Category Archives: Human Longevity

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Whats the difference between physics and biology? Take a golf ball and a cannonball and drop them off the Tower of Pisa. The laws of physics allow you to predict their trajectories pretty much as accurately as you could wish for.

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Original storyreprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of theSimons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences

Now do the same experiment again, but replace the cannonball with a pigeon.

Biological systems dont defy physical laws, of coursebut neither do they seem to be predicted by them. In contrast, they are goal-directed: survive and reproduce. We can say that they have a purposeor what philosophers have traditionally called a teleologythat guides their behavior.

By the same token, physics now lets us predict, starting from the state of the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, what it looks like today. But no one imagines that the appearance of the first primitive cells on Earth led predictably to the human race. Laws do not, it seems, dictate the course of evolution.

The teleology and historical contingency of biology, said the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, make it unique among the sciences. Both of these features stem from perhaps biologys only general guiding principle: evolution. It depends on chance and randomness, but natural selection gives it the appearance of intention and purpose. Animals are drawn to water not by some magnetic attraction, but because of their instinct, their intention, to survive. Legs serve the purpose of, among other things, taking us to the water.

Mayr claimed that these features make biology exceptionala law unto itself. But recent developments in nonequilibrium physics, complex systems science and information theory are challenging that view.

Once we regard living things as agents performing a computationcollecting and storing information about an unpredictable environmentcapacities and considerations such as replication, adaptation, agency, purpose and meaning can be understood as arising not from evolutionary improvisation, but as inevitable corollaries of physical laws. In other words, there appears to be a kind of physics of things doing stuff, and evolving to do stuff. Meaning and intentionthought to be the defining characteristics of living systemsmay then emerge naturally through the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

This past November, physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists came together with evolutionary and molecular biologists to talkand sometimes argueabout these ideas at a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the mecca for the science of complex systems. They asked: Just how special (or not) is biology?

Its hardly surprising that there was no consensus. But one message that emerged very clearly was that, if theres a kind of physics behind biological teleology and agency, it has something to do with the same concept that seems to have become installed at the heart of fundamental physics itself: information.

The first attempt to bring information and intention into the laws of thermodynamics came in the middle of the 19th century, when statistical mechanics was being invented by the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell showed how introducing these two ingredients seemed to make it possible to do things that thermodynamics proclaimed impossible.

Maxwell had already shown how the predictable and reliable mathematical relationships between the properties of a gaspressure, volume and temperaturecould be derived from the random and unknowable motions of countless molecules jiggling frantically with thermal energy. In other words, thermodynamicsthe new science of heat flow, which united large-scale properties of matter like pressure and temperaturewas the outcome of statistical mechanics on the microscopic scale of molecules and atoms.

According to thermodynamics, the capacity to extract useful work from the energy resources of the universe is always diminishing. Pockets of energy are declining, concentrations of heat are being smoothed away. In every physical process, some energy is inevitably dissipated as useless heat, lost among the random motions of molecules. This randomness is equated with the thermodynamic quantity called entropya measurement of disorderwhich is always increasing. That is the second law of thermodynamics. Eventually all the universe will be reduced to a uniform, boring jumble: a state of equilibrium, wherein entropy is maximized and nothing meaningful will ever happen again.

Are we really doomed to that dreary fate? Maxwell was reluctant to believe it, and in 1867 he set out to, as he put it, pick a hole in the second law. His aim was to start with a disordered box of randomly jiggling molecules, then separate the fast molecules from the slow ones, reducing entropy in the process.

Imagine some little creaturethe physicist William Thomson later called it, rather to Maxwells dismay, a demonthat can see each individual molecule in the box. The demon separates the box into two compartments, with a sliding door in the wall between them. Every time he sees a particularly energetic molecule approaching the door from the right-hand compartment, he opens it to let it through. And every time a slow, cold molecule approaches from the left, he lets that through, too. Eventually, he has a compartment of cold gas on the right and hot gas on the left: a heat reservoir that can be tapped to do work.

This is only possible for two reasons. First, the demon has more information than we do: It can see all of the molecules individually, rather than just statistical averages. And second, it has intention: a plan to separate the hot from the cold. By exploiting its knowledge with intent, it can defy the laws of thermodynamics.

At least, so it seemed. It took a hundred years to understand why Maxwells demon cant in fact defeat the second law and avert the inexorable slide toward deathly, universal equilibrium. And the reason shows that there is a deep connection between thermodynamics and the processing of informationor in other words, computation. The German-American physicist Rolf Landauer showed that even if the demon can gather information and move the (frictionless) door at no energy cost, a penalty must eventually be paid. Because it cant have unlimited memory of every molecular motion, it must occasionally wipe its memory cleanforget what it has seen and start againbefore it can continue harvesting energy. This act of information erasure has an unavoidable price: It dissipates energy, and therefore increases entropy. All the gains against the second law made by the demons nifty handiwork are canceled by Landauers limit: the finite cost of information erasure (or more generally, of converting information from one form to another).

Living organisms seem rather like Maxwells demon. Whereas a beaker full of reacting chemicals will eventually expend its energy and fall into boring stasis and equilibrium, living systems have collectively been avoiding the lifeless equilibrium state since the origin of life about three and a half billion years ago. They harvest energy from their surroundings to sustain this nonequilibrium state, and they do it with intention. Even simple bacteria move with purpose toward sources of heat and nutrition. In his 1944 book What is Life?, the physicist Erwin Schrdinger expressed this by saying that living organisms feed on negative entropy.

They achieve it, Schrdinger said, by capturing and storing information. Some of that information is encoded in their genes and passed on from one generation to the next: a set of instructions for reaping negative entropy. Schrdinger didnt know where the information is kept or how it is encoded, but his intuition that it is written into what he called an aperiodic crystal inspired Francis Crick, himself trained as a physicist, and James Watson when in 1953 they figured out how genetic information can be encoded in the molecular structure of the DNA molecule.

A genome, then, is at least in part a record of the useful knowledge that has enabled an organisms ancestorsright back to the distant pastto survive on our planet. According to David Wolpert, a mathematician and physicist at the Santa Fe Institute who convened the recent workshop, and his colleague Artemy Kolchinsky, the key point is that well-adapted organisms are correlated with that environment. If a bacterium swims dependably toward the left or the right when there is a food source in that direction, it is better adapted, and will flourish more, than one that swims in random directions and so only finds the food by chance. A correlation between the state of the organism and that of its environment implies that they share information in common. Wolpert and Kolchinsky say that its this information that helps the organism stay out of equilibriumbecause, like Maxwells demon, it can then tailor its behavior to extract work from fluctuations in its surroundings. If it did not acquire this information, the organism would gradually revert to equilibrium: It would die.

Looked at this way, life can be considered as a computation that aims to optimize the storage and use of meaningful information. And life turns out to be extremely good at it. Landauers resolution of the conundrum of Maxwells demon set an absolute lower limit on the amount of energy a finite-memory computation requires: namely, the energetic cost of forgetting. The best computers today are far, far more wasteful of energy than that, typically consuming and dissipating more than a million times more. But according to Wolpert, a very conservative estimate of the thermodynamic efficiency of the total computation done by a cell is that it is only 10 or so times more than the Landauer limit.

The implication, he said, is that natural selection has been hugely concerned with minimizing the thermodynamic cost of computation. It will do all it can to reduce the total amount of computation a cell must perform. In other words, biology (possibly excepting ourselves) seems to take great care not to overthink the problem of survival. This issue of the costs and benefits of computing ones way through life, he said, has been largely overlooked in biology so far.

So living organisms can be regarded as entities that attune to their environment by using information to harvest energy and evade equilibrium. Sure, its a bit of a mouthful. But notice that it said nothing about genes and evolution, on which Mayr, like many biologists, assumed that biological intention and purpose depend.

How far can this picture then take us? Genes honed by natural selection are undoubtedly central to biology. But could it be that evolution by natural selection is itself just a particular case of a more general imperative toward function and apparent purpose that exists in the purely physical universe? It is starting to look that way.

Adaptation has long been seen as the hallmark of Darwinian evolution. But Jeremy England at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has argued that adaptation to the environment can happen even in complex nonliving systems.

Adaptation here has a more specific meaning than the usual Darwinian picture of an organism well-equipped for survival. One difficulty with the Darwinian view is that theres no way of defining a well-adapted organism except in retrospect. The fittest are those that turned out to be better at survival and replication, but you cant predict what fitness entails. Whales and plankton are well-adapted to marine life, but in ways that bear little obvious relation to one another.

Englands definition of adaptation is closer to Schrdingers, and indeed to Maxwells: A well-adapted entity can absorb energy efficiently from an unpredictable, fluctuating environment. It is like the person who keeps his footing on a pitching ship while others fall over because shes better at adjusting to the fluctuations of the deck. Using the concepts and methods of statistical mechanics in a nonequilibrium setting, England and his colleagues argue that these well-adapted systems are the ones that absorb and dissipate the energy of the environment, generating entropy in the process.

Complex systems tend to settle into these well-adapted states with surprising ease, said England: Thermally fluctuating matter often gets spontaneously beaten into shapes that are good at absorbing work from the time-varying environment.

There is nothing in this process that involves the gradual accommodation to the surroundings through the Darwinian mechanisms of replication, mutation and inheritance of traits. Theres no replication at all. What is exciting about this is that it means that when we give a physical account of the origins of some of the adapted-looking structures we see, they dont necessarily have to have had parents in the usual biological sense, said England. You can explain evolutionary adaptation using thermodynamics, even in intriguing cases where there are no self-replicators and Darwinian logic breaks downso long as the system in question is complex, versatile and sensitive enough to respond to fluctuations in its environment.

But neither is there any conflict between physical and Darwinian adaptation. In fact, the latter can be seen as a particular case of the former. If replication is present, then natural selection becomes the route by which systems acquire the ability to absorb workSchrdingers negative entropyfrom the environment. Self-replication is, in fact, an especially good mechanism for stabilizing complex systems, and so its no surprise that this is what biology uses. But in the nonliving world where replication doesnt usually happen, the well-adapted dissipative structures tend to be ones that are highly organized, like sand ripples and dunes crystallizing from the random dance of windblown sand. Looked at this way, Darwinian evolution can be regarded as a specific instance of a more general physical principle governing nonequilibrium systems.

This picture of complex structures adapting to a fluctuating environment allows us also to deduce something about how these structures store information. In short, so long as such structureswhether living or notare compelled to use the available energy efficiently, they are likely to become prediction machines.

Its almost a defining characteristic of life that biological systems change their state in response to some driving signal from the environment. Something happens; you respond. Plants grow toward the light; they produce toxins in response to pathogens. These environmental signals are typically unpredictable, but living systems learn from experience, storing up information about their environment and using it to guide future behavior. (Genes, in this picture, just give you the basic, general-purpose essentials.)

Prediction isnt optional, though. According to the work of Susanne Still at the University of Hawaii, Gavin Crooks, formerly at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and their colleagues, predicting the future seems to be essential for any energy-efficient system in a random, fluctuating environment.

Theres a thermodynamic cost to storing information about the past that has no predictive value for the future, Still and colleagues show. To be maximally efficient, a system has to be selective. If it indiscriminately remembers everything that happened, it incurs a large energy cost. On the other hand, if it doesnt bother storing any information about its environment at all, it will be constantly struggling to cope with the unexpected. A thermodynamically optimal machine must balance memory against prediction by minimizing its nostalgiathe useless information about the past, said a co-author, David Sivak, now at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. In short, it must become good at harvesting meaningful informationthat which is likely to be useful for future survival.

Youd expect natural selection to favor organisms that use energy efficiently. But even individual biomolecular devices like the pumps and motors in our cells should, in some important way, learn from the past to anticipate the future. To acquire their remarkable efficiency, Still said, these devices must implicitly construct concise representations of the world they have encountered so far, enabling them to anticipate whats to come.

Even if some of these basic information-processing features of living systems are already prompted, in the absence of evolution or replication, by nonequilibrium thermodynamics, you might imagine that more complex traitstool use, say, or social cooperationmust be supplied by evolution.

Well, dont count on it. These behaviors, commonly thought to be the exclusive domain of the highly advanced evolutionary niche that includes primates and birds, can be mimicked in a simple model consisting of a system of interacting particles. The trick is that the system is guided by a constraint: It acts in a way that maximizes the amount of entropy (in this case, defined in terms of the different possible paths the particles could take) it generates within a given timespan.

Entropy maximization has long been thought to be a trait of nonequilibrium systems. But the system in this model obeys a rule that lets it maximize entropy over a fixed time window that stretches into the future. In other words, it has foresight. In effect, the model looks at all the paths the particles could take and compels them to adopt the path that produces the greatest entropy. Crudely speaking, this tends to be the path that keeps open the largest number of options for how the particles might move subsequently.

You might say that the system of particles experiences a kind of urge to preserve freedom of future action, and that this urge guides its behavior at any moment. The researchers who developed the modelAlexander Wissner-Gross at Harvard University and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologycall this a causal entropic force. In computer simulations of configurations of disk-shaped particles moving around in particular settings, this force creates outcomes that are eerily suggestive of intelligence.

In one case, a large disk was able to use a small disk to extract a second small disk from a narrow tubea process that looked like tool use. Freeing the disk increased the entropy of the system. In another example, two disks in separate compartments synchronized their behavior to pull a larger disk down so that they could interact with it, giving the appearance of social cooperation.

Of course, these simple interacting agents get the benefit of a glimpse into the future. Life, as a general rule, does not. So how relevant is this for biology? Thats not clear, although Wissner-Gross said that he is now working to establish a practical, biologically plausible, mechanism for causal entropic forces. In the meantime, he thinks that the approach could have practical spinoffs, offering a shortcut to artificial intelligence. I predict that a faster way to achieve it will be to discover such behavior first and then work backward from the physical principles and constraints, rather than working forward from particular calculation or prediction techniques, he said. In other words, first find a system that does what you want it to do and then figure out how it does it.

Aging, too, has conventionally been seen as a trait dictated by evolution. Organisms have a lifespan that creates opportunities to reproduce, the story goes, without inhibiting the survival prospects of offspring by the parents sticking around too long and competing for resources. That seems surely to be part of the story, but Hildegard Meyer-Ortmanns, a physicist at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, thinks that ultimately aging is a physical process, not a biological one, governed by the thermodynamics of information.

Its certainly not simply a matter of things wearing out. Most of the soft material we are made of is renewed before it has the chance to age, Meyer-Ortmanns said. But this renewal process isnt perfect. The thermodynamics of information copying dictates that there must be a trade-off between precision and energy. An organism has a finite supply of energy, so errors necessarily accumulate over time. The organism then has to spend an increasingly large amount of energy to repair these errors. The renewal process eventually yields copies too flawed to function properly; death follows.

Empirical evidence seems to bear that out. It has been long known that cultured human cells seem able to replicate no more than 40 to 60 times (called the Hayflick limit) before they stop and become senescent. And recent observations of human longevity have suggested that there may be some fundamental reason why humans cant survive much beyond age 100.

Theres a corollary to this apparent urge for energy-efficient, organized, predictive systems to appear in a fluctuating nonequilibrium environment. We ourselves are such a system, as are all our ancestors back to the first primitive cell. And nonequilibrium thermodynamics seems to be telling us that this is just what matter does under such circumstances. In other words, the appearance of life on a planet like the early Earth, imbued with energy sources such as sunlight and volcanic activity that keep things churning out of equilibrium, starts to seem not an extremely unlikely event, as many scientists have assumed, but virtually inevitable. In 2006, Eric Smith and the late Harold Morowitz at the Santa Fe Institute argued that the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems makes the emergence of organized, complex systems much more likely on a prebiotic Earth far from equilibrium than it would be if the raw chemical ingredients were just sitting in a warm little pond (as Charles Darwin put it) stewing gently.

In the decade since that argument was first made, researchers have added detail and insight to the analysis. Those qualities that Ernst Mayr thought essential to biologymeaning and intentionmay emerge as a natural consequence of statistics and thermodynamics. And those general properties may in turn lead naturally to something like life.

At the same time, astronomers have shown us just how many worlds there areby some estimates stretching into the billionsorbiting other stars in our galaxy. Many are far from equilibrium, and at least a few are Earth-like. And the same rules are surely playing out there, too.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder - WIRED

Since 2008 the Wabash Valley Right to Life, based in Terre Haute, has presented a Respect for Life award to a person nominated by someone in the community.

At its annual Benefit Dinner held on Jan. 26 at OShaughnessy Hall, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, the WVRTL presented the 2016 Thomas J. Marzen Respect for Life award to Sharon Carey, executive director of the Crisis Pregnancy Center of the Wabash Valley. Criteria for receiving this award includes being dedicated to the sanctity of human life; longevity of service and having a servant attitude within a pro-life organization; faithfulness to the promised tasks related to pro-life work; and going the extra mile in the current year of recognition and involvement in additional community services.

Carey met all the criteria and more. She has served at the CPC of the WV in many different capacities since being hired in May of 1990. She has held her current position as executive director since 2001.

When Carey learned she had been nominated for the WVRTL Respect for Life award, she was surprised and appreciative. She thought of those the award represented all individuals who work so hard for the CPC to make an impact on the community. She said, Simultaneously I thought of the great opportunity to take this special award and give it to my Lord. He loves this community, and its evident in how Hes provided our new location to meet the needs of the community.

The most significant accomplishment of the CPC of WV happened in 2015 when it moved from the center on Poplar Street and into a new facility on Wabash Avenue, the largest free-standing pregnancy center in the nation. This new CPC is a 7,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility.

The whole community has been behind this project, stated Carey, because the CPC is aimed at the communitys needs. CPC has received a great outpouring of support from the community, especially with finances. The new facility cost a little less than $2 million and every bit came from local support. Built debt free, money came from individuals, churches, local grants and from businesses. Comments included: Weve seen the CPC work in our community and know that it makes our community better.

The board and staff chose this particular location because of it accessibility to college students, both female and male. Since moving to the new building, the client load has significantly increased, offering more medical services beyond the standard ultrasound to various STD testing and pap smears as directed by a doctor. The medical staff has also grown.

The person who nominated Carey for the Respect for Life award wrote: Sharon does not take these accomplishments lightly. She knows that it is by the grace of God that she has the vision, the support, and the resources needed to be successful. Sharon continually encourages the staff and volunteers to respect life, love the unborn and their parents, and live in a manner that would be pleasing to God.

Carey emphasized that the CPC is here to meet needs, to help with life choices the clients sexuality as well as pregnancy issues. Expanded services have opened opportunities for the CPC to give help and hope where its needed. For example, a negative pregnancy test might give a client a false sense of security. Peer-counselors talk with clients about their struggles of being sexually active. The discovery of an STD is a critical moment in life. They have to face the prospect of change and will often listen and adapt to a lifestyle adjustment.

The CPCs compassion ministries also add to community outreach. Creating Positive Relationships (CPR) reaches 5,000 to 6,000 middle and high school students in Vigo and surrounding counties with the advantages of abstinence. For the support of new moms and dads, programs include Encouraging Parents Together (EPT), Earn While You Learn (EWYL), and 24/7 Dads. Theres even a prison ministry called Inside/Out Dads.

Previous recipients of the Thomas J. Marzen Respect for Life award: Thomas J. Marzen (memorial), Msg. Lawrence Moran, Ron Curtis (founder of the CPC of WV), Cecelia Lundstrom, Donna Brinkley, Susan Graham, Rick Mascari and Evelyn Ring.

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CPC's Carey earns Respect for Life award - Terre Haute Tribune Star

February 10, 2017 AAE architecture. Credit: MIPT

Scientists from Mail.Ru group Insilico Medicine and MIPT have for the first time applied a generative neural network to create new pharmaceutical medicines with the desired characteristics. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) developed and trained to "invent" new molecular structures may produce a dramatic reduction in the time and cost of searching for substances with potential medicinal properties. The researchers intend to use these technologies in the search for new medications within various areas from oncology to CVDs and even anti-infectives. The first results were submitted to Oncotarget in June 2016. Since that time, the group has made many improvements to the system and engaged with some of the leading pharmaceutical companies.

Currently, the inorganic molecule base contains hundreds of millions of substances, and only a small fraction of them are used in medicinal drugs. The pharmacological methods of making drugs generally have a hereditary nature. For example, pharmacologists might continue to research aspirin that has already been in use for many years, perhaps adding something into the compound to reduce side effects or increase efficiency, yet the substance still remains the same. Earlier this year, the scientists at Insilico Medicine demonstrated that it is possible to substantially narrow the search using deep neural networks. But now they have focused on a much more challenging question: Is there a chance to create conceptually new molecules with medicinal properties using the novel flavor of deep neural networks trained on millions of molecular structures?

Generative adversarial autoencoder (AAE) architecture, an extension of generative adversarial networks, was used as the basis, and compounds with known medicinal properties and efficient concentrations were used to train the system. The researchers entered information on these types of compounds into the network. The system was then adjusted so that the same data was acquired in the output. The network itself was made up of three structural elements: an encoder, decoder and discriminator, each of which had its own specific role in cooperating with the other two. The encoder worked with the decoder to compress and then restore information on the parent compound, while the discriminator helped make the compressed presentation more suitable for subsequent recovery. Once the network learned a wide swath of known molecules, the encoder and discriminator "switched off," and the network generated descriptions of the molecules on its own using the decoder.

Developing generative adversarial networks that produce high-quality images based on text inputs requires substantial expertise and lengthy training time on high-performance computing equipment. But with images and videos, humans can quickly perform quality control of the output. In biology, quality control cannot be performed by the human eye, and a considerable number of validation experiments are required to produce viable molecules.

But SMILEs do not do the job very well either, as they have a random length from one symbol to 200. Neural network training requires an equal description length for the vector. The "fingerprint" of a molecule suits this task, as it contains complete information on the molecule. There are a lot of methods for making these fingerprints, but the researchers used a simple binary one consisting of 166 digits. They converted SMILEs into fingerprints and taught the network with them, after which they entered fingerprints of known medicinal compounds into the network. The network's job was to allocate inner neuron parameter weights so that the specified input created the specified output. This operation was then repeated many times, as this is how training with large quantities of data is performed. As a result, a "black box" capable of producing a specified output for the specified input was created, after which the developers removed the first layers, and the network generated the fingerprints by itself when the information was run through again. The scientists thus built "fingerprints" for all 72 million molecules, and then compared the network-generated fingerprints with the base. The molecules were selected based on the specified qualities.

Andrei Kazennov, one of the authors of the study and an MIPT postgraduate who works at Insilico Medicine, comments, "We've created a neuronal network of the reproductive type, i.e., capable of producing objects similar to what it was trained on. We ultimately taught this network model to create new fingerprints based on specified properties."

The anticancer drug database was used to check the network. First, the network was trained on one half of the medicinal compounds, and then checked on the other half. The purpose was to predict the compounds already known but not included in the training set. A total of 69 predicted compounds have been identified, and hundreds of molecules developed using a more powerful extension of the method are on the way.

According to one of the authors of the research, Alex Zhavoronkov, the founder of Insilico Medicine and international adjunct professor at MIPT, "Unlike the many other popular methods in deep learning, generative adversarial networks (GANs) were proposed only recently, in 2014, by Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio's group and scientists are still exploring its power in generating meaningful images, videos, works of art and even music. The pace of progress is accelerating and soon we are likely to see tremendous advances stemming from combinations of GANs with other methods. But everything that my groups are working on relates to extending human longevity, durability and increasing performance. When humans go to Mars, they will need the tools to be more resilient to all kinds of stress and be able to generate targeted medicine on demand. We will be the ones supplying these tools."

"GANs are very much the frontline of neuroscience. It is quite clear that they can be used for a much broader variety of tasks than the simple generation of images and music. We tried out this approach with bioinformatics and obtained great results," concludes Artur Kadurin, Mail.Ru Group lead programmer of the search optimizing team and Insilico Medicine independent science advisor.

Explore further: Apple AI research paper is from vision expert and team

More information: Artur Kadurin et al, The cornucopia of meaningful leads: Applying deep adversarial autoencoders for new molecule development in oncology, Oncotarget (2016). DOI: 10.18632/oncotarget.14073

(Tech Xplore)Apple is usually in the news over some product launch, future iPhone speculations, or patent filing. Not this week. Apple made the news over, wait for this, a research paper.

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A single blood test and basic information about a patient's medical status can indicate which patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) are likely to benefit from a stem cell transplant, and the intensity of pre-transplant ...

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Neural network learns to select potential anticancer drugs - Medical Xpress

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Not to be a downer, but we're all going to die. Most likely, somewhere between age 76 and 81 (that is, if you live in the US). And sure, while seven or eight decades isn't too shabby, we'd all agree it'd be much nicer to have twice as much time to tick items off the ol' bucket list.

Luckily, there's recently been a surge in the number of promising research efforts and tech initiatives dedicated to not only dramatically extending our lifespans, but also prolonging health and agility well into our twilight years -- so even when we do get close to the end, we're not hobbled and miserable. Unfortunately, none of them suggeststhe secret is whiskey in your coffee every morning.

No matter how many green smoothies you drink to stay healthy, there's nothing you can do to keep yourself from getting older. Simple aging is the biggest factor causing many of the diseases that ultimately do us in -- from cancer, to heart disease, to diabetes. That stark reality is what's behind the race to develop drugs and supplements that can basically "trick" the body into thinking it's younger than it is, and thus reduce the risk for disease.

According to Bloomberg, pharmaceutical giant Novartis is currently pursuing a handful of drugs that can restore specific physiological functions that typically diminish with age. For example, one would potentially reverse muscle "wasting," another would reverse aging cartilage in joints that causes pain and limited mobility, and another is designed to restore what are known as "hair cells" in the ear canal, which die off over time, leading to hearing loss.

There are also a handful of startups developing so-called "supplements" that aren't hyping themselves up as a cure for aging, but claim they can make you feel younger.The best-known of the bunch is Elysium Health, co-founded by a renowned MIT scientist and backed by six Nobel Prize-winning scientists. Its product, a daily dose of pills it calls Basis, is packed with a combination of naturally occurring compounds and antioxidants associated with longevity, which it claims can restore muscle tissue, improve brain function, and increase energy levels.

However, since the FDA doesn't technically consider aging a "disease" and the company isn't touting Basis as an anti-aging drug (or even claiming it will help explicitly extend your life in any way), it doesn't need to be evaluated by the FDA and doesn't require a prescription -- much in the same way vitamins don't. All you need to get in on the action is $50 and a shipping address, and you can get your very own beautifully branded "fountain of youth" capsules, no questions asked.

There haven't been enough long-term human trials on people taking Elysium's product to truly understand how effective it is. But the fact that an MIT biologist and several other big-shots in the science world are staking their reputations on it is at least somewhat encouraging. However, there are many other burgeoning anti-aging treatments that -- while far more complex than simply popping a pill -- may soon make it easy to turn back time.

Some of the most promising recent research on aging suggests that we may soon be able to reprogram our genome in a way that can reverse the damage time inflicts on our bodies on a more comprehensive scale,rather than by targeting individual areas like joints or ear hair cells, or even inducing suicidal tendencies among troublesome, elderly cells. The idea is based on the discovery that by manipulating a select four genes, you can essentially reprogram cells to revert to an embryonic-like state, thereby stripping them of the marks of age that render them less efficient and cause our bodies to weaken.

In a paper published late last year, scientists at the Salk Institute revealed they were able to genetically engineer mice so that those four genes could be turned on when the mice were exposed to a certain chemical. After six weeks of having the genes turned on, the mice not only ended up looking younger, but they eventually lived 30% longer than mice who hadn't received the treatment. Notably, the researchers made clear that we're still a ways off from initiating human trials for this sort of thing, but the findings are nonetheless a huge deal in the anti-aging community. As Harvard geneticist David Sinclair-- one of the world's leading anti-aging scientists --told Scientific American, the study is the first glimmer of hope that humans could live for centuries. And that's coming from a guy whopreviously said he thinks we'll be living to age 150 by the year 2100.

Another exciting area in the anti-aging quest also involves genetics, but not manipulating or engineering them. Rather, Craig Venter -- the man who sequenced the first complete human genome back in 2006 -- is on a mission to harness genetic sequencing to help us all proactively combat the diseases and ailments that haunt our individual futures. Essentially, he wants to amass a database of 1 million sequenced human genomes in order to cross-check and link variations in them to lethal conditions and anomalies to help doctors identify problems before they can become an issue, so people could theoretically bob and weave every potential disease and ultimately live longer than expected. What's tough is that unlike existing genetic tests from 23andMe and similar outfits that can detect mutations commonly associated with certain cancers, this is an exceedingly complex -- and wildly expensive -- undertaking. That's not to diminish its promise though. Venter's company Human Longevity, Inc.'sdatabase already boasts more than 10,000 sequenced genomes, and it has plans to rapidly scale to collecting 100,000 more per year.

There are reasons to believe this is also the sort of work Google's stealth anti-aging outfit Calico Labs is up to, but that remains a mystery.

As concerned as many of us are with keeping our bodies healthy in an attempt to make it to 150, there are just as many who are more concerned with simply looking the part. Just last year, scientists finally discovered the enzyme in our skin responsible for keeping it looking youthful, which has huge implications for forthcoming cosmetic anti-aging treatments. For one, it means that there may soon be anti-aging creams that can legitimately and dramatically counteract the signs of aging. It also opens up the possibility for tailor-made topical creams to patch up our unique skin and pigment types from wear and tear.

That's not to say that we've moved beyond the threat of snake oil peddlers, who have long lurked within the anti-aging industry. In fact, you don't have to dig too deep to find truly strange and likely too-good-to-be-true emerging fountain of youth trends swirling around Silicon Valley as "scientific" treatments. The most unsettling of the moment is something based on the idea of parabiosis, or essentially stitching oneself to a younger living organism to extend one's own life. Specifically, wealthy life-extension obsessives like Peter Thiel seem to be quite interested in the idea of injecting themselveswith the blood of much younger people, in hopes that it will rejuvenate their own earthly vessels. In fact, there's even a company recruiting "volunteers" that's willing to pay upwards of $8,000 for theirparticipationin a clinical trial that facilitates such transfusions. Any takers?

However, the trouble is much of the science has only ever been conducted in mice -- and more specifically, in mice whose circulatory systems were surgically connected.

Let's just hope they can figure out the drugs, and pills, and gene-sequencing stuff before it becomes normal to vampire blood from broke college kids.

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Joe McGauley is a senior writer for Thrillist who's seen enough movies to know being immortal would actually suck.

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The Tech Breakthroughs That Will Keep People Alive Past 150 - Thrillist

OneTrace is bringing the technology so many golfers experience on TV to life through the launch of their innovative tracking app, produced by mobile agency Nimbletank, in collaboration with OneFairway Ltd, helping golfers become better golfers.

The app helps golfers practice and perfect their swing by using the slow-motion features of the iPhone 6 to trace the ball, visualize shots, and analyse their movements. By showing head, body and club movement and creates composite HD imagery that is completely unique to the market. The app brings ProTracer graphics and feedback to golfers own shots imagery that all golfers know from TV, to their mobiles.

Nimbletank worked in collaboration with OneFairway Ltd to create a prototype. The app was tested on the course with amateur and professional golfers, at all times of the day, in various weather scenarios, both genders, left and right handers, all types of clubs across driving ranges and on golf courses. The experience is perfected by the use of robot navigation, which is originally used to detect unexploded landmines via UAV and here it is used to trace a golf ball.

David Skerrett, managing partner at Nimbletank, discusses how more sports brands should be engaging more with tech and embracing its power to engage audiences further: Technology represents a huge opportunity to connect with sports people both when playing but perhaps more importantly when they are not. The success of many sports is now dependent on the presence and opportunities they place and share online and through apps. Whether that be to drive interaction with your local club, organise your next game or to catch up on news and articles that interest, technology holds the key to enhancing and improving all touch points.

David Dean, chief executive officer of OneFairway predicts this year will be a high water mark for sporting innovation and is looking forward to seeing, a rise in real time, location based advertising that uses big data to perfect the timing and placement of relevant and wanted marketing in ways we haven't seen yet. This harmony of media, message, plus the context new media opportunities present to brands will ultimately add value to consumers lives and make advertising less noisy and more useful the holy grail.

Chris Minas, founder and chief executive officer at Nimbletank adds, Its the quantified self movement. We already can measure so many things about our life and our body. We believe this increasingly rich data from the abundance of sensors around us (not just wearables) can let people make more informed decisions through data and make a meaningful difference to both society and human longevity. Ultimately this can drive a happier and healthier life. I predict we will see new services that are voice driven, mobile, conversational, mixed reality and experiential launch to help unlock sports performance in almost unthinkable ways.

The app is available on the Apple App Store here, the first of its kind to innovate golfing experiences.

Nimbletank is a full service digital and mobile agency, working with clients such as Santander, BBC and Kobalt. In 2016, the agency was awarded Mobile Agency of the Year at The Drum Network Awards.

Originally posted here:
OneTrace brings sporting tech closer to the consumer with the launch of innovative golf tracking app - The Drum

(WXYZ) - When we get sick, it's common for us to reach for some medicine or maybe even have surgery to deal with disease or pain, but what if you could use your own healthy cells to fight back instead?

Right now, there's a procedure being performed in metro Detroit where healthy stem cells are stored so they can be reintroduced to your system and potentially have life changing or life saving benefits.

Dr. Michael Schenden is the first plastic surgeon in the US to perform the Forever Labs stem cell collection. He starts by harvesting her bone marrow to save those healthy stem cells.

"They should be available for many, many different medical applications is a wonderful thing," says Dr. Schenden.

The company behind this procedure is based in Ann Arbor and it's called Forever Labs.

We're told about 30 people have decided to store their stem cells this way. Sonja Michelsen is one of them. She had her daughter in her early 40s and felt like storing her own stem cells could pay off in the future.

"I want to be able to be here with her throughout her life," she says.

She knows there's no guarantee banking her stem cells will help her in the future, but she sees it as an investment that could pay off if her health takes a turn.

"To have that peace of mind that you do have something to use down the road .. is huge," she says.

Steven Clausnitzer is CEO of Forever Labs. He says by re-introducing your own healthy cells, you may be able to fight disease in the future.

"There are a number of ways people are already using these cells. Maybe the most promising .. orthopedic surgeons .. are reintroducing them into joints in lieu of surgery," he says.

Clausnitzer says there are about 500 clinical trials right now that are using stem cells that, one day, may be able to treat everything from osteoarthritis to multiple scleroses to cardiovascular disease.

This kind of stem cell banking is a 15 minute outpatient procedure. It starts with a local anesthetic in the lower back.

He says the number of your stem cells diminishes with age, as does their therapeutic quality.

"My stem cells were stored at 38. I'm going to turn 40 this year. I rest assured knowing I have my 38-year-old stem cells rendered biologically inert. They're no longer aging .. even as I do," says Clausnitzer.

Mark Katakowski is president of Forever Labs. He says his research showed him the rejuvenating and healing power of stem cells in animals. He believes it can have the same effect in humans.

He says the best time to store the stem cells is when you're young.

"There's a slower decline between 20 and 40 years-old and then it picks up. When you put them in the right place at the right time, they can actually improve recovery in a bunch of therapeutic applications," he says.

Katakowski says there's no limit as to how long they can be stored.

Should a person pass away, their stored stem cells would be destroyed unless arrangements have been made for them to be given to a family member.

At this point, the procedure is not FDA approved. The Forever Labs stem cell collection isn't covered by insurance. It costs around $3,500 to have the procedure done and $250 a year for storage.

The company says it plans to bring the first clinical trials for longevity to market in the next 7-10 years, once there is a large enough differential time between when our first clients stored their cells and can then reintroduce.

It says its goal is that its clientele will be able to participate in the first longevity based human trials utilizing autologous stem cell treatments of healthy individuals.

To learn more about Forever Labs, go to: https://www.foreverlabs.co/

Originally posted here:
Can storing your stem cells be the key to fighting disease and living longer? - WXYZ

The Barely Human Fest featuring Adult., ESG, Black Marble and more

8 p.m. Friday through Sunday, Feb. 10-12.

El Club 4114 W. Vernor Highway, Detroit.

Tickets are $20 per night $50 for a three-day pass.

Visit elclubdetroit.com for full lineup and details.

Its been 20 years since Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller played their first show together, as Artificial Material, in Germany. They subsequently settled in Detroit and became Plasma Co. before switching to Adult., the name the world has known the electronic music duo and married couple under since 1998.

During that time Kuperus and Miller have released ?? albums along with plenty of standalone tracks, and theyve remixed songs for nearly two dozen acts including Pet Shop Boys and Death in Vegas. Their latest project, Detroit House Guests, comes out March 17; The duo first conceived the all-star collaboration in 2000 and finally made it a reality via a $40,000 Knight Foundation grant in 2014.

The realization of that dream will keep Adult. fueled throughout 2017, along with a number of high-profile appearances -- including this weekends home town appearance as part of the Barely Human Fest, which Adult. headlines on Saturday, Feb. 11...

Miller says that circumstances, notably moving to a new home in Detroit, have helped Adult. feel the passage of time its been together. Getting a new life set up and running, it can be extremely hilarious going through 20 years of music, he says by phone. Some of the (computer) files wont open; We have to convert them and go through all sorts of machinations. And theres a mountain of papers; We have notes that you dont know what the hell they mean. Eighteen years ago a C-sharp, F in the corner of a piece of paper made sense, but now...

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Nevertheless, the couple is grateful for its longevity. I think we still feel very humble that we could still be a band after 20 years, Miller notes. Its not an easy thing to do. Kuperus adds that, Its not for us to judge, but it seems like our fans find that were continually continuing to be interesting and challenging and relevant -- thats the big challenge.

The Detroit House Guests was conceived as an aural equivalent to a visual artist residency, in which guests -- including Michael Gira of Swans and Angels of Light, Nitzer Ebb co-founder Douglas J. McCarthy and Light Asylums Shannon Funchess -- came to Adult.s home for three weeks each to make music together. We kind of morphed the visual art residency model into the idea of, Well, what would that look like with musicians? Kuperus explains. Its not really a common mode of music-making. For an artist its a great way to learn and experience something. And it let them spend some significant time on one city, which you dont really ever get to do as a touring artist.

Bringing someone into your home, even friends, for that length of time can be a risky proposition, but Miller says that the one thread everybody had was professionalism. Everybody was so unique and different. There was no requirement to write any songs; The (grant) was for collaboration, not a record. But everybody was like, This is in our blood. This is how we communicate with others, so (recording) was inevitable.

Kuperus says most of their Detroit House Guests didnt know anything about Detroit, and she and Miller made sure they were well informed during their stays with Adult. We did a plethora of things, Kuperus reports, anything from going to the Motown Museum to the Dequindre Cut or going and having dinner at Craft Work. Miller notes that it turned out to be a gift for us as well. We got to do a lot of things we had not had time to go and do yet; Living here 20 years, somehow you never make it to this or that. It was like we were always planning some sort of field trip.

If You Go:

The Barely Human Fest featuring Adult., ESG, Black Marble and more

8 p.m. Friday through Sunday, Feb. 10-12.

El Club 4114 W. Vernor Highway, Detroit.

Tickets are $20 per night $50 for a three-day pass.

Visit elclubdetroit.com for full lineup and details.

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Adult. at Barely Human Fest, 5 Things To Know - The Oakland Press

Alexandra Wolfe's 'Valley of the Gods' follows Thiel Fellows on their ... Silicon Valley Business Journal Journalist Alexandra Wolfe tells the tales of the strivers and strangeness behind Silicon Valley startup culture in her new nonfiction book Valley of the Gods.. and more »

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Alexandra Wolfe's 'Valley of the Gods' follows Thiel Fellows on their ... - Silicon Valley Business Journal

With software at the heart of every industry today, an interesting question arises: Can the human body be controlled by code?

The onset of the new renaissance means, most new age businesses can now be controlled by coders huddled in a lab.

The surge prices on uber are controlled by coders and so are the number of cars available in a location. When Tesla realises theres an error with the charger plug that comes with the car, it simply delivers an Over the air update in real time, instead of having to recall the cars. Hackers today are known to be sitting in an aeroplane, plugging into the aircraft LAN and can potentially take control. With software at the heart of every industry today, an interesting question arises: Can the human body be controlled by code ?

Turns out: Of course!

Gene editing techniques have been around for thousands of years. In the ancient past this was achieved by selective breeding. Thats how you end up with exotic dog breeds like the Dalmatian. Over the last few decades, more aggressive techniques like creating artificial mutations by subjecting organisms to radiation, and clogging the organism with new genetic material with the hope that some of it will stick have been invented. Most produce that one sees in the supermarket today is a product of such experimentation, More popularly known as GMOs. These techniques are cumbersome, error prone and its often difficult to predict results accurately.

Things have changed dramatically in the last few years with the discovery of a new gene editing technique called CRISPR CAS 9. CRISPR CAS 9 techniques allow a regular biologist in the lab to have access to sophisticated gene editing equipment and materials for less than 2000 dollars.

So what is gene editing really? Each human cell consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes, inherited in equal numbers both from the mother and father. Each chromosome is made up of billions of molecules of DNA. DNA can be categorized into thousands of units called genes. Each gene has enough information to express one protein. Sometimes errors can creep into the genetic code. Instead of having the letter T, the gene can have G at a crucial location. DNA is pretty much the operating manual for how a cell should go about its business, and you have a copy of it with each and every cell. Therefore any such error can create an effect across the body.

Where CRISPR comes in here, is that using these tools clinical biologists are able to remove an incorrect gene and replace that with a gene that will be more beneficial.

For example, if you have an individual suffering from sickle-cell anemia, there is a possibility in a few years that the patient is injected with a virus carrying CRISPR CAS 9 protein can traverse the body and replace all faulty genetic material with new material that fixes the problem. There is also the possibility that patients suffering from cancer can have CRISPR edited antibodies that fight all the bad cancer causing cells and kill them. CRISPR offers this wonderful opportunity to develop highly personalized proteins to deal with patients suffering from severe genetic challenge and increase their longevity.

CRISPR is an approach that bacteria have been using for millions of years to protect themselves from regular invasions by harmful viruses. With the same approach humans today are trying to use in a variety of applications ranging from creating super foods to eliminating genetic illnesses, improving human longevity, personalizing medicine and bringing down the quality of healthcare.

Having said that, last year U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, ominously declared that genome editing was a potential weapon of mass destruction. With the democratization of access to CRISPR technology, now every qualified individual can potentially do experiments editing the gene pool. For example, Verily, an Alphabet company, is looking to create genetically altered male mosquitos that on mating with the female anopheles mosquito can create a generation of sterile mosquitoes. This will make sure that in a few years, these types of mosquitos will not exist anymore. While this is great news for people, it may not be equally beneficial for the ecosystem. There are many animals and birds that might be part of the mosquito ecosystem, and depend on it for their survival. Thus secondary, tertiary and changes beyond that can create a world that we no longer might recognize.

While its a great opportunity for countries like India to do research in a highly competitive space like this, we also need to be cognizant of the potential harm, and therefore there is a strong case for legislation globally.

The author is CEO of [x]cubeLABS

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Hacking longevity - Telangana Today

Over the last century, Americans have added an unprecedented 30 years to their life spans. But most people still rarely think about or plan for the possibility of living until 80, 90, 100 years and beyond.

The Sightlines project at the Center for Longevity is designed to encourage research and discussion into how to optimize well-being as we live longer lives. (Image credit: kali9 / Getty Images)

The Stanford Center on Longevity hopes to ignite a cultural shift in the ways people think about and design longer lives to optimize well-being throughout all stages of a persons life.

This week, the center released the Sightlines project website as part of its goal to stir conversation about what leads to long, healthy living and to encourage more policymakers, entrepreneurs and members of the public to think about ways of redesigning the human life.

Our aim is to help people have a long-term view of their life, said Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Were trying to help people think about living lives as older people much earlier in their lives.

The Sightlines project launched a year ago with a study the center conducted to understand how well Americans are prepared for longer lives. Since then the project has become a flagship of the center.

As part of the study, researchers worked together to identify prevalent indicators of longevity spanning three domains: healthy living, financial security and social engagement. To paint a portrait of Americans standing in these domains, the team compiled data from eight nationally representative surveys and analyzed trends across six age groups in the U.S. population in recent years and among previous cohorts ranging from 10 to 20 years earlier.

The research showed that the biggest negative change over time has been the declining percentage of Americans who are doing well financially. Financial security is less common among Americans in 2014 compared with 2000, especially among the least educated population. In addition, the average debt the Millennials, ages 25 to 34, are facing is five times higher than the debt the same age group carried 15 years ago, according to the research.

Another finding showed that the baby boom generation is less socially engaged than 55- to 64-year-olds in 1995. Baby boomers tend to have weaker ties to family, friends and neighbors, are less likely to be married and are less likely to participate in religious or community activities compared with the same age group of 20 years ago.

When it comes to health, data revealed that more Americans are exercising regularly for the first time in decades. Risky behaviors, like smoking, have also been on a steady decline across every age group.

But the 2016 study was just the starting point for the researchers vision. Over the past year, the team has designed an interactive website showcasing the comprehensive sets of findings from the 2016 study as well as relevant work being done by faculty at Stanford and around the country.

Our hope for developing the website is not just to present our thinking about this topic, but to engage and iterate with people beyond our center as part of an ongoing, evolving discussion focused on preparing Americans for long-lived lives, said Tamara Sims, a research scientist at the Stanford Center on Longevity.

The Sightlines team created interactive data visualizations to provide a deeper look at changes within the American population, not just by age group, but also by gender, ethnicity, education, income, marital status and geographical region where data are available.

The results allow researchers, including Sims, to identify new patterns in the data.

We are offering unique kinds of comparisons, Carstensen said.

For example, recent analyses show that although home ownership has declined for younger generations from 2000 to 2014, young Asian Americans showed no decline in contrast to other ethnic minorities.

Another finding showed that more educated people, who tend to be doing well across most indicators of well-being, are more likely to sit for long stretches of time, which recently emerged as an independent risk factor for health.

The biggest lesson from this next phase of the Sightlines project is that we cant make sweeping generalizations about different generations of Americans or about different domains of well-being, for that matter, Sims said. There are always caveats that need to be considered and further explored.

Carstensen and her team intend for the project to become a connection point for experts around the world who are interested in enhancing human longevity.

In addition to stimulating conversations and informing decisions among influencers and leaders in private and public industry, the projects website can also serve as a research tool by providing scientists with findings and metrics most relevant for designing comparative studies and developing and assessing the effectiveness of interventions.

Carstensen and her team plan on updating their 2016 research in about five years as new survey data is released. The team used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau; the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Aging; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the Federal Reserve System; and the University of Wisconsin and the National Institute on Aging.

But analyzing existing data limits researchers because some areas that are important to longevity, such as social engagement, are understudied.

So Carstensen, Sims and the Sightlines team intend to work with experts to develop better ways of assessing well-being across the life span and collect more data.

For example, experts have been debating about how to best measure the diet of Americans. Currently, the national benchmark for a healthy diet is measured as eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.

Is there a gold standard of measuring diet that we should use going forward? Sims said. We are working with faculty affiliates and other experts to tackle such questions.

A next step for the Sightlines project is to develop a comprehensive survey to assess all domains among the same group of people over time and to find answers to questions raised by the original report. Researchers plan to make the survey available online sometime later this year.

Excerpt from:
Stanford researchers aim to create global conversations about long, healthy living - Stanford University News