Category Archives: Human Longevity

Whale females, like humans, live well past menopause, a trait possibly selected for because their knowledge base can help their entire clan survive. Dina Fine Maron reports

Women have a biological cap on their reproductive years. And from an evolutionary standpoint researchers have long wondered why human female longevity extends well past fertility. Other than humans, only short-finned pilot whales and killer whales live three or more decades after menopause, some even reaching their 90s. Male whales, which are far less likely to be followed by group-mates than are females, seldom survive past 50.

Now a study of killer whales offers some clues about why evolution may have selected for such long life: older females have accrued what the study authors call repositories of ecological knowledge, that can help their entire group survive.

The researchers examined more than 750 hours of killer whale video. They saw that older, wizened females were the individuals most likely to lead younger whales to salmon feeding grounds, especially during lean times. The study is in the journal Current Biology. [Lauren J. N. Brent et al, Ecological Knowledge, Leadership, and the Evolution of Menopause in Killer Whales]

The work provides the first evidence that the advantage conferred via the knowledge held by elderly female whales may be behind the adaptation for their post-fertility longevity. In humans, an analogous explanation for post-menopausal longevity is part of whats called the grandmother effect, the constellation of attributes that make older women especially valuable to the community. Whale grandmas appear to be highly valuable, too.

Dina Fine Maron

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]

2015 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

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Whale Grandmas' Longevity Linked to Knowledge

The Immortalists - IndeeChannel.Com
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[Science Solitaire] We want to tame our own bodies because we want to outlive our own ailments

When doctors need to see you intimately without having to cut through you, they subject you to magnetic fields 30,000 stronger than what the Earths magnetic field generates. They put you through a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine. The stupendous strength of those magnets cause your bodys atoms to align and send radio frequency signals that the machine translates into a digital image of the nooks and crannies in your body where no eye has ever gone before.

Those magnets are so strong that every precaution is taken so that any metal in your body is taken out (if they could be taken out; otherwise you do not get into the machine) before you get into the machine lest they come flying off in speeds that could hit you or anyone in the MRI room which defeats the purpose of the entire medical exercise.

What could motivate humans to create such machines that magnify powers of an entire planet and concentrate it on a singular photo exploration of a human body? And that is only the MRI machine. Think of the other powerful medical tools that we have come up with.

Yes, we want to tame our own bodies because we want to outlive our own ailments. And underneath that wellness mantra, we all know that we do this based on a deeper drive. The thing is, we have tasted what its like to be alive and we want more so we take it on our own hands and stretch our lives, like pulling gum we have been chewing for a while. You dont need to tell your doctor this when you go to her for a treatment. She shares this sentiment with you.

And it has worked! But it has not yet stretched the gum of our lives to infinity and beyond. Humans are living longer than ever before in their entire history but everyone we knew or knew of has conked out at some point doing that stretch. Living up to a 100 is still the exception that we celebrate centenarians and hold them up simply by having lived that long regardless of how that life has been lived. We usually give in to the probability that length must equal quality of living. We give them bonus points for stamina because we also know the load that the years throw, regardless of who you are.

If you want to have a closer look at what humans have been trying to stretch their own lifespans and healthspans, including the incredible successes and failures, you may want to read Bill Giffords Spring Chicken (Stay Young Forever or Die Trying).

I was listening to NPRs interview of him about his book and it was insightful and hilarious. He talked about someone named Seguard who in 1889 declared that he has found the elixir of youth, which he concocted by using, among other strange parts, crushed dog testicles and semen which he injected into himself. It was said that he lived 4 or 5 years more since he inflicted himself with the concoction and one of his claims was he regained distance urination which is something very few of us may have in mind as one of the highlights of living forever more.

Gifford explored what I want to characterize as longevity start-ups, like those who use growth hormones, those who starve themselves consistently by lessening their intake or by fasting. He even looked into scientists who have studied fascinating creatures who can live up to the equivalent of a 600-year old woman without ever reaching menopause!

But amid these incredible quests, this is what we know and have proven so far to be true. Our bodies are wired to start giving up once we are past the reproductive stage. This is because that is the only plan they have: to keep the genes moving along. Our cells, once raging to renew and divide when we are young, get tired through the years. Some of them get to be cantankerous and drag their cell mates along with them. How long or quickly this happens seems to depend on a lot on what you inherited from your parents: genes. Other than that, eating just right and consistent and consistent exercise seem to be the only boring, yet proven effective, ingredients of the elixir that we yearn for.

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Longevity 'start-ups'

Multicohort Research Protocol Velocitizes Longevity Research
Description Velocitizing longevity research Create a group of 40 cohorts (groups) of 11 mice each Where each cohort is a different month of age Then the mont...

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16 hours ago by Xerxes D. Arsiwalla

The human brain generates massive amounts of data resulting from its intricate and complex spatiotemporal dynamics. Biophysical mechanisms underlying these processes are key to our understanding of brain function and disease. To address this challenge, researchers at the SPECS lab lead by Prof. Paul Verschure, have recently developed BrainX3, a platform for visualization, simulation, analysis and interaction of large data, that combines computational power with human intuition in representing and interacting with large complex networks. BrainX3 serves as a hypotheses generator of big data. As is often the case with complex data, one might not always have a specific hypothesis to start with. Instead, discovering meaningful patterns and associations in big data might be a necessary incubation step for formulating well-defined hypotheses.

On this platform, the researchers have reconstructed a large-scale simulation of human brain activity in a 3D virtual reality environment. Using the brain's known connectivity along with detailed biophysics, the researchers reconstruct neuronal activity of the entire cortex in the resting-state. Users can interact with BrainX3 in real-time by perturbing brain regions with transient stimulations to observe reverberating network activity, simulate lesion dynamics or implement network analysis functions from a library of graph theoretic measures. Within the immersive mixed/virtual reality space of BrainX3, users can explore and analyze dynamic activity patterns of brain networks, both at rest or during tasks, or for discovering of signaling pathways associated with brain function and/or dysfunction or as a tool for virtual neurosurgery.

In addition to the dynamics of the resting state, the researchers have also simulated neural activity from lesioned brains and activity resulting from TMS perturbations. These simulations shed insight on the spatial distribution of activity in the attractor state, how the brain maintains a level of resilience to damage, and effects of noise and physiological perturbations. Knowledge of brain activity in these varied states is clinically relevant for assessing levels of consciousness in patients with severe brain injury.

Explore further: How we know where we are

More information: "Network Dynamics with BrainX[sup]3[/sup]: A Large-Scale Simulation of the Human Brain Network with Real-Time Interaction." Xerxes D. Arsiwalla, Riccardo Zucca, Alberto Betella, Enrique Martinez, David Dalmazzo, Pedro Omedas, Gustavo Deco and Paul F.M.J. Verschure. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. journal.frontiersin.org/articl .2015.00002/abstract

Provided by Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Knowing where we are and remembering routes that we've walked are crucial skills for our everyday life. In order to identify neural mechanisms of spatial navigation, RUB researchers headed by Prof Dr Nikolai ...

(Medical Xpress)Scientists have created a virtual model of the brain that daydreams like humans do.

Everyone makes mistakesso a University of Nebraska-Lincoln psychologist set out to determine how the human brain responds to the errors of its ways.

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Addressing the human brain's big data challenge with BrainX3

US President Barack Obama is proposing to spend $215 million on a precision medicine initiative, whose centrepiece will be a national study drawing on the health records and DNA of one million volunteers.

The term precision medicine refers to treatments tailored to a persons genetic profile, an idea which is already transforming the way doctors fight cancer and some rare diseases. When treating cancer, for example, doctors can nowadays assess any molecular abnormalities in the cancerous cells so that they can apply the appropriate treatment. Some types of abnormalities may be found in different types of cancer, and patients with these conditions will be given the same treatment. Studying a set of molecular abnormalities in a patient in order to prescribe a unique, personalised treatment for his/her condition appears to be the future of medicine and this means that going forward treatment will be based on peoples individual genetic maps

Barack Obama has recently put forward a funding initiative to support precision medicine with a view to developing technology that has to date been under-exploited. The aim is to change the old one-size-fits-all approach, as Jo Handelsman, associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, puts it, and to move towards personalised medicine using information from the human genome. Under the Federal funding proposal, $130 million will go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for development of a voluntary national research cohort of a million or more volunteers to propel our understanding of health and disease and set the foundation for a new way of doing research through engaged participants and open, responsible data sharing, says the White House factsheet. This will be the largest genome study ever carried out at country level, and should open up amazing opportunities for the advance of science.

In the 1970s, the noted French biologistJacques Monod, regarded as one of the fathers of modern molecular biology, opined that the scale of DNA was too vast for scientists ever to be able to modify the human genome. Just six years later, the first genetic manipulations were being carried out. As recently as 1990, there was general consensus among genetic scientists that human DNA would never be sequenced, yet this feat had been achieved by 2003. Enormous progress has also been made in reducing the cost of human genome sequencing, which has fallen from $3 billion to just $1000 per person! In fact so mainstream has DNA sequencing become that the company ranked by MIT in 2014 as the smartest in the world was Illumina, a San Diego, California-based firm that develops, manufactures and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function. Today the main focus of investment in digital health is onBig Data and analytics.

Some companies are now even specialising in combating ageing, including California startupHuman Longevity Inc., a genomics and cell therapy-based diagnostic and therapeutic company whose stated goal is to tackle the diseases associated with age-related human biological decline. The web giants are also muscling into this field. Google is out in front via its R&D biotech firm California Life Company (Calico) on an amazingly ambitious mission to vanquish death, as CEO Larry Page put it. Clearly the White House is aware of the huge opportunities in this sector, hence the Presidents intention to channel Federal dollars into the search for DNA-based treatments.

Jo Handelsman predicts that significant scientific progress will result from studying the genome in a large number of people and merging this information with data from other ongoing studies. In fact she believes it will be a major step forward in how we see medicine. Some $130 million of the budget proposed by Barack Obama will be allocated to the NIH to fund the huge volunteer genome study. Another outcome of the initiative is that patients will be able to obtain lots of genetic information about themselves. We arent just talking about research but also about patients access to their own data, so they can participate fully in decisions about their health that affect them, underlined the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren. The proposal also earmarks $70 million for DNA-driven research on cancer and another $10 million for related certification work by the US Food and Drug Administration.

NIH director Francis Collins underlined that the United States is not looking to create a single bio-bank. Instead, the project will seek to combine data from among over 200 large ongoing American health studies, which jointly together involve at least two million people. The challenge of this initiative is to link those together. Its more a distributed approach than centralised, he explained. Meanwhile, in the search for data, NIH officials have met in recent weeks with administrators from the Veterans Health Administration, whose ongoingMillion Veteran Program has already collected DNA samples from 343,000 former soldiers. Obama also wants to allocate grants to private sector technology firms, and Illumina is likely to be an early beneficiary. As the famous work La mort de la mort (The Demise of Death) by French surgeon DrLaurent Alexandre points out, progress in the field of medicine in the 21st century is in the process of delivering a scientific revolution on an unprecedented scale.

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Genome Studies: Personalised Medicine around the Corner?

Even seemingly intractable problems such as the antibiotic crisis and the obesity epidemic could be resolved by treating human health and society as an integral part of an ecosystem.

Renowned health and nutrition expert Professor Mark Wahlqvist of Monash University said the living world was by nature a collaborative enterprise rather than a competitive one.

"It is unhelpful to look at ourselves as discrete species as the interconnectedness of all things, animate and inanimate, becomes more apparent," he said.

In research published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Professor Wahlqvist says awareness is growing of the ecosystem-dependent nature of human health.

"The problem now faced is that ecosystems have been plundered in such an anthropocentric fashion that their sustainability is precarious and our health with it," he said.

Calling for a re-evaluation of many ecosystems, from the home, school and work-place to health care, communication, transport and recreation, Professor Wahlqvist said we had become accustomed to blaming disease and dysfunction on one factor, or a small set of factors.

Such views had contributed to the rise of medications such as antibiotics, as well as their probable imminent demise.

"We confront multiple-resistant microorganisms in farm animals and ourselves that no currently available antibiotic can eradicate, not least because of their misuse as growth promotants in livestock for human consumption," he said.

"Better ecosystem management is likely to be one of the few solutions available to this crisis."

Professor Wahlqvist also said more integrative approaches to health-care practice were required.

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Team approach boosts human and environmental wellbeing, researcher says

Even seemingly intractable problems such as the antibiotic crisis and the obesity epidemic could be resolved by treating human health and society as an integral part of an ecosystem.

Renowned health and nutrition expert Professor Mark Wahlqvist of Monash University said the living world was by nature a collaborative enterprise rather than a competitive one.

"It is unhelpful to look at ourselves as discrete species as the interconnectedness of all things, animate and inanimate, becomes more apparent," he said.

In research published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Professor Wahlqvist says awareness is growing of the ecosystem-dependent nature of human health.

"The problem now faced is that ecosystems have been plundered in such an anthropocentric fashion that their sustainability is precarious and our health with it," he said.

Calling for a re-evaluation of many ecosystems, from the home, school and work-place to health care, communication, transport and recreation, Professor Wahlqvist said we had become accustomed to blaming disease and dysfunction on one factor, or a small set of factors.

Such views had contributed to the rise of medications such as antibiotics, as well as their probable imminent demise.

"We confront multiple-resistant microorganisms in farm animals and ourselves that no currently available antibiotic can eradicate, not least because of their misuse as growth promotants in livestock for human consumption," he said.

"Better ecosystem management is likely to be one of the few solutions available to this crisis."

Professor Wahlqvist also said more integrative approaches to health-care practice were required.

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Team approach boosts human and environmental wellbeing

DUBLIN, Feb. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --Research and Markets

(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/6j59z5/human) has announced the addition of the "Human Augmentation Market by Product, Application, & Geography - Global Forecast to 2020" report to their offering.

The global human augmentation market is expected to reach up to $1135 million by 2020, at a CAGR of 43.5% between 2014 and 2020.

The lucrative growth rate of the augmentation market in the future is the major driving factor for the human augmentation market. Human augmentation has not only made human beings' life easier but has also resulted in its longevity. In the product category of human augmentation, the wearable augmentation is expected to have a higher market size as compared to the in-built augmentation. The major reason behind its large market size is the growing demand for sophisticated gadgets.

The eye-wear holds the highest market share in the North American human augmentation market, due to the presence of a large number of market players, which are launching new products in this region. The North American market is estimated to grow at the highest growth rate between 2014 and 2020.

The global human augmentation market has been segmented into three categories that include: products segment, application, and geography. The product segment includes the in-built augmentation and wearable augmentation types. The application segment includes the medical, defense, industrial, and others segments. The human augmentation market has also been segmented on the basis of geography. The market by geography has been classified into various economic regions such as North America, Europe, APAC, and ROW.

The major players that offer various products in the human augmentation market are B-Temia Inc. (U.S.), BrainGate Company (U.S.), Ekso Bionics Holdings, Inc. (U.S.), Google Inc. (U.S.), Raytheon Company (U.S.), Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd (South Korea), and Vuzix Corporation (U.S.).

Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction

2 Research Methodology

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Global Human Augmentation Market 2015-2020: B-Temia, BrainGate, Ekso Bionics, Google, Raytheon, Samsung & Vuzix Leads ...

Innovations In Multiple Myeloma: The Role of Patients in Big Data Collection
Moderated by patient advocate, Bob Tufts and featuring Robert Goldberg, PhD (Center for Medicine in the Public Interest), Robert Hariri, MD, PhD (Human Longe...

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