Longevity science

Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida have uncovered a toxic cellular process by which a protein that maintains the health of neurons becomes deficient and can lead to dementia.

The findings shed new light on the link between culprits implicated in two devastating neurological diseases: Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which afflicts physicist Stephen Hawking.

There is no cure for frontotemporal dementia, a disorder that affects personality, behavior and language and is second only to Alzheimer’s disease as the most common form of early-onset dementia.

Will our increased understanding of how our brains work allow us to transcend human nature?

 

Yes indeed.

 

Ray Kurzweil, the software inventor and visionary, argues that human intelligence will radically evolve beyond biology and become embedded in new "spiritual" machines.

 

The book, How to Create a Mind, is available through Amazon and BN.com

 

 

Video: Singularity Hub’s recent interview with Ray Kurzweil

 

The interview with Kurzweil focused at first on his new book to be released November 13 “How to Create a Mind”, but then moved on to broader topics, such as Kurzweil’s more general thoughts on the future of man and machine, and Kurzweil’s personal goals for his work. The interview features a closeup, raw style.

The latest data from a long-running study of hormone therapy suggests women who started taking hormone replacements within five years of menopause were 30 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than women who started years later.

 

 

Neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth believes that he can live forever, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. But first he has to die.

 

“The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body,” he says.

 

He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin — before he dies of natural causes.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have surgically implanted a pacemaker-like device into the brain of a patient in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the first such operation in the United States.

 

The device, which provides deep brain stimulation and has been used in thousands of people with Parkinson’s disease, is seen as a possible means of boosting memory and reversing cognitive decline.

 

 

A team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the Institut Pasteur, Paris has come up with a novel way to describe brain development.

 

The findings could lead to new drug designs for mental disorders such as autism-spectrum disorders (ASD) and schizophrenia.

 

 

Thanks to work of pathologist Thomas Harvey to preserve Albert Eisntein’s brain decades ago, we can continue to busy ourselves today with trying to figure out what made Albert Einstein so smart.