Category Archives: Human Longevity

This is our AI Daily Roundup today. We are covering the top updates from around the world. The updates will feature state-of-the-art capabilities inartificial intelligence (AI),Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Fintech, and human-system interactions. We cover the role of AI Daily Roundup and its application in various industries and daily lives.

Segra completed the first phase of its broadband build for DISH, launching service across more than 500 towers located in critical sites in less than one year. With the help of Segra, DISH has reported it has met its 20 percent of U.S. population coverage deadline established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Intelligent Connected Vehicle (ICV) sector, the government of Zibo, Shandong,Chinahas recently been working with ICV players, such as Baidu Apollo, QCraft, Dongfeng Yuexiang,Golden Dragonand Suntae Auto, the frontrunner in Zibos ICV industry chain. The aim of the collaboration is to establish an ICV full-scenario ecosystem along the 100km-plus stretch of road in the mountain park located in the eastern Zibo National New & Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone.

Longevity research network,Rejuve.AI reveals its first app,Longevity, which combines Artificial Intelligence (AI), world-leading research, and blockchain technology to drive breakthroughs in human life extension. In a first for the industry, Longevity will give users full control over their health data as part of its mission to democratise and advance longevity science breakthroughs that were previously inaccessible beyond the realms of academia or significant wealth.

Simulations Plus, Inc. a leading provider of modeling and simulation software and services for pharmaceutical safety and efficacy, announced it has entered a new collaboration with a large p

SingleStore, the cloud-native database built for speed and scale to power data-intensive applications, announced it has selected AppDirect to power SingleStore Connect, a subscription commerce platform that removes the complexity of building a recurring business model. SingleStore Connect is an interactive marketplace for partners and customers to collaborate, discover new use cases and locate complementary technologies to maximize their SingleStore solution investments.

Read more here:
Daily AI Roundup: Biggest Machine Learning, Robotic And Automation Updates - AiThority

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission with funding from the EU, routinely publishes monthly climate bulletins reporting on the changes observed in global surface air temperature, sea ice cover and hydrological variables. All the reported findings are based on computer-generated analyses using billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.

July 2022 surface air temperature:

July 2022 sea ice:

July 2022 Hydrological conditions:

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reports on the prolonged heatwave seen starting in Portugal and Spain, continuing north and eastwards towards France, the United Kingdom, central Europe and Scandinavia. Temperatures measuring over 40C were observed in parts of Portugal, Spain, France and the UK. Across the affected region, July and all-time records for maximum temperature were broken. The Iberian Peninsula saw an unusually large number of days with maximum temperatures above 35C, underlining the longevity of hot temperatures in this region. For its regional average, southwestern Europe experienced its warmest July on record in terms of maximum temperatures.

Senior Scientist for the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Freja Vamborg, states: We can expect to continue seeing more frequent and longer periods of extremely high temperatures, as global temperatures increase further. Heatwaves pose serious risks to human health, and they can increase the intensity and longevity of many other disastrous climate events including wildfires and droughts, affecting both society and natural ecosystems. Additionally, dry conditions from previous months combined with high temperatures and low precipitation rates seen in many areas during July may have adverse effects on agricultural production and other industries such as river transport and energy production.

More information on a C3S analysis of the recent heatwave and the dry conditions affecting Europe can be found here.

Video material accompanying the maps can be found here.

More information about climate variables in July and climate updates of previous months as well as high-resolution graphics and the video can be downloaded here.

More information can be found here.

More information on the reference period used, can be found here.

Answers to frequently asked questions regarding temperature monitoring can be found here.

Information about the C3S data set and how it is compiled

Temperature and hydrological maps and data are from ECMWF Copernicus Climate Change Services ERA5 dataset.

Sea ice maps and data are from a combination of information from ERA5, as well as from the EUMETSAT OSI SAF Sea Ice Index v2.1, Sea Ice Concentration CDR/ICDR v2 and fast-track data provided upon request by OSI SAF.

Regional area average quoted here are the following longitude/latitude bounds:

Globe, 180W-180E, 90S-90N. overall surface.

Europe, 25W-40E, 34N-72N, over land surfaces only.

About Copernicus and ECMWF

Copernicus is a component of the European Unions space programme, with funding by the EU, and is its flagship Earth observation programme, which operates through six thematic services: Atmosphere, Marine, Land, Climate Change, Security and Emergency. It delivers freely accessible operational data and services providing users with reliable and up-to-date information related to our planet and its environment. The programme is coordinated and managed by the European Commission and implemented in partnership with the Member States, the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), EU Agencies and Mercator Ocan, amongst others.

ECMWF operates two services from the EUs Copernicus Earth observation programme: the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). They also contribute to the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS), which is implemented by the EU Joint Research Council (JRC). The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by 35 states. It is both a research institute and a 24/7 operational service, producing and disseminating numerical weather predictions to its Member States. This data is fully available to the national meteorological services in the Member States. The supercomputer facility (and associated data archive) at ECMWF is one of the largest of its type in Europe and Member States can use 25% of its capacity for their own purposes.

ECMWF has expanded its location across its Member States for some activities. In addition to an HQ in the UK and Computing Centre in Italy, offices with a focus on activities conducted in partnership with the EU, such as Copernicus, are in Bonn, Germany.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service website can be found athttp://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/

The Copernicus Climate Change Service website can be found athttps://climate.copernicus.eu/

More information on Copernicus:www.copernicus.eu

The ECMWF website can be found athttps://www.ecmwf.int/

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Prolonged and intense heatwave affecting parts of western and northern Europe breaks temperature records; globally, July 2022 was one of three warmest...

We are all made of dust, and in the end, we will return to dust. This belief, consistent in essence across various religions, cultures and traditions, has also, for most of the human race's tenure on earth, manifested itself in our practices and usages. We all know of the early houses built using natural stone boulders and animal skins, or assembled meticulously with wood logs, clay bricks and straws. All these materials are congruously perishable and hence, sustainable. But, as humans slowly moved from a peripatetic lifestyle to a more settled one, the desire for building structures and objects that could resist the throes of time, temperature and calamity also grew. Today, we can buy plastic bottles that can last for decades, but fall out of trend within the span of a season. Ergo, an unsustainable culture has bolstered. We ostensibly value durability and easily succumb to the latest fads. In a climate such as this, it is brave and admirable to go against the tide and build something that is essentially "designed to disappear", as Midushi Kochhar of YLEM Studio describes.

Kochhar is an Indian industrial designer and the founder of YLEM, a circular design and research studio. A graduate from Central St.Martins, UAL in London, UK, Kochhars practice as a designer revolves around researching materials, techniques and methodologies that can help rebuild symbiotic relationships and further the practice of circular economy in our daily lives. She co-founded Makers on Move, a Netherlands-based sustainable-arts initiative for design, research, technology and education, which is also supported by the Dutch government. YLEM is the Indian designer's latest creative practice, born out of the desire to understand and communicate the relationship of materials with design, science, sustainable development and human behaviour.

All of YLEM's projects are driven by the underlying theme of green design. The designers at the studio, under the tutelage of Kochhar, employ fastidious research and experimentation to develop materials that can be used to create products with circular life cycles. By utilising non-traditional items and salvaged waste to create unique materials, YLEM helps spread awareness about climate change and debunks the common misunderstandings associated with discarded materials. The firm's role, however, is not limited to research and development alone. Instead, these new materials are used to create both bespoke and scalable product design items that one can use in their everyday lives. Some of their projects include Eggware, Hasiroo and Plumeware. While Eggware, a project sitting at the intersection of design and food, is more experimental and artistic in nature, Hasiroo poses the potential to reach a wider audience at affordable rates.

Eggware, made by binding the calcareous food waste, that is eggshells, using a bio-binder, resembles both ceramic and concrete in materiality. This naturally white, light-weight, rigid and water-absorbent material can be used to craft tableware, candelabras, jewellery holders, and planters and pots. After usage, these cohesive pieces, high in calcium carbonate and protein, can be crushed into bits and used to compost and nourish soil. The global consumption of eggs amounts to 1200 billion units per year, and the eggshells from these eggs are wastefully discarded. Kochhar identified this massive source of waste, and decided to pick up the perennial material and sculpt them into interesting shapes, such that they can mimic the roles of plates, glasses and stands. Not only does this project reduce wastage, but the hand sculpted pieces offer the chance to own bespoke homeware items that are also sustainable. Heeding to the regulations of circular design, Eggware follows a zero-waste production cycle. The damaged and rejected bits from one batch are salvaged and used up in the next one, thus ensuring that nothing goes to waste. The studio has partnered with local food vendors to acquire large quantities of egg waste, thus helping in the reduction of egg scraps and bits that travel to the landfills. The result of this project is an array of charming recycled products that allow equitable acquisition of artistic objects meant for personal usage and decoration.

Another interesting sustainable design project, created by Kochhar with the intent of exploring the potential of undiscovered natural fibres is Hasiroo. It encompasses a series of footwear made out of the leaf sheaths of a native Indian palm tree. Since the dried palm leaves that fall off every season are brittle in nature, they are treated so as to make them more flexible. These tensile offshoots are then converted into flat bases for the footwear. Developed to replace the polyester guest slippers used in the hospitality sector, the studio also plans on designing more lifestyle products using Hasiroo.

Creating sustainable physical objects that tend, in some manner, to everyday needs is an essential practice. However, envisioning prototypes and concepts is also a crucial step towards imagining and creating a green future. YLEM's Plumeware is a step in that direction. Imagined as an eco-friendly surface material stitched together using discarded chicken feathers, Plumeware bears the ability to be shaped as desired. It is durable and flexible and can be shaped into decorative and functional products. Although it is not used by the studio to create physical objects, the idea of moulding such an unusual substance into a usable material prompts curiosity and encourages further research and experimentation in this direction.

While most of Kochhar's experimentations revolve around small scale products, Stasis Set, a furniture piece by YLEM takes it a notch further. Stasis Set is a two-piece outdoor furniture set that is made using bamboo and that alludes to the theme of tensegrity. The project aims to understand the traditional knowledge systems of bamboo production in the Indian subcontinent. Since bamboo has recently crept up as an alternative to other kinds of wood, understanding the most archaic notions and practices related to the material are almost imperative. Kochhar, instead of crafting a simple rectilinear furniture design piece, played with the shape and form of the lounge chair to create a contemporary design piece. Much like the name of the project which means counterbalance, tension, harmony and togetherness, the lounging furniture product softly cushions the user and stands stoically under the weight of anyone using the furniture.

Behind this impressive body of work is an up-and-coming industrial designer, Midushi Kochhar. STIR established a dialogue with Kochhar to better understand her creative journey, what drives her and the role of YLEM in propagating a more sustainable culture.

Almas Sadique: Tell us a little about your journey in design and research. How did you start working with discarded materials?

Midushi Kochhar: As a kid, I used to collect weird looking objects from my surroundings and used to display them in my room because of the sheer beauty they held in my eyes. Snake skins, tree barks, dry flowers, even bones sometimes. They did not have to look shiny and new, but by just being in their natural state, they made me feel attracted to them. Subsequently, during my design studies, I was exposed to the philosophy of Wabi-Sabi, which made so much sense to me and it was something I was following unconsciously. This trickled down to my practice of repair before discard and eventually I started retrieving discards. I cant actually put a finger on it, but this idea of seeing value everywhere, with little or no intervention is what has led me to work with such materials.

I am the designated kabaadiwali in my circles, which makes me feel quite proud - existence of a kabaadiwala is quite important in our social fabric and if at all, this small-scale network can become more organised, instead of "westernised" we can continue to recycle low-value materials and have a positive impact on several levels.

My educational background also encourages me to solve problems and create appealing products but it contradicts with my mindset of consuming minimally. Therefore, I try to find the right balance to the conflicting challenges of achieving elegant aesthetics, production capabilities, easy usability and environmental impacts. To tackle these oppositions, I started YLEM in India and Makers on the Move in the Netherlands.

Almas: How did you come up with the name YLEM for your studio? What is the thought behind it?

Midushi: YLEM [ahy-luhm] is a middle-English word that stands for the hypothetical initial substance of the universe from which all matter is derived or it can also mean it is the real, primordial ur stuff out of which everything else is made. Since materials are the epicentre of all our design process, and we want our audience to think about alternatives and consequences of material utilisation, it made sense to name the studio that. Plus, we simply love the sound of the word.

Almas: What led to Eggware? What is the intention behind the project?

Midushi:Eggware is one of the results from a bigger body of work called The Waste Project that was my master's thesis at Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London. The process started with basic kitchen experiments using our regular household waste. I started with vegetable peels, fruit seeds etc. and mixed them with different binders. The purpose was to create DIY recipes for people to replicate and upcycle some of their domestic waste, promoting a home ecosystem.

Subsequent experimentation that further took place at Green Lab, London, as part of a research residency there, resulted in more rigid, scalable and novel material that I coined as Eggware. This led me to think of the rest of the waste that comes from the originator of an egg, that is, chickens. About 50 per cent of their meat is used for food consumption and the remaining organs, including the feathers are thrown away. Chicken feathers, although have low insulation properties as compared to down, have great binding strength - and this is how Plumeware was born. With further experimentation, we conceptualised a set of lamps to showcase their beautiful translucency, and perhaps, quite literally, shed light on this low-value resource.

Almas: All your projects before Eggware also utilise discarded materials and waste such as chicken feathers, leaf sheaths etc. What kind of research and development process does the studio undertake when deciding on these materials and developing prototypes?

Midushi: The process usually starts with ideating on accessible yet abundant materials around us, basically looking at resources that no one is paying attention to. Our curiosity starts with the material first, and then we work on finding an application for that material.

It takes years to go from workshop investigations to scalable solutions and we do in-house testing mostly at the physical, mechanical and thermal levels. That means we check for water resistance, fire retardation, longevity, hardness etc. and while doing so, we also factor in the end-of-life disposal and if at all our products can find a new life, in a different version. Moreover, our materials are always in development, and we incorporate user, maker, market feedback to create high-design.

Almas: Apart from ecological, what are some social and economic impacts of these biomaterials?

Midushi: Virgin materials are expensive and difficult to procure, waste is cheap and abundant. It makes great economic sense to first utilise what is discarded locally around you, that is, identify this valuable "waste" and instead of mining for new resources, utilise the discards up to their maximum capabilities. Sure, not everything can be recycled and can be made from residue but there is a big enough market potential here where people are slowly starting to tap into. Socio-cultural impacts are seen in ways of new craft practices being created, giving our local artisans another medium to work with, hence improving their livelihood.

Almas: What is the future of biomaterials? Can you see its usage extending beyond product design?

Midushi: Yes, definitely! I would say that the application of such innovative materials is extensively being applied in the textile and fashion industry. For example, fabric made from and by algae, dyed by bacteria and filter air by infusing chlorophyll in them. Several plant-based leathers like piatex (from pineapple leaves), malai (from coconut cellulose) are also becoming mainstream and affordable. In construction and packaging, mycelium is gaining traction due to its natural strength, water resistant, and fire resistance properties.

Construction and fashion are few of the most waste producing industries, and these examples just prove the scale at which biomaterials can be applied. The shift is taking place slowly, and the opportunities are immense in the field. Having said that, since it is such a new field, starting out has many challenges related to awareness, affordability, longevity and profitability etc.

Almas: Which material does the studio plan on experimenting with next?

Midushi: We have witnessed some really interesting items being made from these materials and want to devote more energy into new material R&D and design. It is challenging to grow while continuously researching. We are designers not engineers, so knowing our limits we are quite intrigued to work with mycelium (the vegetative part of mushroom) and moss as well.

Almas: Despite the availability of biomaterials, plastic continues as a dominant material in the market. How do you think this trend can be subverted?

Midushi: Let's try to understand the extensive use of plastics and its origins. Plastic is quite a marvellous material, which no other material can currently compete with and it took over 50 years just to develop it. Before that high-value natural materials like wood, tusks, horns, tortoise shells, metals etc. were being used exploitatively. Plastic emerged as a solution to somehow save the environment and did so in this regard. It became a problem due to its low-cost and disposability factor where people found no sense of judicious usage of the same.

Currently, biomaterials are not that easy to source (due to the ways the industry is set in) and more expensive due to less companies producing them. Now this does not mean they are actually expensive to procure - it simply means that industry is not conducive and structured in a way that favours non-renewable resources. With the right support from governments, self-realisation, and easier transitions, we can reclaim our biomaterials and get closer to our natural environment while urbanising in greener ways.

Almas: Beyond research and design that centres on the circular economy, how can sustainable practices and the usage of reclaimed materials be encouraged amongst the larger population?

Midushi: I think there are several different ways to work around this. Of course, the one way is with the support of governments, that is, having strict policies against material wastage and utilisation of toxic matter and subsidising the greener ways of functioning.

Secondly, I dont suggest that it is only the government's responsibility and want to debunk a grassroots-top/top-bottom blame game of our systematic problems and suggest some sporadic yet interconnected systems. Meaning waste from one industry can become a raw material for the next and the spiral continues till all levels of the material is utilised. Moreover, this also makes good business sense since waste is cheap and abundant and virgin materials are expensive.

Thirdly, there is enough awareness among the common public about the consequences of their buying choices but there are either no real sustainable options, or they are ruled by greenwashing brands or they simply dont care. Personal values/status takes precedence over collective good. In these scenarios, we cannot actually disrupt current behaviours completely but need to find smart, invisible systems that people can adapt to without much friction. Citizens are going to consume in large quantities, and this is a sign of a thriving economy, so why not make the same things with better, circular materials?

Continued here:
YLEM: Augmenting sustainable futures through material exploration and testing - STIRworld

Now humans

Renewal Bios precise technical plan remains under wraps, and the companys website is just a calling card. Its very low on details for a reason. We dont want to overpromise, and we dont want to freak people out, says Omri Amirav-Drory, a partner at NFX who is acting as CEO of the new company. The imagery is sensitive here.

Some scientists say it will be difficult to grow human embryo models to an advanced stage and that it would be better to avoid the controversy raised by imitating real embryos too closely.

Its absolutely not necessary, so why would you do it? says Nicolas Rivron, a stem-cell scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. He argues that scientists should only create the minimal embryonic structure necessary to yield cells of interest.

For his part, Amirav-Drory says he hasnt seen a technology with so much potential since CRISPR gene-editing technology first emerged. The ability to create a synthetic embryo from cellsno egg, no sperm, no uterusits really amazing, he says. We think it can be a massive, transformative platform technology that can be applied to both fertility and longevity.

To create the succession of breakthroughs, Hannas lab has been combining advanced stem-cell science with new types of bioreactors.

A year ago, the stem-cell specialist first showed off a mechanical womb in which he managed to grow natural mouse embryos outside of a female mouse for several days. The system involves spinning jars that keep the embryos bathed in nutritious blood serum and oxygen.

A. AGUILERA-CASTREJON ET AL., NATURE 2021

In the new research published this week, Hanna used the same mechanical womb, but this time to grow look-alike embryos created from stem cells.

Remarkably, when stem cells are grown together in specially shaped containers, they will spontaneously join and try to assemble an embryo, producing structures that are called embryoids, blastoids, or synthetic embryo models. Many researchers insist that despite appearances, these structures have limited relation to real embryos and zero potential to develop completely.

See the article here:
This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting - MIT Technology Review

The summer before she started her neuroscience degree at the University of Texas, Celine Halioua interned at a clinic in Germany, working with patients who had age-related brain cancer. She formed a bond with one of them. He had a large, bushy moustache and a permanent smile the picture of a kind father, she told me. My German was not great, and neither was his English, but what struck me was his kindness despite the fact he was there to discuss his terminal diagnosis.

Halioua was shadowing a doctor, and found it hard to grasp that nothing could be done for this patient. I always thought that doctors were magical that if you put the effort in, youd be able to fix it. The realisation that you cant made me feel that we dont have free will.

She resolved to find that fix: not a cure for cancer, but an end to ageing itself. Now, at only 27, Halioua is a leading light in the relatively new field of anti-ageing biotech. Im confident well have an ageing drug by the time its relevant for me, she told me. She estimated that time as within a decade, and aims to dominate the market before then. Transparently, my goal is to build the ageing pharma company there will be many. The ageing field will one day be larger than the cancer field. Halioua described ageing as deviation from optimal biological function. Optimal is subjective, of course: Olympic gymnasts peak at a much younger age than Olympic sprinters. Old is easier to define: Halioua described it as when the physical body gets in the way of the thing that you want to do.

Haliouas speech was so rapid that the internet connection from her office in San Francisco could barely keep up. She looked every inch the digital nomad in her black T-shirt and AirPods: part biogerontologist, part CEO, part Gen Z-er. Haliouas mother is Moroccan and her father German; she was born in Texas but studied in Sweden, Germany and the UK, and dropped out of her PhD at Oxford University and began to work for the venture capitalist Laura Deming, now 27, at the California-based Longevity Fund, a firm that invests in anti-ageing businesses. Halioua launched her own start-up in 2020.

The quest for eternal youth may not be new, but it is now bankrolled by some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations on Earth. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Oracles Larry Ellison are among the many billionaires who are investing. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped launch Calico, a Google subsidiary focused on combating ageing, in 2013. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is in the game: not long after touching down from his maiden space flight in July, he was reported to have invested an undisclosed sum in Russian billionaire Yuri Milners Altos Labs, which will have a research base in Cambridge, UK (most anti-ageing start-ups are in the US). It is estimated that the industry will be worth $610bn by 2025.

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[See also: The internet was built for connection how did it go so wrong?]

The field shouldnt be confused with the kooky subculture of life extensionism, whereby the determined and ascetic experiment with severe calorie restriction, intensely calibrated exercise and cocktails of daily supplements in a bid to extend a life that is arguably not worth living. Instead, anti- ageing science works at the level of gene therapy, cell hacking and reconstituting human blood; the medical treatments at its heart are based on bleeding edge science and aimed at the mass market. Some focus on biological reprogramming: adding proteins known as Yamanaka factors to cells, causing them to revert to a previous state. Others look at genomic instability or the way DNA damage that accumulates over time might be repaired.

The entrepreneurs in this fledgling field are determined that the end of ageing will come via therapies approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The elixir of youth wont be a single drug, but a regimen of treatments that knock out different hallmarks of ageing and allow us to get older without losing our bodies and minds. We will still die: there will be accidents as well as diseases unrelated to age (children still get fatal cancers, after all). But death will become increasingly remote, and no longer preceded by years of inevitable decline.

Its advocates argue that, once ageing is cured, the financial, medical, societal and emotional burden of taking care of the elderly will disappear. But have these entrepreneurs thought about what a post-ageing world would look like? And if they have, would anyone want to live there?

As it stands, a drug will only get regulatory approval if it is marketed as a treatment for age-related diseases such as arthritis, cataracts and macular degeneration, diabetes, certain cancers, dementia and Parkinsons rather than ageing in its own right. This, then, is where the science is focused. The thinking is that, if the ageing processes that underlie those diseases are treated, other rejuvenation benefits can be smuggled in.

Based in San Francisco, Unity Biotechnology is developing a class of anti-ageing drugs called senolytics. These work by eradicating senescent cells those that have stopped dividing and then gather in the body, spewing out factors that harm the surrounding tissue. Its a completely new way both of thinking about a disease and targeting it, Anrivan Ghosh, Unitys CEO, told me. Senolytics reprogramme the tissue. They raise the possibility that I can restore a previous state that a tissue or a body was in. It was first thing in the morning for Ghosh (we were speaking over Zoom), but he was fizzing with enthusiasm. He is 57 but looks younger, with a neat goatee and hair that is only flecked with grey.

Senolytic drugs are designed to be taken prophylactically, during what Ghosh refers to as a window of time when senescent cells are known to accumulate (this varies in different parts of the body). He was keento tell me about Unitys ongoing clinical trial in people with age-related eye disease the first evidence of a senolytic treatment working, he said. Twelve patients with severe vision loss due to macular degeneration or diabetic macular oedema (two of the major causes of age-related blindness) had been put on a course of Unitys lead senolytic. One of the patients could not see any letters on an eye chart, even with her glasses on, from four metres away. Everything she once needed help with, she can now do independently. The majority of those patients showed an improvement.

I would have been happy if they just maintained their vision, Ghosh said. It raises the possibility that you may somehow be able to reverse trajectory and restore a better state. Thats another level.

[See also: The fidget business]

Unity was an early success story, with Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos signing up as seed investors. People like Thiel and Bezos arent interested in financing the kind of incremental gains a next-generation medicine might offer, Ghosh told me. They are drawn to the idea of being able to do something that changes the way we think about disease, that changes the way we live. Over time, Unitys funding has come increasingly from bigger, more mainstream investors.

Promising paradigm change can be a risky business. Unity was valued at $700m at its initial public offering in May 2018, but shares fell by more than 60 per cent in August 2020 after its flagship product, a senolytic treatment for osteoarthritis of the knee that had worked on mice, was shown to have no greater effect than a placebo in human trials. It tells you something about the translational gap in that case sometimes the animal studies do not replicate in the human case, Ghosh said. There will be many bumps before we have success.

Up to 30 biotech companies around the world are developing senolytic drugs. British biogerontologist and computational biologist Andrew Steele, who wrote Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (2020) after studying ageing in nematode worms and a stint at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told me he thought we were two or three years away from having the first senolytics in the clinic for specific conditions. It could be within a decade that were using these things preventatively. Like most other advocates, Steele was ambitious about the timeframe, given the relatively small number of human trials.

Ageing isnt officially defined as a disease, which is a problem for the biotech companies, Steele explained. Its currently very difficult to get a drug approved because it isnt an indication in the pharmaceutical industry. That means theres no way to say, Ive reversed or slowed someones ageing. But he remained optimistic. Were in a position, unique in human and scientific history, where weve finally got a handle on the processes. Unless youre very old or very, very unwell, theres going to be an anti-ageing drug in time for you.

For Steele, who is 36, this cant come soon enough. We have been completely ignoring the single largest cause of death, human disease and suffering, he told me. I dont think barbaric is too strong a word. Being old steals your independence: its what puts you at risk of all kinds of things not just the internal stuff like cancer and heart disease, but external threats like falls, infectious disease.

Steele told me about some 24-month-old mice (around 70 in human years) he had observed in a lab while researching his book. After a dose of senolytics, the mice thrived. They get less cancer, fewer cataracts, fewer heart problems, they are fitter and less frail, he said. Theyre cognitively younger as well. And they have better fur, thicker, plumper skin, less grey hair they just look fantastic.

Celine Halioua doesnt have to worry about the translational gap between mice and humans. She left the world of longevity venture capital in 2019 to become founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech start-up dedicated to extending dog lifespan. It aims not simply to stretch the length of time a dog can live anything from an extra six months to three years, depending on the breed but to ensure that those months and years are healthy. (Halioua herself is a devoted dog owner, and lists her husky, Wolfie, as the companys chief evangelist on the Loyal website.) But dogs are just the beginning. Were planning to take what we learn in dogs to help pet parents and non-pet parents live longer, too, she told me.

Dogs develop the same age-related diseases as we do, Halioua explained, at approximately the same point in their life-span (the exception being heart disease, because they dont eat a lot of McDonalds or whatever). Their fur loses pigment and goes grey, just like their owners hair. They share an environment with us, and environmental factors are huge in ageing. Its also possible to see whether an intervention is working much sooner in dogs than in humans: You can do a preventative measure when theyre two or three, and youll know by six or seven, probably sooner, whether the intervention did or did not do the thing. Dogs will make the pathway to regulatory approval smoother, Halioua believes. If something can work in a complex species like a dog, that isnt super-inbred like a mouse, its a more robust justification to pursue that in people.

Significantly, dogs have devoted owners who are prepared to pay over the odds though Halioua said she was determined not to exploit that devotion. It is important to me to price our products so that they are accessible for the majority of dog owners. The final cost will depend on the materials but, order of magnitude tens, not hundreds, of dollars a month.

The first of two Loyal drugs in development targets cellular mechanism and glucose metabolism in large- and giant-breed dogs. Due to a quirk of animal husbandry, the larger the dog, the shorter its lifespan. A Great Dane might live seven to nine years on average, while a Chihuahua might live 16 to 18. Thats weird. You normally dont see a times-two differential in lifespan within the same species you dont see it in people of varying heights. This, Halioua explained, was due to an antagonistic pleiotropic effect: the thing that caused the dog to grow big quickly has a negative impact on lifespan.

The second drug targets metabolic fitness in dogs of any breed and size, in order to replicate the same effect on lifespan that calorie restriction does in mice. This will be better for late-in-life intervention. Of course, prevention is optimal, but there are people who already have grey-faced dogs and we wanted to have something for them.

Other anti-ageing therapies have emerged from more gruesome animal experimentation. The biotech company Elevian, founded in Silicon Valley but now based in Boston, began 15 years ago after Harvard professor of regenerative biology Amy Wagers stitched live mice together, fusing the circulatory systems of old and young specimens, in a process called parabiosis. The mice lived fused together for four weeks before their organs were removed and studied. Elevians CEO and co-founder, Mark Allen, described an experiment that sounded like Frankenstein and Dracula combined: The old mice exposed to young blood grow biologically younger by many different measures, and the young mice exposed to old blood grow older.

[See also: The spirit of the age: Why the tech billionaires want to leave humanity behind]

A 51-year old medical doctor turned tech entrepreneur, Allen told me he had read about Wagers work and thought it might be turned into a therapy. But its not an easy thing to translate. In the parabiosis model, the old animals are getting a continuous transfusion of young blood, 24/7, for four weeks. You cant really have a blood boy tied to you, he said, with a dark grin.

The Harvard team identified the recombinant protein GDF11, the critical factor circulating in blood that appears to be behind the rejuvenating effect. Just injecting GDF11 once daily was able to reproduce many of the different effects, Allen said. I fell in love with this work because of the breadth of effect. He reeled off a list of diseases that GDF11 might combat: emphysema, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease and potentially some cancers.

Still, Elevian had to choose one specific indication they could tell regulators they were targeting, and decided its best bet was stroke: the worst possible disease that we could treat for the shortest possible duration, and see clinically meaningful effects, Allen said. Stroke is the second biggest cause of death worldwide and a leading cause of long-term disability; the few treatments that currently exist need to be given within a few hours after a stroke if they are to be effective.

Allen said animal trials were looking positive. When we give GDF11 after a stroke, it significantly improves sensory motor function recovery. And we can give it late we can start it 24 hours or later when no other treatments exist. Our primary focus today is taking it into clinical trials. For Allen, this would be the start of something more ground-breaking. Part of the game is getting it to market as soon as possible and then beginning to expand its indication.

The entrepreneurs I speak to might be taking different paths to eternal youth, but they agree on one thing: ultimately, ageing will be cured. None wants to hazard a guess at how long people will live there may be some yet unknown physical side effect that we discover in our 200s but they believe the only obstacle to an infinite human lifespan is our inability to imagine what that might look like. This means that the potential negative effects can only be raised delicately. The ageing process causes two thirds of death globally, Steele reminded me. Any objection you want to come up with to say we shouldnt do something about it has to be larger than that.

But Paul Root Wolpe, 64, director of the centre for ethics at Emory University in Georgia in the USA (and a former senior bioethicist at Nasa), told me that a world without ageing would be an economic disaster. The argument some advocates make for its enormous social benefits is a misdirection, he said. I find their arguments extremely naive, sociologically unsupportable, and most importantly, deeply narcissistic. Ive never heard a single plausible argument of how radical life extension would benefit society only an egocentric desire not to die. The truth is, they want to stop ageing. They want to live healthily to 150.

In Wolpes view, anti-ageing scientists and entrepreneurs minimise or ignore the profound implications of significantly increasing the human lifespan. The International Monetary Fund has stated that an ageing population in Japan has led to a vanishing labour force, higher demands for social services, a shrinking tax pool, greater wealth disparities and thats just from living what is currently our lifespan. If we increase it, all of those things would increase exponentially.

But in the future envisaged by the biotech start-ups, we would work into our hundreds: an elderly population would still be a labour force. Wolpe had little patience for this idea. That is a profoundly elite perspective. Do you really think that the longshoreman, the hard labourer, the person who works as a clerk in a store, at the age of 65 is going to say, Great! I get to work for another 50 years! Its absurd. Polls show that large percentages of people hate their job. Elitists who work entirely with their brains are a small minority of the human population. They have a very blinkered point of view. It was no coincidence that Silicon Valleys tech billionaires were early investors, Wolpe said. This is one of the great scientific, intellectual areas to conquer. These people have already conquered the world in new ways. They are the first group to touch the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. They have so much cash, and they dont know what to do with it.

The political ramifications of an indefinite lifespan are equally huge, Wolpe argued. The elderly vote at much higher rates than the young, and, in America at least, the highest echelons of power have become the preserve of the over-70s. Politically, young people will be squeezed, and the fresh ideas they bring to politics and innovation more generally will be suppressed.

Do you think that if the last generation or the generation before that lived to 100 or 150, there would be gay marriage, diversity inclusion movements, #MeToo? Wolpe said. The vast majority of the great innovations of the last 50 years were created by young people. A life well-lived hands its torch to the next generation. It doesnt try to override them for its own narcissistic needs.

Overpopulation and the climate crisis are other obvious counter-arguments. If death becomes rare, and humans remain at optimal health, how soon will the world run out of space and resources? Wont humans die from starvation and natural disasters instead?

[See also: Toxic relationships, burnout, productivity dysmorphia why do we medicalise societal problems?]

This is not a technology in isolation, Allen argued when I put this to him. Were figuring out how to have cleaner energy, how to have food that is healthier and less polluting, how to live more peacefully, how to travel into space. There is not a real estate problem here on Earth if we live better. Its an argument typical of Silicon Valley optimism: the solution is always more tech.

Im sanguine about overpopulation, Steele told me. If we had to work a little bit harder to solve things like climate change, resource use, land use and all those things that Im genuinely concerned about, Id happily do so if it meant suddenly no one was dying of cancer or Alzheimers.

Both Steele and Halioua dismissed the idea that indefinite fertility would lead to a population crisis, seeing it instead as an opportunity for a fairer world. Halioua pointed out that, if women want to have children, they are currently forced to make compromises at a critical time in their careers. Im going to be in my thirties soon, theoretically the ideal age to have kids, and Im not going to want kids at that age hopefully I will still be building Loyal. Thats a societal pressure that men dont have. [This] will free up 50 per cent of the population who inevitably have to take the hit.

Already, the wealthy live longer: men in the most deprived areas of England can expect to lead lives nearly a decade shorter than those in the wealthiest parts. Anti-ageing drugs will surely amplify these inequalities, when only the individuals and nations that can afford them can buy ever longer life-spans. Halioua said she had factored these concerns into her development plans: The ideal ageing drug is going to be like a statin, in terms of not being expensive. Steele added that this was a long game: expensive drugs have patents that expire after 20 years, after which generic drugs can be made at a fraction of the cost. Im not saying its right, but its normal for rich people in the West, and then everyone in the West, and then poorer countries to benefit from various kinds of medical intervention.

[See also: How life without germs has left us newly vulnerable]

I asked the anti-ageing entrepreneurs about Wolpes point that longer lives will increase intergenerational inequalities. In a future where people keep their minds and bodies, never losing their edge, how will the young ever compete in the workplace?

That kind of thinking assumes that if people were to live in good health for a very long period of time they would want to continue to do the same things, Ghosh said. I know I would not want to do drug discovery for the next 30 years. I have a bazillion other things Id like to do, and I would happily let other people take this role.

Halioua took the question personally. With Loyal, there are plenty of people who are double my age, in their 40s and 50s, completely cognisant, who have been working in ageing a long time, and didnt have the idea or desire to build this company, she said. Experienced people come with baggage and biases. Being naive has actually been one of my best traits, she said. In other words, the young will still wield their advantages.

Allen was the only anti-ageing advocate I spoke to who entertained any ethical discomfort. The biggest thing that concerns me is despots, dictators, he said. They die over time. With this, they might be able to live.

Even if we believe the claims these proponents of eternal youth make that the planet can cope, that societies will be no more unequal one problem remains: death. Its proximity directly affects our appetite for risk, making clinical trials into new vaccines possible, and encouraging billionaires to go into space. In a future where death occurs only as a result of rare disease, suicide or tragic accident, will we become paralysed by the fear of it?

For the first time, Halioua didnt have an answer. I dont know, she replied, after a long pause. I would argue that this is already a huge latent paralysis in the average human. Maybe it will get better. I dont see a world where we start becoming extra- terrified of car accidents, but maybe we will. Her face brightened: she had an idea. Maybe Tesla needs to get all their self-driving cars on the market and market it this way Number One Cause of Death Eliminated By Tesla! There it was again: the answer to a problem created by technology is more technology. The future looked bright once more and endless.

Jenny Kleeman is the author of Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex and Death (Picador)

This article appears in the 13 Oct 2021 issue of the New Statesman, Perfect Storm

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Do you want to live forever? Big Tech and the quest for eternal youth - The New Statesman

Renewal Bio, a newly formed biotechnology company focused on infertility and longevity, today announced it has acquired an exclusive license from Yeda Research and Development Co Ltd, the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science, to a newly developed synthetic embryo technology. The technology was spearheaded by Prof. Jacob Hanna, Ph.D., M.D., as recently published in Cell, and builds on his research published in Nature last year. Renewal Bio plans to develop a bio platform that combines biology, hardware, and software to drive advancements and develop therapies for infertility, genetic diseases, lab-grown organs, and blood system rejuvenation.

The Problem: Humanity is Getting Older and Sicker

Since the turn of the century, developed nations have seen a clear trend: declining birth rates and fast aging populations. With significant socioeconomic implications, this trend threatens to upend health systems, retirement programs, and workforces across the globe. At the beginning of life, this is shown by a 5-10% increase in infertility treatments by U.S. couples each year. Towards the end of life, these issues are manifesting in fast-aging populations that balloon healthcare costs. In the U.S., the aging population is driving national health expenditures to increase at a rate of 5.5% per year, and are expected to reach more than $6 trillion annually by 2027.

The Solution: A Bio Platform to Renew Humanity

To solve these complex and compounding issues, Renewal Bio aims to make humanity younger and healthier by leveraging the power of the new stem cell technology. The technology can be applied to a wide variety of human ailments including infertility, genetic diseases, and longevity.

Renewal Bio's founding team includes:

Anyone interested in joining the company's mission of making humanity younger and healthier can learn more at renewal.bio.

About Renewal Bio

Founded in 2022, Renewal Bio mission is to renew humanity - making us younger and healthier. The company was founded by Omri Amirav Drory and Jacob Hanna to develop therapies ranging from infertility treatments to lab-grown organs using novel stem cell technology developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Learn more at renewal.bio.

About Yeda

Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd. is the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Yeda currently manages approximately 500 unique patent families and has generated the highest income per researcher compared to any other academic technology transfer operation worldwide. Through the years, Yeda has contributed to the commercialization of a number of groundbreaking therapies, such as Copaxone, Rebif, Tookad, Erbitux, Vectibix, Protrazza, Humira, and the CAR-T cancer therapy Yescarta. For more information, visit http://www.yedarnd.com/.

About the Weizmann Institute of Science

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel is one of the world's top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions. Noted for its wide-ranging exploration of the natural and exact sciences, Weizmann Institute's scientists are advancing research on the human brain, artificial intelligence, computer science and encryption, astrophysics and particle physics, and are tackling diseases such as cancer, while also addressing climate change through environmental, ocean, and plant sciences.

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Renewal Bio Acquires Breakthrough Stem Cell Technology With Applications in Infertility and Longevity - Benzinga

A recently published study has called into question the long-held belief that women tend to outlive men. The study found that the belief might, after all, not be true, especially in the case of men who are married or possess a university degree. The study, published on Tuesday in the British Medical Journal Open, spanned two centuries across all continents and concluded that while men have a lower life expectancy than the opposite sex, they do have a substantial chance of outliving females.

A blind interpretation of life expectancy differences can sometimes lead to a distorted perception of the actual inequalities (in lifespan), researchers wrote in the published paper.

Why women have been thought to live longer than men

What does the latest study have to say about this

The researchers in Denmark have challenged this conventional knowledge stating, Despite females having a higher life expectancy than males, not all females outlive all males. On the contrary, a sizeable portion of males might live longer than a sizeable portion of females, even if the life expectancy shows a female advantage.

After collecting data from 199 countries between 1751 and 2020, the scientists discovered that men have a high probability of outliving women, especially if they have a university degree or are married. For married couples, the study pointed out that couples influence each others health and that men benefit more from being in a stable relationship than women.

Males who are married or have a university degree tend to outlive females who are unmarried or do not have a high school diploma, the study read.

In the United States, married men had a 39 per cent chance of outliving women compared with a 37 per cent chance for unmarried women. In terms those with university degrees, they have a 43 per cent chance of living longer than women as opposed to a 39 per cent chance for men who didnt complete a high school diploma.

According to the analysis, between 25 and 50 per cent of men have lived longer than women based on the country and the time period. In other words, data has shown that one to two out of every four men have outlived a randomly paired woman for almost all points as reviewed by the study.

The study also said that male expectancy tends to be lower since a small number of males will live very short lives to result in that difference. For example, more baby boys die than baby girls in most countries.

These findings challenge the general impression that men do not live as long as women and reveal a more nuanced inequality in lifespans between females and males, the study concluded.

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Get married or get a degree to live longer says study, debunking theories of womens longevity over men - Times Now

News and research before you hear about it on CNBC and others. Claim your 1-week free trial to StreetInsider Premium here.

TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nucleai, a leader in AI-powered spatial biology transforming precision medicine by unlocking the power of pathology data, today announced the appointment of Kenneth J. Bloom, MD, FCAP as the companys new head of pathology. Dr. Bloom brings more than 35 years of clinical experience in pathology, oncology, telemedicine and bioinformatics to this critical role at Nucleai.

In his most recent role, Dr. Bloom was Chief Medical Officer of Advanced Pathology and Genetic Services at REALM IDx, including operating companies: Invicro and Ambry Genetics. Previously, he was President and Head of Oncology and Immunotherapy for Human Longevity Inc. In this role, Dr. Bloom was responsible for all sequencing products and for establishing and leading the Oncology program. Under his direction, the team developed and commercialized an industry-leading cancer exome product and commercialized a technique for validating neoantigens predicted from sequencing.

Earlier in his career, he spent 12 years as a top executive at Clarient Pathology Services where he led the development of hundreds of laboratory-developed tests, including those using IHC, ISH, Flow Cytometry and molecular methods. He has also served as a principal investigator in more than a dozen clinical trials and as an advisor to various pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Before his industry experience, Dr. Bloom spent 15 years at Rush Medical Center.

I am excited to welcome Dr. Ken Bloom, a world-renowned thought leader in pathology, to our team. His experience, knowledge and innovative ideas are an asset for Nucleai, said Avi Veidman, CEO of Nucleai. The appointment of Dr. Bloom as the Head of Pathology strengthens our ability to unlock the power of pathology data through our AI-driven spatial biology platform. As we have assembled a team of world-class physicians, scientists and technologists, Nucleai is uniquely positioned to help advance precision medicine more rapidly.

Nucleais state-of-the-art spatial biology and machine learning platform empowers researchers and pathologists to improve workflows and unleash data previously hidden within pathology slides, transforming the practice of pathology and improving patient outcomes, said Dr. Bloom. I look forward to working with Nucleais CEO and other visionaries within the company to make Nucleais approach pervasive in the medical field.

About Nucleai

Nucleai is an AI-powered spatial biology company with a mission to transform drug development and clinical treatment decisions by unlocking the power of pathology data. Nucleai provides pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations, and diagnostics laboratories with a state-of-the-art AI platform to improve clinical trials and clinical decision-making. For more information, please visit http://www.nucleai.ai.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220802005702/en/

Anthony PetrucciBioscribe[emailprotected]512-581-5442

Source: Nucleai

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Nucleai Appoints New Head of Pathology to Support Expansion in Biopharmaceutical and Clinical Markets - StreetInsider.com

Healthy aging is a shared goal of most humans, but the body has a nasty habit of breaking down over time. Tantalizing research suggests it is possible to develop nutrition and lifestyle interventions that can delay aging and extend healthspan. In model organisms, including rodents and nonhuman primates, caloric restriction (CR) has proven to be an effective method for mitigating aging-related deterioration of biological functions and for extending healthspan and lifespan. But more than 80 years since its discovery, the underlying mechanisms by which caloric restriction extends either are still largely undefined.

Researchers have linked a number of biochemical pathways to longevity, including those involved with nutrient signaling, metabolism, growth, genome stability, and oxidative stress. Translating this knowledge, derived mostly from mouse studies, to humans is an additional barrier that must be overcome. For example, it is almost impossible for the majority of people to maintain severe dietary restriction over their lifetime. Thus, more viable solutions for promoting health- and lifespan in humans must be found.

We have been studying the behavioral effects of CR in mice and have found that it leads to dramatic changes in feeding behavior. In contrast to mice given continual access to unlimited food, which spread their daily food consumption over the course of the day and night, mice on caloric restriction adopt a stark feeding and fasting pattern in which they consume all of the food provided within a few hours each day. Thus, under CR, mice not only consume fewer calories, they voluntarily adopt a time-restricted feeding pattern with a long fasting interval. All these factors have been shown to have numerous health benefits, again primarily in animal models.

More than 80 years since its discovery, the underlying mechanisms by which caloric restriction extends lifespan are still largely undefined.

To disentangle the contributions to longevity of calorie restriction, periods of fasting, and alignment of eating with an animals circadian clock, we recently completed a comprehensive study that contrasts these three factors. We found that CR is sufficient to extend lifespan but that the pattern and circadian alignment of eating act synergistically to extend lifespan further. While CR alone increases lifespan by approximately 10 percent, eating that CR diet only at night, when mice are normally awake, extends lifespan by more than 35 percent compared to mice eating regular diets. We also found that circadian alignment of feeding enhances CR-mediated benefits for survival independently of fasting duration (2 vs. 22 hours) and body weight. Aging promotes increases in inflammation and decreases in metabolism in the livers of mice with constant access to food, whereas a CR diet fed at night ameliorates most of these aging-related changes. Thus, eating only at certain times of day appears to promote longevity in animals and could provide a new mechanism for the treatment and management of aging in humans.

A significant aspect of our study was that there were no significant effects of the pattern or time of eating on body weight in mice. In addition, body weight was not associated with lifespan. This finding is consistent with a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) comparing weight loss in two groups of human subjects that were assigned to CR alone or CR with an 8-hour time-restricted eating window. The authors of this paper report no differences between these groups and conclude that there was no benefit of time-restricted eating for body weight. As we showed in our study, however, body weight does not serve as a good biomarker for longevity under CR conditions. So it would have been more useful in the NEJM study to have measured other endpoints besides body weight, such as inflammatory biomarkers associated with aging. In addition, previous studies that demonstrated health benefits of time-restricted eating were performed under conditions of overeating, not CR. Obviously, CR and overeating engage fundamentally different metabolic processes, and thus time-restricted eating of a CR diet should not be expected to yield the same results as time-restricted eating of a calorie-rich diet.

Our discovery that CR functions in concert with time-restricted eating and circadian alignment to optimally extend healthspan and lifespan is potentially transformative because it may yield a novel method for promoting healthy aging and lifespan increases in humans. Because lifespan in humans is primarily determined by lifestyle (less than 25 percent is genetically determined), these findings may be translated in future work to humans and are amenable to widespread adoption because they can be achieved by behavioral intervention: a CR diet eaten at the correct circadian time of dayi.e., when one is normally awake. This might involve, for example, a 12-hour eating window that begins at breakfast time.

A significant aspect of our study was that there were no significant effects of the pattern or time of eating on body weight in mice.

In addition, ongoing research in our labs seeks to test whether enhancing circadian clock function by behavioral (lifestyle), genetic, or pharmacological means can delay the aging process. Pharmaceutical agents were identifying in our labs that enhance circadian clock function may one day be used in humans as comprehensive therapies for aging. For now, were planning experiments for testing their anti-aging and pro-longevity effects in mice. Our lab and others have already provided evidence that the circadian clock system is an upstream regulator of all of the known anti-aging and pro-longevity pathways. So enhancing circadian clock function may rescue multiple aging pathways at the same time. We are testing this hypothesis by boosting Clock gene expression in genetically engineered mice. These animal studies can then lay the groundwork for the isolation of small molecules that target the Clock protein and the development of drugs that might safely modulate clock function and enhance health and longevity in people.

Joseph S. Takahashiis an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor and chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centers Peter O Donnell Jr. Brain Institute. He is also a member ofThe ScientistEditorial Advisory Board. Carla B. Green is a professor and Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Neuroscience at the same institution.

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Opinion: Changing When and How Much We Eat May Extend Health Span - The Scientist

Wards wry survey of the weird world of immortalism goes heavy on the early history of cryonics (freezing corpses until we work out how to revive them) but it is light on the science of what we actually know about ageing. To fill this gap, at least partially, I recommend Methuselahs Zoo () by the zoologist Steven M Austad.

Austads big beef and hes not alone in this is that too many experiments are done on mice. For anyone interested in ageing, the trouble with mice is that they dont live very long, even relative to their size. Which terrestrial mammals live the longest? The answer to this, funnily enough, is humans. As Austad points out, mice should really be experimenting on us.

The rationale of this smartly written book can be summed up by whats known as Orgels second rule, after the British chemist Leslie Orgel: namely, that evolution is cleverer than you are. So if you want to know how to extend the longevity of humans, one way might be to examine the superior longevity of other animals, then try to work out how they manage it.

As weve seen, this is tricky, since humans already have a high longevity quotient, yet there are animals that outdo us and this gives Austad his cue for an entertaining tour of the whole animal kingdom in all its mad variety. I had no idea I would so enjoy reading about the naked mole rat, or indeed the human fish, a type of salamander that lurks in Balkan caves.

The one disappointing thing about this urbane volume is that even though Austad knows more about his subject than anyone on the planet, on the key points he still doesnt know much. His chapters often end by asking rhetorically what lessons we have learnt from the exceptional longevity of such-and-such a beast only to conclude that, as yet, the answer is none. More research is needed.

Specifically, Austad recommends we trigger a Manhattan Project to uncover the longevity secrets of birds. Or bats, for that matter. In this, he brings to mind Nikolai Fedorov, the Russian philosopher and godfather of immortalism, who argued in the 19th century that the quest to combat death should be put on a war footing.

Now that Jeff Bezos and other multi-billionaires have put their financial heft behind the quest to understand ageing, this may be what were getting. For anyone with cash to spare, Id recommend channelling some of it towards the katabatic heroes at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. New technologies often originate in identifying and harnessing new scientific principles. In this case, the researchers would be descending into the unknowns of lifes thermodynamics and a theory of immortality.

Like the Greek hero Pirithous, who failed to make it back from hell, they might never be seen again. On the other hand, theres a chance they might return with quite a story to tell.

To order a discounted copy of either book call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

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Some species are immortal but dying of old age is humanity's secret weapon - The Telegraph