A Research I Really Want To Be True

Someone pointed this research summary to me. It says that if we restrict our food to 20-50% of normal calories on one day and we eat till we are full the next day, we gain a lot of health benefits.

The excerpt:

"Since May 2003 we have experimented with alternate day calorie restriction, one day consuming 20-50% of estimated daily caloric requirement and the next day ad lib eating, and have observed health benefits starting in as little as two weeks, in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette's, Meniere's) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes."

If this is true, I will starve one day and go to a buffet the next day and live longer! I'm sure that after the one starving day, the food at the buffet will taste even better :-D

Memento mori?

According to Wikipedia, Memento mori may be translated as "Remember that you will die.",  a warning that is applicable to human throughout our history.

However, many people such as these people are working on making death unnecessary.   Hopefully, we will live long enough for their research to be practical.  After that we can wait for brain state backup technologies and escape from our mortal flesh eventually.

On a slightly related note, one speculation that tries to explain the Fermi's Paradox is that the aliens already uploaded their mind to other computational substrate and don't care so much to contact primitive technological societies like ours.  The uploaded minds might use little energy, can be transmitted at the speed of light, can exploit computational capacity of complex systems found in the universe, and can run at much higher speed than biological hardware, making their subjective time much faster.  Due to this time scale difference, their conversation with us might be similar to our conversation with a tree.

One More Step Toward My Cyborg Future!

This IBM's report indicates that their scientists used the 4096-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer to simulate 8 million neurons of mouse brain with 6,300 synapses per neuron at 1/10 the real-time speed.

Human brain has about 100,000 million neurons, so there is a factor of 12,500 in the number of neurons to go, and a factor of 10 for the simulation speed. Let's say we need 1,000,000 times more computing power to simulate the human brain in real time, that will take only 20 doublings in processing power to achieve. Therefore, a supercomputer in 20-30 years might be able to simulate a human brain!

Further understanding of how the states of the brain are stored in neuron configurations, and how to read the state of a living human and upload the state to the simulator would be the limiting steps in our ability to backup our brain states.

Hopefully, in the next few decades, nanotech + biotech will allow us to either repair our biological body or build a more durable artificial body for our backup brain states.

I think if I can live another 40-50 years, I will be able to upload and backup myself repeatedly to live for a really long time.

I might as well dream a little bit more. I might even download my brain to a diplodocus body with Titus in an allosaurus body and we can really walk with the dinosaurs. Maybe I can live for a while in a plesiosaur body to reduce my fear of the ocean. :-)

A Reason To Live "Forever"*

I found an interesting article about what important ideas scientists want to tell us. Sir Martin Rees said this:

"I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead — for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that exist then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Our concern with Earth's future is, understandably, focused upon the next 100 years at most — the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. But awareness of this longer time horizon, and the immense potential that human actions this century could foreclose, offers an extra motive for proper stewardship of this planet."

I hope scientists will learn about our biology and information processing fast enough to significantly extend our lives. Although I want to believe otherwise, all evidences so far tell me that I only have one life to live, so I better live a good, long one before this consciousness ceases to exist at my death. There is so much to explore and learn, so much potential in directly evolving our body and mind, and so little time to do it. But hey, if we succeed, maybe we will become something like Q!

Another two quotes that I think more people should know about are:

"I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant." -- Richard Dawkins

"Science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries. Science increases the store of wonder and mystery in the world; it does not erode it. The myth that science gets rid of mysteries, started by the Romantic poets, was well nailed by Albert Einstein —whose thought experiments about relativity are far more otherworldly, elusive, thrilling, and baffling than anything dreamt up by poets.

Isaac Newton showed us the mysteries of deep space, Charles Darwin showed us the mysteries of deep time, and Francis Crick and James D Watson showed us the mysteries of deep encoding. To get rid of those insights would be to reduce the world's stock of awe." -- Matt Ridley
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*"Forever" because it's not really forever as in infinite years, just a few centuries to a few billion years :-)

ถ้าเรายังไม่ตายใน 30-40 ปี เราอาจจะอยู่ได้อีกเป็นร้อยปี*

ความรู้เกี่ยวกับการทำงานของร่างกายเพิ่มขึ้นเรื่อยๆทุกวันๆ ผมหวังว่าอย่างน้อยผมจะไม่ใช่มนุษย์ที่ตายเป็นคนสุดท้ายก่อนที่งานวิจัยเหล่านี้จะทำให้คนเลือกที่จะอยู่สัก 100-1,000 ปีได้ (ถ้าเลือกได้ผมว่า 350 ปีน่าจะกำลังดี จะได้ดูว่าเรา colonize space และ สร้าง time-machine/warp drive ได้ไหม แล้วก็ จริงๆแล้วเราอยู่ใน "simulation" แบบ It-From-Bit หรือเปล่า)

ค้นหาสัญญาณที่ทำให้ร่างกายสร้างอวัยวะใหม่ (ในไก่):
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/scientist-regrow-chicken-wing-12031.html

อวัยวะเต่าไม่แสดงอาการแก่:
Turtle Link at the NY Times

ปลูกฟันแท้ใหม่ (ในหนู):
http://www.physorg.com/news83345072.html

ระบบภูมิคุ้มกันเสื่อมอย่างไร:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/001057.php

การกำจัดเซลไม่พึงประสงค์ด้วยออโต้เฟจี (autophagy = self-eating)
http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2006/10/18/autophagy-on-the-brain/

รักษาเบาหวานประเภทที่หนึ่ง (Type-1 Diabetes) ในหนู:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061126115521.htm

ซ่อมหนูตาบอด:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061108154556.htm

พิมพ์อวัยวะด้วย Ink-jet Printer (หนูอีกแล้ว):
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/asfc-mab120406.php

วัคซีนสำหรับมะเร็งปอดในหนู:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061108101513.htm

สร้างสเต็มเซลจากเซลไข่:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061215091048.htm
http://www.technologyreview.com/BioTech/17902/

The Immortal Question:
http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Document.aspx?id=B9048E8D-5E75-4A4E-ABEF-40826A3215C0 ดู Aubrey de Gray พูด 20 นาที ที่นี่ หรือ ดาวน์โหลดได้ที่นี่

etc., etc., etc.

เราควรจะสร้างอนุสาวรีย์ให้สัตว์ที่สละชีวิตในการเรียนรู้ของเรานะ

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*That's my hope anyway.

Artificial Liver Grown From Stem Cells! (Well, a mini version anyway)

My dream of turning myself into a cyborg and live a few centuries (or a few millenia) is one step closer! Mwahahahaha! Mwahahahaha!

From the article:

British scientists have grown the world's first artificial liver from stem cells in a breakthrough that will one day provide entire organs for transplant. The technique that created the 'mini-liver', currently the size of a one pence piece, will be developed to create a full-size functioning liver.

Here is an estimate of the timeframe:

Within five years, pieces of artificial tissue could be used to repair livers damaged by injury, disease, alcohol abuse and paracetamol overdose. And then, in just 15 years' time, entire liver transplants could take place using organs grown in a lab.

I guess I would double the estimate to 30 years as the time that I must keep my liver working before I can get a new replacement then.

Now, we need a good way to back up my brain state, a good processor to run my brain image, and an easily repaired body, and my dream would be fulfilled.