Two dozen leading experts in the brain recently converged for a daylong meeting at Stanford University. The meeting focused on a review of the current state of research and scientific knowledge related to software products and approaches that aim to defend against age-related cognitive decline. This meeting follows a similar meeting held five years ago which resulted in the 2008 Expert Consensus on Brain Health.
The immune system of older people declines in reliability and efficiency with age, resulting in greater susceptibility to pathology as a consequence of inflammation, for example, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, autoreactivity and vaccine failure, as well as an increased vulnerability to infectious disease.
A new report this week about signals from hypothalamus reminds us that some of the biggest influences on longevity are mediated through the nervous system. To this extent, the decision about how long to live comes from a calculation made in the brain. The new research suggests a hormone known as GnRH as a relatively simple signal by which aging might be slowed, and another signal called NF-kappa-B promotes aging and might be blocked to slow aging.
Eating less is the best-tested and surest way to a younger body and an increased life span. But it’s a hard discipline to maintain, and many of us would welcome an easier alternative. Perhaps we can realize some of the benefits applying a more temporary exercise of willpower, with intermittent fasting. It’s counter-intuitive, but seems to be true, that health and longevity are better served by clumping up our food consumption (feast and famine) than by spreading food consumption evenly through the day and through the week.
For decades, we have been treating cancer by hammering away at cancer cells with radiation and chemical poisons. Fearful that even one surviving cell can seed a recurrence, we routinely apply the maximum tolerable dose, with side-effects ranging from nausea and hair loss to permanent impairment of the immune system. Is there a better approach?
What is personalized medicine and what can it do for you? We overview some of the latest — the use of biomarkers for diagnosis, the Quantified Self movement, distributed medical intelligence, and more.
In this paper the authors show that dataset generation can be accelerated using machine learning. . Results are achieved here with the free and available WEKA machine learning toolkit which is a perfect tool for DIY experimentation.
Human enhancement and the future of work is a recently issued report destined to become a landmark in the history of Transhumanism and specifically human enhancement research.
