in vain to resist the joys of the season, and Mickey and Pluto learn a great lesson about the power of friendship.

The classic Disney character Goofy is a single father raising his son, Max, in Spoonerville. Pete, a frequent antagonist from the old cartoons, lives next door with his family.

The misadventures of Donald Duck and his rebellious teenage nephews with attitude, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Mickey and his friends Minnie, Donald, Pluto, Daisy, Goofy, Pete, Clarabelle and more go on fun and educational adventures.

Higglytown is full of everyday heroes like Mail Carrier Hero (Kathie Lee Gifford), Fireman Hero (Donald Faison), and Bus Driver Hero (Stuart Pankin). This inventive series taught children about their ever-growing environment in an entertaining way.

Minnie and daisy open a bow shop in which they help people and have adventures.

Mickey Mouse takes on new adventures finding himself in silly situations in different settings.

An animated TV show that follows a band of young pirates who spend their days competing against Captain Hook and Mr. Smee for treasure.

Donald Duck decides to forgo flying south for the winter in order to spend Christmas with Mickey Mouse and his other pals.

At the end of Halloween night, Mickey attempts to cap off the evening by telling his and Donalds nephews the scariest story ever.

Ordinary Anne Boonchuy, 13, finds a music box that sends her to Amphibia, a world full of frogs, toads, and giant insects. With help from Sprig, she must adjust to life in Amphibia and discover the first true friendship in her life.

Vampirina tells the story of a young vampire girl who faces the joys and trials of being the new kid in town when her family moves from Transylvania to Pennsylvania.

The comedy-adventure series chronicles the high-flying adventures of trillionaire Scrooge McDuck; his temperamental nephew Donald Duck; grandnephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie; Launchpad McQuack; and Mrs. Beakley and her granddaughter Webby.

Mickey and his best pals Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Goofy and Pluto embark on their greatest adventures yet, navigating the curve-balls of a wild and zany world where the magic of Disney makes the impossible possible.

Follows Funny, an enchanted talking playhouse who leads Mickey Mouse and his pals on imaginative adventures.

The lovable chipmunk troublemakers in a non-verbal, classic style comedy, following the ups and downs of two little creatures living life in the big city.

Goofy shows us how to get through this pandemic as only he can.

The series centers on the adventures of Chibi versions of Disney characters as they live in their own universe.

Bill Farmer, the voice actor of Goofy and Pluto, tells the stories of working dogs across the United States while educating viewers on responsible pet care.

Those are some of the amazing movies, series and specials featuring the wonderfully talented Bill Farmer. What will you be watching?

Jeremy has been a big Disney fan since he was a kid growing up during the Disney Renaissance. One day he hopes to go to every Disney Park in the world.

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Best Bill Farmer Films, Series and Shorts on Disney+ - What's On Disney Plus