It's so frustrating to get seemingly contradictory results across species with the same treatment. The Interventions Testing Program found no increase in median or maximum lifespan in mice, male or female, treated with metformin (though it did in combination with rapamycin) [0].
I realize "decelarating the aging clock" might be subtly different than increasing lifespan, but it's a reasonable enough comparison, imho. Hopefully we can soon capitalize on improvements in AI to faithfully model human biology in silico, and conduct experiments that way.
I am pessimistic about purely in silico or even in vitro methodd to tackle a problem as complex as aging rates. Improving mouse models to incorporate a high level of genetic diversity is a better first step. This is what our group of resesrchers is doing now. Results are promising and results are also highly dependent in genetics and sex.
Improving the genetic diversity of mouse models doesn't help you when a humans are far more complex, anyway. You may find a universal effect for a mouse, it's still a mouse. You're trying to fix the space shuttle by testing changes on automobiles.
Perhaps we should be looking at function levels at 70, 80, 90% of lifespan rather than looking for quantity of life.
Logistically speaking, humans tend to have a lot of disposable income at 60-70% of life expectancy. From the Enlightened Self Interest perspective, extending that zone before functional decline would not only improve society but also be profitable.
Yep, optimize healthspan not necessary lifespan. Best to do both and “rectangularize” survival functions (falling off a cliff). Lots of effort on this now.
yep, mice are burning calories much more actively than larger mammals, and if anything i'd not be surprised for the opposite result - ie. if mice on metformin die earlier from exhaustion and starvation.
Those encouraging folks to "just shave it off" fail to realize that it's so much more than a vanity issue. From an evolutionary standpoint, baldness is perceived in the female brain as a sign of poor sperm quality [0].
True, but they are also encouraging to instead invest in other parts of your body which can more than compensate for this negative effect on female humans. Muscles…
That's weird, because women these days seem to really love dogs. There's a stereotype about women loving cats (which do not normally have a strong body smell at all), but these days women seem to greatly prefer dogs over cats. I think it has something to do with the fact that dogs require far more maintenance than cats, so they basically act as surrogate children. Cats are independent and don't need to be bathed (you do have to clean their litter box, but that's about it) or walked 3x a day so you can pick up their fresh poop in your hand, so they don't take any time out of your day, or force you to adapt your schedule to theirs, the way dogs do.
I meant that a specific strong body smell in men has been shown to be attractive to a lot of women, it doesn’t specifically smell like dog, but the study also showed that men dislike this odour – unless it’s exactly theirs ;) hence me calling it “dog smell”, but it’s inaccurate.
Well it was one specific smell, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. “Old sweat that closes your throat because it’s so unbearable” is definitely not that =)
Cats are far more maintenance than dogs. I went over a decade just buying food and toys for my dog. I got a cat (a very laid back cuddle monkey) and he eats more than the dog, loads our HVAC filter with fur, requires daily cat box maintenance, and has been to the vet more times than I can remember and now has a prescription.
"Because all of the included participants were from infertile couples, this appears to be a limitation of the study..."
Pretty big limitation, and their discussion really is just there to justify publishing anyway. Both groups, bald and shaggy, may as well have been shooting blanks.
I don’t find any mention of this on the study. But even if there was you realize how insignificant that signal is compared to everything else right? From personal anecdotes to any married bald man it’s trivial to show it’s irrelevant. Like others have said work on what you can improve, like getting fit, and obviously confidence and empathy first by getting female friends and in the process realizing they are not cavewomen. If you are seriously looking at studies for what is attractive then that’s 100% the problem, not your hair.
It's totally possible to both acknowledge its something that can be surmounted or is only a single factor in attraction while also acknowledging it's almost always a negative, the same way being short, being stupid, being poor, having bad style, being fat, being awkward etc. would be.
If this works and becomes a common dental procedure I will be soooo happy. Every time I go to the dentist I ask them if anything like this is coming down the pipeline and they laugh...
"Learning to Be Me" is a masterpiece, one of the best short stories ever written. Not only is the phenomenology brilliant, but the literary skill is so good that, even though you suspect what's coming all throughout the tale, he still manages to shock you in the denouement.
You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.
It's the other side of passing the Turing test. Assuming that the machine passes, what's next?
What's next is a lot of people are fooled. Is it me or the machine that replaced me? Is it grandma, transmigrated into machineland afterlife, or is it just a fake? Does the fake get to vote and own property?
Worst possible scenario : Everybody is fooled. Everybody gets brainscraped. Everybody goes to immortal AI heaven. But actually nobody did. I won't give away what story goes with that spoiler (not Egan).
Your comment made me reminisce, I read the story a few years ago and its one of my favorite short stories by him. Such a simple concept. One beautiful piece of sci-fi horror.
> You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.
In my interpretation, Egan is trying to say that _this is already the case_.
I understood the story as a description of epiphenomenalism, only layered with sci fi concepts to make it more straightforward to digest.
From a cosmetic point of view, almost everybody exclusively focuses on the skin to counter aging, when they should be at least as concerned with bone density.
Lots of people have perfect skin, but they still look old. Why? Bone morphology. The zygomatic bone erodes, and the orbital gaps widen. The mandible degrades and pivots down and backwards (jaw rotation). Issues like resorption are currently very challenging. Skin is comparatively much easier. Also (and besides well-known interventions like collagen, retinoids, HA, and dermarolling), Epidermal and Keratinocyte Growth Factors are already very cheap, and showing much promise.
For anyone else wondering: your body is continually pulling calcium from your bones for metabolic processes. Usually it gets replaced when you consume something with calcium in it.
It makes sense to have somewhere to store extra nutrients so you can keep functioning for a long time between taking in those specific nutrients again.
Your body does this with a lot of your organs. Fat is obviously calorie storage, but muscles can also be resorbed for energy under starvation conditions (or just when they're under used). Your kidneys can resorb water from stored urine, and your intestines pull most water out of what you consume. Most neurotransmitters and hormones get recycled at various rates and turned into new molecules.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all I know of offhand.
> Animal and human studies suggest that high-frequency, low-magnitude vibration therapy improves bone strength by increasing bone formation and decreasing bone resorption.
So you could apply vibration to the head bones. Not sure about any side effects.
Indeed. Wasn't there an article just a few days ago about Navy Seals (?) suffering brain injury from being too close to artillery being fired or some such? The vibrations in the skull were thought to be the culprit.
I have been getting ads lately for an aerobic step with a vibrating motor built into it, for this very purpose. It might have been on Peacock, and if so it was during Tour de France footage.
It’s a small effect but real, and it’s passive from the patient’s standpoint and we always seem to find that to be a selling point. This research was, if I recall, originally done for NASA and studied sheep. Shake a Sheep for Science!
Bone density is definitely an adaption from resistance exercise.
I don't know any specific studies, but I would expect that the bone density improvements are in some sense systemic in that the metabolic changes that increase bone density will have spillover effects to bones not directly involved in some given movement.
With the third and last videos (space men, and man reading in the clouds), this is the first time I have found the resolution indistinguishable from real life. Even with SOTA stills from Midjourney and Stable Diffusion I was not entirely convinced. This is incredible.
I presume the subject must've been in pretty bad shape in terms of health, to assume the inherent risk of brain surgery at the micron scale. Best wishes to them, and I hope humanity can benefit from knowledge gathered with this breakthrough.
The first requirement for participating in the study:
"Have quadriplegia (limited function in all 4
limbs) due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis (ALS) and are at least 1-year
post-injury (without improvement)"
Ideally yes, but the liabilities are likely too great at this time. So better start with the "hopeless", where no harm can be done, then go up from there.
The only way to get approval to experiment on human subjects is by specifically intending the device to treat a condition, and then only testing on individuals with that condition. You can't just take volunteers off the street and start testing chemotherapy drugs on them for example - this is to avoid exploiting the poor and indigent as human lab rats.
They need to thread the needle of a condition so advanced that a brain link device would potentially restore a basic essential of life but also not so advanced that the patient can no longer give consent.
This is highly speculative, but minute 18:46 in the DevDay presentation [0] struck me as very awkward. Sam's AGI comment seemed off-script, and I don't think Satya liked it very much.
I realize "decelarating the aging clock" might be subtly different than increasing lifespan, but it's a reasonable enough comparison, imho. Hopefully we can soon capitalize on improvements in AI to faithfully model human biology in silico, and conduct experiments that way.
[0] https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-p...
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