Tag: lifeextension

Parasitical Life Extension

Infected Temnothorax ants live at least 3x longer than their siblings, and perhaps in excess of 10 years, approaching that of ant queens, who can survive up to 20 years. When Foitzik cracks open infected Temnothorax colonies, the parasitized workers do little more than stare expectantly skyward. Down to the molecular level, the parasite is pulling the strings. She has split open Temnothorax abdomens and counted up to 70 tapeworms inside. From there, the worms can unleash a slurry of proteins and chemicals that futz with the ant’s core physiology, likely impacting their host’s hormones, immune system, and genes. What they achieve appears to be a rough pantomime of how ant queens attain their mind-boggling life span, a feat humans still don’t understand. The tapeworms’ grasp of ant aging is far more advanced than ours.

6x aging differences

Some humans age faster than others. Variation in biological aging can be measured in midlife, but the implications of this variation are poorly understood. We tested associations between midlife biological aging and indicators of future frailty risk in the Dunedin cohort of 1037 infants born the same year and followed to age 45. Participants’ ‘Pace of Aging’ was quantified by tracking declining function in 19 biomarkers indexing the cardiovascular, metabolic, renal, immune, dental and pulmonary systems across ages 26, 32, 38 and 45 years. At age 45, participants with faster Pace of Aging had more cognitive difficulties, signs of advanced brain aging, diminished sensory–motor functions, older appearances and more pessimistic perceptions of aging. The slowest ager gained only 0.4 ‘biological years’ for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.

2020s Technology

Therapeutic plasma exchange is FDA-approved (not for aging, but for a bunch of other conditions). I imagine there remain prohibitions on advertising that it can add years to your life, but it is safe, and a doctor can prescribe it off label. It’s also cheap. An automated plasmapheresis machine—which lets you do treatment after treatment—can be bought online for under $3000. That is less than the cost of a single transfusion of young blood sold by the startup Ambrosia. How long until someone opens a clinic offering plasma dilution? I bet someone tries it in 2021. If it works, people will get over the weirdness, and it could be commonplace by 2030.

What is more plausible this decade is enhanced and advanced geothermal systems. The legacy geothermal industry is sleepy, tapping energy at traditional volcanic hydrothermal hotspots—forget about it. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry. The startups I have spoken to think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions. With relatively minor advancements in drilling technology compared to what we’ve seen over the last decade, advanced geothermal could reach 2¢/kWh and become scale to become viable just about anywhere on the planet. Collectively, the startups are talking about figures like 100s of gigawatts of generation by 2030. I’m watching this space closely; the Heat Beat blog is a great way to stay in the loop. As I wrote last month, permitting reform will be important.

The 2020s will be a big decade for sustainable alternative fuels (SAF). Commercial aviation can’t electrify—batteries will never match fossil fuels’ energy density. Given political realities, aviation has no choice to decarbonize, which means either hydrogen fuel or SAF. Hydrogen fuel is much better than batteries, but still not as energy dense as fossil fuels or SAF, and so my money is on SAF, and particularly on fuel made from CO₂ pulled from the atmosphere. It is easy to convert atmospheric CO₂ to ethanol in solution; and it is easy to upgrade ethanol into other fuels. But it is hard to separate ethanol from water without using a lot of energy—unless you have an advanced membrane as Prometheus Fuels does. I have written about Prometheus before and continue to follow them closely. Their technology could decarbonize aviation very suddenly.

Construction tech is another area to watch. Whether it’s 3d-printed homes as imagined by Icon, or advanced manufactured housing as designed by Cover or Modal, there has to be a better way to build than our current stick-built paradigm. Housing costs have skyrocketed largely due to zoning rules, but construction technology is another lever by which we can increase housing productivity. This is another area where the barriers don’t seem to be primarily technological.

Life’s Energy Limits

For individual cells, this power minimum hovers around a zeptowatt, or 10−21 watts. That is the power required to lift 0.001% of a grain of salt 1 nanometer once a day. (For reference, a human body uses ~100 watts, the power of a reading light.) The new model suggests that cells living in sub-seafloor sediments are drawing only slightly more power than that.

2022-11-02: Inert spores may be close to that energy limit, and use a passive sensing technique.

The spores might be able to sense small cumulative changes in their environment, until enough signals build up to trigger a sort of wake-up alarm. The mechanism that would induce these changes would be the movement of ions out of the cell—specifically, potassium ions.

These movements can be triggered by positive environmental signals, like the presence of nutrients. When the ions travel out of the cell thanks to passive transport, they generate a difference in potassium concentration inside versus outside the cell. This concentration difference allows the spore to store potential energy. Over time, as the spore continues to sense more positive signals, more ions would move out of the cell. This would also create a corresponding drop in potassium levels, as the ions exit. Eventually, the potassium content in the spore would lower to a certain threshold, signaling that it is safe for the cell to wake up. That would trigger reanimation and germination.

2024-07-23: Most life is dormant

60% of all microbial cells are hibernating at any given time. Even in organisms whose entire bodies do not go dormant, like most mammals, some cellular populations within them rest and wait for the best time to activate. esearchers reported the discovery of a new hibernation factor, which they have named Balon. The protein is shockingly common: A search for its gene sequence uncovered its presence in 20% of all cataloged bacterial genomes. And it works in a way that molecular biologists had never seen before.

Previously, all known ribosome-disrupting hibernation factors worked passively: They waited for a ribosome to finish building a protein and then prevented it from starting a new one. Balon, however, pulls the emergency brake. It stuffs itself into every ribosome in the cell, even interrupting active ribosomes in the middle of their work. Before Balon, hibernation factors had only been seen in empty ribosomes.

Multiplex editing

Enhancing Organs for Cryonics, Space and Transplants

They are able to multiplex edit on the repeating gene sequences. The repeating gene sequences are key to many aspects of antiaging and cancer and other diseases. They are working to multiplex editing for enhancing organs. The can make the organs more resistant to cryopreservation and disease immunity. They can make people better able to travel in space and be more radiation resistant

Testosterone juicing

Before and after pictures of tech leaders like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin suggest they’re taking supplemental testosterone. And though it may help them keep looking young, Palladium points out that there might be other effects from having some of our most powerful businessmen on a hormone that increases risk-taking and ambition. They ask whether the new availability of testosterone supplements is prolonging Silicon Valley businessmen’s “brash entrepreneur” phase well past the point where they would normally become mature respectable elders. But it also hints at an almost opposite take: average testosterone levels have been falling for decades, so at this point these businessmen would be the only “normal” (by 1950s standards) men out there, and everyone else would be unprecedently risk-averse and boring.

Paging Peter Thiel and everyone else who takes about how things “just worked better” in Eisenhower’s day.

Stem cell injection

Injecting Placental stem cells into old mice at the end of their lives can boost longevity by 50%. It extends the life of 2-year-old mice to 3 years. Peter Diamandis states that he personally knows billionaires who are over the age of 80 who go to foreign stem cell treatment clinics to inject Placental stem cells.

42 ka earthworm revival

1 worm came from an ancient squirrel burrow in a permafrost wall of the Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River – close to the site of Pleistocene Park which is seeking to recreate the Arctic habitat of the extinct woolly mammoth. This is around 32 ka old. Another was found in permafrost near Alazeya River in 2015, and is around 42 ka old.