Category Archives: Human Longevity

Today, the only constant is changeAnd the rate of change is increasing.

You either disrupt yourself, or someone else will. For any company, sitting still equals death. I believe that we are now experiencing only a tiny fraction of the rate of disruptive change we will see over the next 10 years.Why?

Though its hard to even fathom, think about this for a second:Exponential technologies dont exist in a vacuum.They interact with each other. They augment each other. They accelerate each other.When they do, the emerging impact is enormous.Its a tsunami of change, and its impossible to predict what it looks or feels like.To give you a better picture of the accelerating change coming our way, I want to define four key Moments of Convergence where I believe we will see the most change.

Moment 1: First, we have the continued acceleration of those exponential technologies riding on top of Moores law: Infinite Computing, Networks & Sensors, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Digital Manufacturing and Synthetic Biology. Each of these technologies enable exponential entrepreneurs to build products that can positively impact the lives of a billion+ people.

Moment 2: Second, we will have Combined Interface Interface moments. In other words, these technologies will converge at various interfaces. For example, the intersection of Networks, A.I. and 3D printing will soon allow anyone to verbally describe their desires and have them physically materialize. Imagine having an A.I. listening to you describe what youd like to see created, then turn it into a design file that is uploaded to the cloud, 3D printed and delivered later that day to your doorstep. Every one of us, with or without skills, becomes a master designer and manufacturer, in much the same way that Microsoft Microsoft Word makes us all perfect spellers.

Moment 3: This decade, the number of digitally connected people on Earth will grow from 2 billion (in 2010) to at least 5 billion (by 2020), perhaps as many as 7 billion (if Google Google and Facebook have their way). These additional 3 billion+ new minds entering the global economy are now fully empowered with dematerialized, demonetized and democratized technologies ranging from Google to 3D printing and SynBio. They now have access to the technologies once coveted by the largest corporations and government labs so what will they create? What will they build?

Moment 4: Historically, the rate of innovation on Earth has increased as peopled moved out of the countryside and concentrated in cities, where they exchanged and built on each others ideas. Soon, the global mind of 5 billion+ connected people will drive a frenzy of rapid iteration. Innovation cycles on new products will go from years to months to weeks. How will the intellectual property system that so many linear-thinking companies rely on, possibly handle this rate of change? It wont; it will likely fail.

It is these four moments of disruptive convergence that will be driving the tsunami of change ahead of all of us.

Our challenge as entrepreneurs is that we are evolutionarily predisposed to be local and linear thinkers. (Our brains evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, when our life where best described as local and linear.)

The only option we have to surf atop the tsunami, rather than be crushed by it, is constant and continuous education and emersion in these exponential technologies to understand what you can use to reinvent yourself and your business every year.

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100X Disruptive Change

SAN FRANCISCO -- Ever wanted to stretch your life to Old Testament proportions? You may be in luck. A movement of Silicon Valley thinkers and entrepreneurs wants you to live as long as Jacob, who died at 147, and maybe even Noah, who made it to 950.

One year after Google created a company named Calico with the goal of extending human life, Menlo Park investor and Stanford-trained radiologist Joon Yun has launched a $1 million science competition with the lofty aim of "curing" the disease more commonly known as aging.

While Calico's plan remains largely opaque, Yun has laid out specific criteria for the 11 teams that have already signed up to compete for the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, which focuses on improving "homeostatic capacity," or the ability of an organism to bounce back to normal in the face of stress.

Menlo Park resident Joon Yun announces the Palo Alto Longevity prize at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2014. Yun, a doctor and investor is the main backer of the prize to to crack the code of life. (John Green/Bay Area News Group) ( JOHN GREEN )

At a swanky launch party this month in San Francisco, Yun declared aging an urgent problem, saying every day 100,000 people die unnecessarily of age-related illness. The Presidio gathering included proponents of life extension who believe the current limit on human life, roughly 120 years, can be pushed back several decades, or perhaps hundreds of years.

"Ultimately, I think we'll crack the age code and we'll hack aging," Yun announced. "And if we do, not only will health care be transformed, but humanity. At that point we'll have unlocked human capacity."

The idea for the competition came from Yun's daily life. As president of Palo Alto Investors, an investment fund targeting the health care sector, Yun gets an early look at innovative research. At the age of 46, he's noticed the many small ways in which his own homeostatic capacity has degraded over time -- for instance, recovering from a poor night's sleep.

That same lack of resilience, Yun said, helps explain serious illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension -- the body loses its ability to self-tune when its blood sugar or blood pressure gets too high.

Professional athlete Brandi Chastain speaks at a conference on aging in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2014. (John Green/Bay Area News Group) ( JOHN GREEN )

The Palo Alto Longevity Prize has two parts. Judges will give $500,000 to the first team that increases a small mammal's heart rate variability to levels typical of a young adult. Heart rate variability is an indicator of autonomic nervous system health that decreases over time. They also will award $500,000 to the first team to extend the life of a test mammal by 50 percent beyond its life expectancy by restoring homeostatic capacity.

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Silicon Valley launches another bid to 'hack' aging, cheat death

NAIROBI, Kenya, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- Research has shown strong social relationships -- both with friends and significant others -- to be good for human health. Now a new study shows the same holds true for baboons.

Previous studies have shown same-sex social interaction to have positive impacts on the longevity of rats and dolphins, but the latest research out of Duke University showed the health and life expectancy of female baboons was especially improved by increased interaction, or "social grooming," with male companions.

"Grooming is the baboon equivalent of gossip, or having a good conversation over a cup of coffee," Duke researcher and study co-author, Susan Alberts, explained in a press release.

Alberts and her colleagues -- including study co-author Jenny Tung -- observed the social behaviors of some 200 wild female baboons living in the plains of southern Kenya. They estimated long-term sociability by measuring how often each female partook in social grooming sessions relative to rest of the troop.

The researchers found that more sociable females were likely to live two to three years longer than their less-friendly female peers. As the reason why, Alberts surmised: "Males' larger size may make them better than females at defending their friends against potential bullies."

The study also found that while older females begin interacting less and less with other females, their male friendships remain constant.

"When females get older, many of their female peers start to pass away, and their daughters become tied up with their own infants, leaving less time for social interaction," Alberts said. "It suggests that social isolation isn't an inevitable part of aging, but instead may simply be a consequence of declines in potential friends' availability."

The study was published this week in the journal the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

2014 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

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Female baboons with male friends live longer

I love Uber, the ridesharing app that connects people who need rides with drivers.Instead of my normal $35 taxi ride to LAX, an UberX car takes me for about $11.The service is active in 108 US cities and 45 countries worldwide.Five years ago, it didnt exist. Today, its valued at over $18 billion.It truly is an Exponential Organization.

Uber is one of a new generation of dematerializing, demonetizing and democratizing technologies thats disrupting the status quo.Simply put, Uber is a product adored by passengers and Uber drivers alike.It uses technology to dramatically improve a broken system. It solves a pain point.As a result,hordes have leftthe traditional taxis and rental car options.Understandably, these incumbents arent happy, and where do they turn?

Regulation.

Ubers Long, Legal Battle

I recently spent a week with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in Sicily at Google Google Camp.Id heard mention of some of the legislative challenges that Uber was facing globally, but I wasnt really aware of the scope or scale of what was happening.

Check out this global resistance:

And yet:

Regulation, the Protection of Last Resort

Laws typically favor the incumbent solutions that manifested them in the first place.But when an industry turns to protectionist regulations to keep a more cost-effective solution out of the market, you know its in a death spiral.Take the horse versus the automobiles, for example. Many hated cars in the early 1900s because, well, they scared horses.In fact, amazingly, at the turn of the century, a law in Pennsylvania stated:

Any motorist who sights a team of horses coming toward him must pull well off the road, cover his car with a blanket or canvas that blends with the countryside, and let the horses pass. If the horses appear skittish, the motorist must take his car apart, piece by piece, and hide it under the nearest bushes.

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Uber vs. the Law (My Money's on Uber)

Longevity technology molecular variants of spermidine like halogenated polyamines
Doubling the longevity of mammals with polyaminesThe beauty as well as vitality of these women remind me of the value of youthful longevity, the value of liv...

By: amnestysupernational

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Longevity technology molecular variants of spermidine like halogenated polyamines - Video

Hold the butter! The genetic secrets of centenarians are starting to be unravelled and they hint that low cholesterol plays a role in their unusual longevity.

"This is one of the first studies to detect rare genotypes in these exceptional individuals," says Joo Pedro de Magalhes of the University of Liverpool, UK, who was not involved in the research.

It is thought that genetics accounts for up to 30 per cent of the variability in human lifespan. But so far just two genes have been linked to longevity, and neither has a large influence creating a genetic puzzle sometimes called "missing heritability".

Suspicion has been growing that rare mutations are behind longevity. But these get missed by standard genetic studies, which sequence small snippets of DNA for known variants rather than scouring the full genome to find unknown ones.

To look for unknown rare mutations, Timothy Cash of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid and his colleagues sequenced the entire exome the protein-coding part of DNA of three Spanish centenarians and four of their long-lived siblings. These were compared with the exomes of 800 people, many of whom could be assumed to have average lifespans, as only one in 5000 people live to 100.

One gene apolipoprotein B had rare mutations in all three long-lived families that were less common in the 800 controls. The protein made by this gene helps carry "bad cholesterol" in the blood, high levels of which lead to heart attacks. It is possible that the mutations reduce levels of this bad cholesterol.

The team is now investigating whether the centenarians' cholesterol levels bear out this theory. If they do, "this would definitely reinforce the idea that cardiovascular health is an important factor in overall ageing", says Cash.

Intriguingly, previous work has shown that another gene for which there is strong evidence for a role in human lifespan is apolipoprotein E, which also helps transport cholesterol. However, the beneficial variants of this gene also reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease, which is usually thought to be the main reason behind their effects on longevity.

Another gene that has recently been implicated in longevity is FOXO3A, which may affect people's sensitivity to insulin.

Journal reference: Aging Cell, doi.org/vfv

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Gene variant found that may help people live to be 100

43 minutes ago

A new study calls into question the evolutionary stability of an ecological explanation of biodiversity.

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, brings together evolutionary theory and ecology to explore one of the big questions in ecology: How is biodiversity developed and maintained?

"This is a fundamental question if we want to protect biodiversitywhat exactly do we need to protect?" says IIASA Evolution and Ecology Program Director Ulf Dieckmann, who led the study together with Florian Hartig from the University of Freiburg, collaborating with colleagues from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig and the French National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble.

In Biology 101, students learn that two species cannot occupy the same niche, and that the world's biodiversity is thus closely related to the number of niches that exist. But in fact, in the real world this is often not trueit appears that organisms can and do occupy the same niche, meaning that they feed on the same resource, in the same place, at the same time.

"For example," says Dieckmann, "herring and sprat in the Baltic Sea occupy very similar ecological niches, feeding on the same kinds of plankton. How such species can robustly co-exist is a key question for modern ecology."

One theory, known as Relative Nonlinearity of Competition (RNC), suggests that such species can co-exist because they react differently to fluctuations in resources or other limiting factorssuch as algal blooms for fish, or rainfall variations for mosquitoescausing changes in the environment that temporarily benefit the other species. This leads to a dynamic relationship in which each species temporarily benefits from the other's influence on the environment, holding the two in balance.

"The idea has held up well in theory, but it's difficult to test in practice," says Dieckmann. So he and his colleagues decided to test RNC from another perspective, using three standard evolutionary models. "We wanted to find out what happens to the RNC mechanism when we allow the species to adapt."

Their results show that RNC is typically not stable if one considers evolution: in all three models, the species differences that supported their coexistence disappear through adaptation. This means that, evolutionarily, the two coexisting species are outcompeted and replaced by a single species. Dieckmann says, "We thus suggest that the potential of this mechanism for explaining the origin and maintenance of biodiversity might have been overestimated in the literature."

The scientists conclude that further research will be needed to understand what other mechanisms support biodiversity.

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Biodiversity in the balance

My friend Ray Kurzweil projects the U.S. will meet 100 percent of its electrical energy needs from solar in 20 years. Elon Musk is a bit more conservative, pegging it at 50 percent in that timeframe. While the growth of solar may seem slow to some, its fair to say its in the midst of its deceptive phase, on the road to disruption. For example, a 30 percent increase in solar energy production per year, means 1 percent today grows to 1.3 percent in 3 years. It also means that in 20 years (7 doublings), well see a 128-fold increase. Either way, if Ray and Elon are even close, there is a trillion dollars up for grabs (as well as the future of our planet), and the future is bright. Lets take a closer look at the converging technologies driving this futureThe cost of solar panels is dropping exponentially.The first and most important technological change is the falling cost per watt of silicon photovoltaic cells over the past few decades. Check out the plummeting cost from $76 in 1977, to less than $0.36 today.

The International Energy Agency predicts that we will produce 662 GigaWatts of solar energy by 2035 following a $1.3 trillion investment in this area, but frankly this estimate is highly conservative. The second technology at play is satellite-Earth imaging, which enables companies like solar City to make rapid and accurate decisions on solar panel installations. These days, an installer can check out your rooftop on Google Earth and determine in minutes if you are a good candidate. Super-simple.Energy Storage Mechanisms Are Improving RapidlyThe third key technology transforming our energy economy is battery storage. The ability to take solar energy captured during the day, and time-shift it into the night. Here to the change has been very significant, with a 50%+ reduction over the past four years, and an additional 50%+ reduction by 2020.

In addition to this ongoing cost reduction, were about to see a massive increase in battery production. Teslas Gigafactory alone will produce 35 Gigawatts worth of the batteries by 2020, more than 2013s total global battery production capacity.

Electric Vehicles (EVs)Teslas Gigafactory also supports the production of 500,000 electric vehicles per year. The rapid rise (see below) of Electric Vehicle (EV) production will play a critical role as well.

6 Ds: Tying It All Together The convergence of solar, batteries and EVs will democratize energy production and offer billions of people access to cheap, carbon-neutral energy. Looking at solar energy thru my 6 Ds paradigm of exponential technologies may offer some added insights:

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Solar Energy Revolution: A Massive Opportunity

9 hours ago A new and more precise recalculation of the normal background extinction rate what it would be without the human presence shows the rate to be lower, meaning that the rate of extinction in the human era is as much as 10 times worse than had been thought. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

It's hard to comprehend how bad the current rate of species extinction around the world has become without knowing what it was before people came along. The newest estimate is that the pre-human rate was 10 times lower than scientists had thought, which means that the current level is 10 times worse.

Extinctions are about 1,000 times more frequent now than in the 60 million years before people came along. The explanation from lead author Jurriaan de Vos, a Brown University postdoctoral researcher, senior author Stuart Pimm, a Duke University professor, and their team appears online in the journal Conservation Biology.

"This reinforces the urgency to conserve what is left and to try to reduce our impacts," said de Vos, who began the work while at the University of Zurich. "It was very, very different before humans entered the scene."

In absolute, albeit rough, terms the paper calculates a "normal background rate" of extinction of 0.1 extinctions per million species per year. That revises the figure of 1 extinction per million species per year that Pimm estimated in prior work in the 1990s. By contrast, the current extinction rate is more on the order of 100 extinctions per million species per year.

Orders of magnitude, rather than precise numbers are about the best any method can do for a global extinction rate, de Vos said. "That's just being honest about the uncertainty there is in these type of analyses."

From Fossils to Genetics

The new estimate improves markedly on prior ones mostly because it goes beyond the fossil record. Fossils are helpful sources of information, but their shortcomings include disproportionate representation of hard-bodied sea animals and the problem that they often only allow identification of the animal or plant's genus, but not its exact species.

What the fossils do show clearly is that apart from a few cataclysms over geological periodssuch as the one that eliminated the dinosaursbiodiversity has slowly increased.

The new study next examined evidence from the evolutionary family treesphylogeniesof numerous plant and animal species. Phylogenies, constructed by studying DNA, trace how groups of species have changed over time, adding new genetic lineages and losing unsuccessful ones. They provide rich details of how species have diversified over time.

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Extinctions during human era worse than thought

5 hours ago The biobank comprises three cryotanks, equipped with cooled protective hoods, and a transfer station from which the sample containers are transported via a rail system. There is enough space for approximately 60,000 samples. Credit: Fraunhofer IBMT

For the development of new drugs it is crucial to work with stem cells, as these allow scientists to study the effects of new active pharmaceutical ingredients. But it has always been difficult to derive enough stem cells of the right quality and in the right timeframe. A central biobank is about to remedy the situation.

Human stem cells allow scientists to assess how patients are likely to respond to new drugs and to examine how illnesses come about. For a few years now, it has been possible to take tissue samples from adults and use reverse programming to artificially produce stem cells, which have the potential to create any kind of cell found in the human body. Before this discovery, pharmaceutical researchers had to use adult stem cells or primary cells, which have a more limited potential. Another option is to use stem cells derived from human embryos, but quite apart from the ethical considerations these cells are available only in limited diversity. The new technique makes it possible for instance to reprogram adult skin or blood cells so that they behave in a similar way to embryonic stem cells and can become any type of cell. "These are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells for short," says Dr. Julia Neubauer from the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering IBMT in St. Ingbert, Germany. Although an increasing number of local biobanks have emerged in recent years, none of them fulfills the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry and research institutions. What is needed is a supply of 'ready-to-use' stem cells, which means large numbers of consistently characterized, systematically catalogued cells of suitable quality.

At the beginning of 2014, the IBMT teamed up with 26 industry and research partners to launch a project aimed at establishing a central biobank the European Bank for induced pluripotent Stem Cells (EBiSC) to generate iPS cells from patients with specific diseases or genetic mutations (http://ebisc.org/). Six months into the project and the first cells are available for use in the development of new drugs. By its three-year mark, it is hoped the project will be in a position to offer over 1000 defined and characterized cell lines comprising a hundred million cells. Such quantities are needed because a single drug screening involves testing several million cells. The main biobank facility is being built in the English city of Cambridge and an identical "mirror site" will be set up at the IBMT's Sulzbach location in Germany.

Gently freezing cells

The IBMT was brought on board for EBiSC by virtue of the comprehensive expertise it gained through participation in the EU's "Hyperlab" and "CRYSTAL" projects. For EBiSC, IBMT scientists are responsible for freezing the cells and for automating cell cultivation and the biobank itself. For an efficient long-term storage of functional stem cells, they have to be cooled down to temperatures of below 130 degrees Celsius in a controlled way. The scientists have to prepare the cells so they can survive the cold shock of nitrogen gas. The IBMT has, for instance, developed technologies that allow cells to be frozen in an extremely gentle way. "Cells don't like being removed from the surface they are grown on, but that's what people used to do in order to freeze them. Our method allows the cells to stay adherent," explains Neubauer.

Just as with foodstuffs, stem cells depend on an unbroken cold chain to preserve their functionality and viability. The scientists store the cells in special containers or cryotanks each measuring one by two meters. To remove a particular sample, the scientists have to open the cryotank. The problem is that this exposes all the other samples to warmer ambient air, causing them to begin to thaw out. "It's just like when you go to your refrigerator at home it's not a good idea to leave the door open too long," says Neubauer. She and her colleagues at the IBMT and industry partner Askion GmbH have together developed a stem cell biobank complete with protective hoods that protect the other samples whenever the cryotank is opened. In addition to maintaining the temperature, the hoods help keep another key shelf-life criterion, humidity, at a constant level.

Flawless freezing is important, but it is just as important to automate the whole process. "That not only guarantees consistency, it's what makes it possible to provide large quantities of cells of the required quality in the first place," says Neubauer. And the scientists' cooling process already boasts a finished technology. In their automated biobank, each cell sample is labelled with barcodes to allow them to be tracked. The samples travel along a conveyor belt to the individual cyrotanks, and a computer monitors the entire freezing and storage process.

Now the scientists are working on automating cell cultivation or the multiplying of the cells. There are essentially two possible approaches. One is to use robots that translate each preparation step into a mechanical one. The other is to use stirred bioreactors that provide free-moving cells with the ideal supply of nutrients and oxygen. Both technologies feature in the IBMT's portfolio. "By the time the project is completed, we'll know which is the better method for what we're trying to do," says Neubauer.

Explore further: Animal-free reprogramming of adult cells improves safety

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Central biobank for drug research