Updated: 2012-09-29 02:00:54
Over at the SENS Foundation, you'll find fairly detailed commentary from Michael Rae on the recent news of progress towards a viable therapy for the rare accelerated aging condition progeria. As I've noted in recent years, one of the things learned about the mechanisms of progeria is that they seem to be a greatly exaggerated version of processes that happen in all of us - in the same sense that the runaway mechanisms of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease (and many other age-related conditions) take place at low levels in all of us. So should we do more than keep a...
Updated: 2012-09-29 02:00:53
It is thought that size in humans relates to life expectancy via aspects of metabolism such as growth hormone - less growth hormone means a smaller size but longer life in mammal species. Ames dwarf mice are an example of this taken to an extreme through genetic engineering, lacking growth hormone but living more than 60% longer than their peers. From an evolutionary perspective, an abundance of food and good health in early life or gestation is thought to trigger a more aggressive front-loading of growth and fertility - which comes at the cost of faster decline once an individual...
Updated: 2012-09-29 02:00:52
Telomeres are the protective caps at the end of chromosomes. They shorten with cell division, and so are part of the clock which decides when a cell reaches the Hayflick limit and ceases dividing. There is much more to it than this, however: telomere length across all the cells in a piece of living tissue is dynamic, as there are processes that lengthen telomeres as well - such as the activity of telomerase. In general average telomere length erodes with age, reflecting the progressive breakdown of the body's ability to maintain itself - but this proceeds quite differently in different...
Updated: 2012-09-27 15:09:43
Researchers here investigate another portion of the mechanisms of metabolism that are influenced by calorie restriction and many of the known longevity genes. This sort of discovery helps to fill in a very complicated landscape of intertwining effects and controllers of effects - at some point in the not too distant future the research community will be able to set out a complete map of how all of the longevity genes and known ways to extend life in laboratory animals relate to one another and work through an overlapping set of mechanisms: In this study, we demonstrated that the overexpression...
Updated: 2012-09-26 17:17:34
An online course coupled with hands on training in Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy and Transmission Electron Microscopy given in Mountain View, California, is being offered by Foothill College and NASA-ASL (NASA-Ames).
Updated: 2012-08-28 23:16:52
September 6, 2012. San Francisco. General admission to Design Night is $20 and student admission is $10. Admission fees include access to the exhibits, content such as a speaker, music, a hosted bar, and hands-on activities.
Updated: 2012-08-27 20:16:38
The conceptual history of nanotechnology is usually traced to a classic talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which was first published in Caltech Engineering and Science, Volume 23:5, February [...]
Updated: 2012-08-13 18:03:16
From Desiree D. Dudley, Foresight Director of Development and Outreach: 1)Foresighters Christine Peterson and Desiree Dudley will be speaking at NASA-Ames’ Singularity University this Monday night, August 13th, from 8-10pm. Presentations are from 8-9, and a Q&A panel with H+’s Amy Li and SU’s Jose Cordiero 9-10pm! Topics will include nanotech, biotech, life-extension, and our [...]
Updated: 2012-08-07 00:47:09
I am speaking on nanotechnology at a free event at Stanford this Wednesday evening. The Nanocentury: Bringing Digital Control to the Physical World. Throughout human history, our species has worked to control the matter surrounding us — building larger and larger, smaller and smaller, more and more precise. The payoffs from these efforts are starting [...]
