I’ll be on Fastforward radio tonight at 7:30 PT. Topic is “Risks, Dystopias, and Unsettling Futures” and other guests include David Brin (author of Transparent Society) and the Lifeboat Foundation’s Philippe Van Nedervelde. If you listen live, you can contribute to the show by joining the live text chat.

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For those interested in longevity, July was a good news month. Recently published research in the journal Science shows that caloric restriction helps monkeys live longer and healthier, while a parallel study demonstrated the possibility that a drug could mimic this process.
Here is my column arguing that, while good news abounds, the downside [...]

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It’s a fact that as humans age, the chance of getting cancer increases. Unfortunately for Carmen Bousada and her twin boys, she fell to the disease much earlier than she had expected. Her own mother had lived to 101 years, so she assumed she would have another 30 years or so left to [...]

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Anyone who seriously follows new technologies and cutting edge science knows that Singularity University officially launched this week. Here is an uplifting welcome message from Vice-Chancellor and Chairman Peter Diamandis and below is a thoughtful video featuring a Q&A with Chancellor Ray Kurzweil (he discusses the key goal of our species, FDA risk assessment, [...]

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Here’s the paper everyone has been buzzing about for the last few days (press release). Monkeys who ate a lower calorie, yet nutritious diet, lived longer than those who ate more. These results were expected, and it will be interesting to see how the monkeys fare over the next decade or so. [...]

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Like Resveratrol, the thinking is that Rapamycin mimics caloric restriction. Here’s the summary from Nature:
“On the basis of age at 90% mortality, rapamycin led to an increase of 14% for females and 9% for males….To our knowledge, these are the first results to demonstrate a role for mTOR signalling in the regulation of mammalian [...]

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This bolsters the argument that “stem cells can generate any cell in the body,” and also has big ramifications for future fertility technologies.
From Time.com:
“Researchers at Newcastle University in England report they have coaxed the first human sperm cells from embryonic stem cells, in a remarkable demonstration of how quickly the field of stem-cell science is [...]

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This is a great video on growing human organs and how such procedures will extend life. Oprah’s Dr. Oz does a good job interviewing the experts at Wake Forest University.

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The below text is from a speech given by Hawking at TED in 2008. He expects that humans will be able to repair and alter themselves, which will create new political issues. That just happens to be the topic of a book I am working on at the moment, so nice to see [...]

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This is a fantastic step towards healing heart damage.
“Doctors at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute announced the completion of the first procedure in which a patient’s own heart tissue was used to grow specialized heart stem cells that were then injected back into the patient’s heart in an effort to repair and re-grow healthy muscle in [...]

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From Wired:
“By tracking individual cells in genetically modified salamanders, researchers have found an unexpected explanation for their seemingly magical ability to regrow lost limbs.
Rather than having their cellular clocks fully reset and reverting to an embryonic state, cells in the salamanders’ stumps became slightly less mature versions of the cells they’d been before. The findings [...]

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