longevity | Singularity Hub

Tim Ferriss’ New Book: Become a Superhuman

13 Comments

by Aaron Saenz on July 15th, 2009

Everyone knows that building the perfect body takes years of hard work and an iron will. Everyone except Tim Ferriss. The bestselling author just announced that his next book will focus on his study of the human body using the craziest subject he could find: himself. Tim promises to show readers how to increase muscle strength by 30% in three days or less, drop 50-100 pounds of fat, or change lean muscle mass weight by 20 lbs in just 3-4 weeks. In short, Tim Ferriss has found the short cut to getting cut, and he’s about to share it with the world.

The bestselling author's next book will focus on superhuman workout regimens. (Photo from Tim Ferriss' Blog: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/)

I have no idea if Tim Ferriss is the real deal, but he’s certainly made himself into a big deal. His 2007 bestselling book, The 4 Hour Work Week, promised to show you how to exit the rat race, make tons of money, and pursue your life’s goals without working yourself to death. He appeared at MIT, Harvard, Princeton, the CIA, Google, Live with Regis and Kelly…the list really never ends. He’s been on a constant lecture circuit while still achieving some ridiculous titles. He holds a Guinness World Record for Tango spins, he’s a champion kickboxer in China, and even had a TV show: Trial by Fire on Discovery Channel. Check out the promo after the break.

4 Comments

by Aaron Saenz on July 8th, 2009

The eScale will send your weight via cell phone signal to the Internet. Better start working out!

If Reality TV has taught us anything about weight loss it’s that the more people who are watching you, the quicker you’ll drop the pounds. Social pressure is a key ingredient in the eScale from Body Trace. This bathroom scale comes equipped with a modified cell phone module allowing it to broadcast your weight to a Body Trace “motivational webpage.” There you, or your avatar, can display the fluctuations in your weight with all the pride or shame that you want. Along with a calorie calculator, BMI graph, and health tips, the Body Trace motivational page allows you to connect with friends and strangers to share in your experience. It’s social networking meets weight loss obsession.

This isn’t the first web-based weight loss device Singularity Hub has seen. There are smart toilets that will analyze your weight as you pee, as well as analyze it for your doctor. There are big differences with Body Trace, however. First, the eScale has a GSM network module, so it connects directly to the Body Trace server straight out of the box. No WiFi or other setup necessary. You just pop in the batteries (six D-cells included) and step on the eScale. It’s that simple. Second, Body Trace is really pushing the networking aspects of their motivational page. Looking at the screen shot, I am reminded of Facebook’s wall interface. It’s a nice concept, and I have no doubt that being able to share the weight loss struggle will really help some people achieve their goals.

1 Comment

by Andrew Kessel on July 6th, 2009

Skin replacement might not be a hot new cosmetic procedure yet but, believe it or not, synthesized human skin is already a precious commodity on the market. It is not as sinister as it might seem, though, as most of it is not suitable for transplant and goes to the cosmetics industry to test new products for adverse skin reactions. For years, these industries have been eating up skin samples far faster than labs can produce them but recently our good German friends over at Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have developed a method to mass produce the highest quality of skin sample, selling for merely 34 Euros ($48 USD) a pop. Project leader Jörg Saxler describes this price as “attractive to the industry”.

Fresh skin just aching to be made softer, smoother and silkier

The skin produced by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is leaps and bounds better than what is currently available, with two layers and two cell types instead of just one layer with one cell type. The two layer samples are a near perfect copy of human skin, combining the two different types of skin cells to give a life-like test bed for new products about to hit the market. The cosmetics industry is so set on using human skin because nothing is better (not even animal testing) at determining which products will cause irritation and which will not. So, as far as they are concerned, the more life-like, the better.

And this is not just great news for moisturizer aficionados, either. This product could eventually lead to readily available swatches of skin to be used for replacements in a hospital setting. Who would have thought that the next big advancement in skin grafting would come from the cosmetics industry? Sure, current methods of repairing skin include using a pig derived sheet to act as a guide for skin regrowth or recycling gently worn skin from dead people, but there is nothing as cool as purpose-grown body tissues.

17 Comments

by Aaron Saenz on June 29th, 2009

Do I need to catch more sun and vitamin D?

The western world faces three very notorious killers: heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Just this week Michael Jackson (heart attack??) and Farah Fawcett (cancer) were struck down, and the media is waiting on baited breath for another celebrity to die and fulfill the “rule of threes.” Stroke, we’re looking at you. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if there were just a few simple things you could eat or take that would protect you from all three killers?

That’s what the U.S. government is going to find out. The National Institute for Health (NIH) is funding a $20 million dollar study with 20,000 test subjects to explore how vitamin D and fish oil affect health. The Vitamin D and Omega-3 Trial (or VITAL) will be a five year study and will be one of the first to specifically target African Americans as test subjects. With darker skin producing less vitamin D in the body from sun exposure, scientists theorize there may be a link between a vitamin D deficiency and higher rates of stroke, heart disease, and cancer in the Af.Am. community.

23 Comments

by Aaron Saenz on June 23rd, 2009

When you’re heart is broken, you’ll do anything to fix it. Even replace it with a pig heart. Scientists at the University of Minnesota have been working on stripping down hearts, removing much of the muscular and vascular tissue. What you get is a semi-translucent “decellularised” heart. Add some stem cells, and a new heart can be grown on this scaffold. A new heart that your body won’t reject, at least in theory. When Singularity Hub first brought you this story last year, researchers at UM were using the technique on rat hearts. Now, they’ve moved on to pig hearts and we’ve got a hold of some cool new pics and a short video from New Scientist. Check them out before and after the break.

At top, a rat's heart is decellularised until it becomes a scaffold. Stem cells from mice are then applied to the heart, and it is recellularised at bottom. Photo courtesy of University of Minnesota.

It's alive! This rat heart is being pumped in an artificial structure, allowing stem cells to grow into a new version of the organ. Photo courtesy of the University of Minnesota

The biggest problem is making sure that each heart grown is fully functioning and able to be transplanted. After being decellularised, each heart has to be recellularised by applying a coating of stem cells and having blood pumped through the heart scaffolding. Along with chemical signals from the scaffold cells, the blood allows the stem cells to specialize into the various needed tissues. Looking at the rat hearts in the pumping machine, it’s hard to believe that you are looking at a living, autonomous organ outside a body. Check out the video from New Scientist:

7 Comments

by Andrew Kessel on June 22nd, 2009

Here at Singularity Hub, we are just a little bit vain. Like, what’s the point of doing all this science and technology stuff if you’re not going to look good while doing it? Well, it’s high time that technology made us look prettier. Thankfully, researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have heard our call and noticed a peculiar coincidence that could eradicate our wrinkles and sun damaged spots much better than any store-bought product. Patients treated with a topical chemotherapy drug have shown that a side effect of treatment is wrinkle-free, ageless skin. Yes, toss out that cocoa butter and prepare for eternal youth through chemotherapy.

Look this "good" without spending millions at your local plastic surgeon!

Think it’s a bit bonkers, using chemotherapy drugs to knock a few years off of the face? Well, it really is. The research published shows that the skin rejuvenation is a mere side effect. The initial intent of the study was to determine the efficacy of the drug Fluorouracil, which is used to remove pre-cancerous actinic keratoses: lesions that could cause cancer. Aside from the fact that most people willing to plunk down their dollars for this type of treatment would not actually have the actinic keratoses, patients in the trial experienced severe discomfort during and after the trial.

As the saying goes, you have to get worse before you can get better, and it indeed holds true for a pretty face. In fact, patients endured itchiness, redness and fiery irritation of their skin for weeks while the treatment was taking place. The topical ointment works in much the same way (albeit quite a bit cheaper) as laser therapy and chemical peels, intentionally destroying the outer skin layer in order to force the body to regenerate new and healthy skin. It is only after the weeks of pain and leprous looks that the clear and rejuvenated skin starts to show.

2 Comments

by Andrew Kessel on June 3rd, 2009

The primate family tree seems to have gotten a bit brighter lately. Earlier, Singularity Hub reported on Ruby Puppy, the genetically engineered glowing dog, and now the puppy has been one-upped by a team of Japanese scientists who have created a gaggle of glowing marmosets. Monkeys are just steps away from humans on the evolutionary ladder. Does that mean that we’ll soon be glowing too?

Glowing Primates: Terrible at Flashlight Tag (credit Erika Sasaki - Hideyuki Okano / AP)

The marmosets were given the glowing gene in much the same way as Ruby Puppy but, instead of glowing red like the transgenic dog, the primates glow green. The genetic mutation of these marmosets holds many of the same implications as a glowing dog, including the potential study of many human diseases as well as the ethical dilemmas that come with the territory. The marmoset itself was targeted for study because it reaches sexual maturity faster and has more offspring, allowing experiments to take less time from breeding to data collection.

Aside from the usual perks of having a genetically engineered pet/lab experiment, the plethora of scientists credited with writing the report believe that this is the first time that the offspring of genetically engineered primates are able to inherit the new trait. This was proven when three out of the four second-generation marmosets bred in the experiment were capable of glowing under ultraviolet light. The presence of this gene in the sperm and egg cells of the marmoset could not only lower the cost of each animal, but also increase the yield. Whereas only a few marmosets matured to adulthood from the 900 original embryos, tradition breeding could allow for a much better survival rate.

17 Comments

by Drew Halley on April 30th, 2009

Creating a virtual model of the human brain is one thing. I do it all the time, doodling little cerebrums while I talk on the phone. But getting your model to behave just like its flesh-and-blood counterpart? That’s a Frankenstein moment right there. Researchers with the Swiss-based Blue Brain Project have just created a virtual pack of neurons that acts just like the real thing, and hope to get an e-brain up and running. I hope somebody yelled “It’s alive!”

Nerve cell model. Photo courtesy of the Blue Brain Project

Launched by the EPFL in 2005, the Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse-engineer the brain. As most folks know, the human brain is made up of lots (and lots and lots) of neurons – around 100 billion or so. These neurons connect and communicate with each other through a dizzying network of something like 100 trillion synapses. If these numbers are making your own brain hurt, you now have a sense for how hard it is to make an artificial brain.

But all hope is not lost. Genes don’t really code the body like blueprints do for a building, mapping out every single detail; instead, they give a more general instruction and hit the “repeat” button a few million times (e.g. when they give fractal instructions). This means that amid the great complexity of the whole brain, there are structural units that repeat themselves. One such structure is called a neocortical column (NCC): a group of about 10,000 neurons in the cerebral cortex that are organized in a relatively consistent way across the mammalian brain. Millions of these columns compose the whole of your grey matter.

33 Comments

by Aaron Saenz on April 29th, 2009

“Does God exist? Well, I would say, ‘Not yet.” —Ray Kurzweil, Transcendent Man, 2009

It’s not every documentary that predicts humanity will someday create and become God. Transcendent Man says it will happen in the next twenty years. A bold statement for a movie about a bold man. Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man is a biopic of famed inventor, writer, and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is author of The Singularity is Near, a best-selling book describing humanity’s journey to becoming non-biological life.

Singularity Hub was at the Tribeca Film Festival debut of Transcendent Man, and the revealing panel discussion that followed. Whether you are new to the concept of ‘the singularity’, or whether you are a well-known authority on the subject, you will want to see this film.

Scene from Transcendent Man

Kurzweil, his family, his friends, his colleagues, and his detractors all appear in filmed interviews to discuss his most famous predictions: intelligence is following an exponential growth curve, as technology increases the differences between technology and humanity will shrink, and eventually the human-machine civilization will be advancing so quickly that no one can truly understand what it will be like. The last concept is known as the singularity. Borrowed from physics, Kurzweil and others use the term to describe the inability to comprehend the seemingly limitless intelligence that will arise past this point in our future. This intelligence will have amazing powers of perception, communication, and understanding, and could seem in our eyes to be God-like.

42 Comments

by Keith Kleiner on April 22nd, 2009

A simple message, less than 140 characters, is sent out to followers around the world and within hours, perhaps minutes, more than 100 million people have been mobilized to act. The message might instruct those who read it to look at a certain website, protest at a designated time and place, or perform any number of other acts, promoting an agenda or cause whose intentions may be either benign or downright evil. But whatever the message, whatever its agenda or intentions, the message has been sent and the world is shaken by its power. A tweetbomb. That is what this message is called. Although we haven’t seen one yet, you better believe it is coming, and it is coming soon. Welcome to the era of Twitter, an era of mass communication where a single individual or institution can mobilize massive numbers of people as never before.

There once was is a Twitter account @tweetbomb that used a viral technique to ‘bomb’ an increasing number of followers with a message once a day, but this was not a true tweetbomb. It was simply an interesting exercise by the same name, quickly shutdown by Twitter for violating terms of service. Meanwhile, as various famous tweeters are now eclipsing the milestone of one million followers, the prospect of a true tweetbomb looms ever closer.

The tweetbomb is a single, simple message that is sent into the wild of cyberspace, causing a minimum of 100 million people to act at its behest within hours, or perhaps at some future pre-determined date and time. It is not enough for 100 million people to receive the message – those who receive the message must act upon its contents for the message to rise to true tweetbomb status. The distinction of receiving vs acting on the message may seem minor, but in fact it is a defining feature of the powerful tweetbomb phenomenon.

13 Comments

by Drew Halley on April 17th, 2009

This bigfoot Dewar is custom designed to contain four wholebody patients and six neuropatients immersed in liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees Celsius. Photo courtesy Alcor

Want to live forever? You’re not alone. For as long as we humans have contemplated our own mortality, the dream of eternal life has not been far behind. We see it reflected in our mythologies, religions, and cultural traditions, whether through a fountain of youth or an immortal soul in heaven. But the dream of cheating death has recently made the jump from superstition to science. Welcome to the world of cryopreservation.

Cryonics is the preservation of a body at low temperatures following legal “death,” with the expectation that future technologies will allow the resuscitation of the individual. The technique has reached the popular imagination through a mix of Hollywood portrayals (e.g. Austin Powers) and urban legends (sorry, but Walt Disney was actually cremated). Singularity enthusiasts hope that death will be but a long nap, and dream they might awaken to a futuristic afterlife here on Earth. But how much of this is science, how much is hype, and how much is faith? To find out, we’ve surveyed the landscape of cryonics today.

The logic of cryopreservation goes something like this. The medical definition of “death” has changed throughout history as new technologies became available. A century ago, people were considered dead if their heart had stopped beating. Today, lives are routinely saved through the use of a defibrillator shortly after a heart attack, even after a few minutes of cardiac arrest. Cancer was once a death sentence, and now people survive it regularly. How we define death is a function of the technology at our disposal.

8 Comments

by Keith Kleiner on April 3rd, 2009

A census in Kazakhstan has reportedly uncovered a woman named Sakhan Dosova who has just turned 130 years old! If confirmed, Dosova would be an incredible 15 years older than Gertrude Baines, an American woman who is just days away from turning 115 and currently holds the title as the world’s oldest confirmed living person. Dosova would also shatter the record set by Jeanne Calment, whose 122 year lifespan is the longest documented lifespan beyond reasonable doubt.

So is it really true then? It may be impossible to tell for certain, but there are some compelling clues. Sakhan Dosova’s passport states that she was born in 1879 — the year Edison invented the lightbulb and Stalin and Einstein were born. Demographers were astonished to find that she was also on Stalin’s first census of the region in 1926 when her age was given as 47. An image (from the Daily Mail) of Dosova’s Kasakh identity card with a birth date of March 27, 1879 is shown below:

Regardless of her exact age, Dosova is almost undoubtedly part of an exclusive club of individuals known as supercentenarians. According to Wikipedia, these individuals have reached the age of 110 years or more, something achieved by only one in a thousand centenarians (based on European data). Furthermore, only 2% of supercentenarians live to be 115. As human health and medicine continue to improve it will be interesting to see what many in the singularity community expect will be an explosion of individuals reaching supercentenarian status.

At the time of one of our earlier stories, Edna Parker was the oldest person in the world at age 115, but she has since passed away in Nov 2008. A woman named Mariam Amash in Israel claims to be about 120 years old, but similar to the case of Sakhan Dosova, it may be impossible to prove.

Many may question whether it is possible to use medical forensics to verify the age of a person. According to a Scientific American interview with Jay Olshansky, and expert on the topic, and answer is “no”. An excerpt below:

The Future Is Here Today...Robots, Genetics, AI, Longevity, Singularity

New Gene Therapy Trials To Test Cure For Bubble Boy Syndrome

Video of Navy Laser Shooting Unmanned Drone Out of the Sky

Armed Robots Deployed By South Korea in Demilitarized Zone

Tim Ferriss’ New Book: Become a Superhuman

13 Comments

The eScale: Broadcast your Weight to the World

4 Comments

A Sample of Synthetic Human Skin for Just 34 Euros

1 Comment

Vitamin D and Fish Oil – Time to Put Up or Shut Up

17 Comments

Stem Cells Used to Grow Hearts: Cool New Pics and Vid

23 Comments

Chemotherapy Skin Cream Fights Wrinkles, Knocks Decades off Your Face

7 Comments

Another Step in Genetic Engineering: Glowing Primates

2 Comments

Virtual Neurons Acting Like the Real Thing – The Blue Brain Project

17 Comments

Transcendent Man Wows At Tribeca Film Festival Premier

33 Comments

Tweetbomb – A Tweet To Shake The World

42 Comments

Freezing Lazarus: The Cryonics of Eternal Life

13 Comments

Is Sakhan Dosova The Oldest Person In The World?

8 Comments