Read moreNo single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare — only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.
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The so-called Methuselah genes — named after the biblical patriarch who lived to 969 — are thought to include ADIPOQ, which is found in about 10% of young people but in nearly 30% of people living past 100. The CETP gene and the ApoC3 gene are found in 10% of young people, but in about 20% of centenarians.
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“If we know which genes control longevity then we can find out what proteins they make and then target them with drugs. That makes it possible to slow down ageing. We need to reclassify it as a disease rather than as a benign, natural process,” he said.
Author: m1k3y
Read more“I won’t dumb down Neuromancer,” he says. “There would be no point in making that version. We’ve seen things like that before. What is exciting about William Gibson’s vision in 2010 is how prescient it was. He really anticipated the post-human world. And I think we are entering that world very quickly. So, what draws me to the book – and what I think the film will offer that we haven’t seen before in the cinema – is an in-depth exploration of our growing relationships to the cybernetic universe. If Splice is about the evolution of our bodies, then Neuromancer will be about the evolution of our minds.”
Is Gibson involved in the creative process? And will the film be a blockbuster, or more of a purist science-fiction thing?
“Gibson is involved, and yes, he has been immensely supportive and I’m actively developing the script with his consultation,” says Natali. He tells me he is hoping that the success of Nolan’s film will help convince studios to greenlight a big-budget Neuromancer, but one which maintains the book’s cerebral impact. “The movie would not work without that kind of cash, and I wouldn’t want to do it,” he says. “I think with the advent of Inception there is now an example out there of how that would be possible.”
Read moreThe attack on the hydroelectric station was the most dramatic outburst of violence in the Russian Caucasus in recent months. Although Kabardino-Balkariya sees less violence than nearby Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, the republic suffers from persistent tensions stemming from poverty and harsh police actions toward worship by unsanctioned Muslim sects.
Read moreMy notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changed his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it, I can’t plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don’t know what his character is until I get acquainted with him.
The Dose is back!
My man in Budapest, Damage, and his team of cybernetically enhanced monkeys have brought their wicked cyberculture magazine The Dose back from the dead: THE DOSE magazine – Issue 3 (Paris) TEASER http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=34600135&access_key=key-s9rq9g70gvw2rv015xc&page=1&viewMode=book It’s only 4EUR for the digital download. So snazz up your iPad with some euro-cyberpunk, why doncha.
Read more "The Dose is back!"
In the six-week pilot for the promotion, more than 100,000 in virtual Farm Cash was redeemed using the stickers, which appeared on 25 different Green Giant produce items. The promotion was launched in Target Fresh Grocery and SuperTarget stores first, but was expanded to stores nationwide as a result of the pilot promotion success.
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FarmVille, which has 65 million users and 20 million who play daily, has perhaps finally reached the mainstream by getting inside our grocery stores and refrigerators. Recently, we learned that Google is reportedly partnering with FarmVille game-maker Zynga to launch a hub for social online games after investing some $100 to $200 million in the company. And one of Zynga’s newest social games, FrontierVille, recently passed the 20 million user mark.
(via FarmVille Cash Invades Supermarkets Nationwide)
Read moreRead moreRussia is building a new spaceport to enhance the growth of its commercial space industry and aims to launch unmanned flights from it by 2015. The country is pumping investments worth $800 million into the new site which will be smaller than its current launch site of Baikonur that it rents from Kazakhstan and will have state-of-the-art launch pads, research facilities and a modern residential complex. Russia’s space officials say that the future spaceport is planned mostly for civilian launches and that the new cosmodrome will ensure stability of the Russian space industry by setting it up on its soil and will foster the development of its private space industry. The country also plans to build a new generation of spacecraft to be used for interplanetary flights
Read moreAny theory of time travel has to confront the devastating “grandfather paradox,” in which a traveler jumps back in time and kills his grandfather, which prevents his own existence, which then prevents the murder in the first place, and so on.
One model, put forth in the early 1990s by Oxford physicist David Deutsch, can allow inconsistencies between the past a traveler remembers and the past he experiences. So a person could remember killing his grandfather without ever having done it. “It has some weird features that don’t square with what we thought time travel might work out as,” Lloyd says.
In contrast, Lloyd prefers a model of time travel that explicitly forbids these inconsistencies. This version, posted at arXiv.org, is called a post-selected model. By going back and outlawing any events that would later prove paradoxical in the future, this theory gets rid of the uncomfortable idea that a time traveler could prevent his own existence. “In our version of time travel, paradoxical situations are censored,” Lloyd says.
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For instance, a bullet-maker would be inordinately more likely to produce a defective bullet if that very bullet was going to be used later to kill a time traveler’s grandfather, or the gun would misfire, or “some little quantum fluctuation has to whisk the bullet away at the last moment,” Lloyd says. In this version of time travel, the grandfather, he says, is “a tough guy to kill.”
“The discovery improves our knowledge of this species, but we need to focus our efforts on the conservation and restoration of the remaining montane forest (a high density forest) where this species still exists,” conservation biologist Dr. Craig Turner of the Zoological Society of London said in a press release. “Currently this accounts for less than one percent of the land area of Sri Lanka.” (via First pictures of the primate thought to be extinct)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 