Longevity extension in Drosophila through gut-brain communication

Aging and chronic disease development are multifactorial processes involving the cumulative effects of metabolic distress, inflammation, oxidative stress and mitochondrial dynamics. Recently, variations in the gut microbiota have been associated with age-related phenotypes and probiotics have shown promise in managing chronic disease progression. In this study, novel probiotic and synbiotic formulations are shown to combinatorially extend longevity in male Drosophila melanogaster through mechanisms of gut-brain-axis communication with implications in chronic disease management. Both the probiotic and synbiotic formulations rescued markers of metabolic stress by managing insulin resistance and energy regulatory pathways. Both formulations also ameliorated elevations in inflammation, oxidative stress and the loss of mitochondrial complex integrity. In almost all the measured pathways, the synbiotic formulation has a more robust impact than its individual components insinuating its combinatorial effect. The concomitant action of the gut microbiota on each of the key risk factors of aging and makes it a powerful therapeutic tool against neurodegeneration, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and other age-related chronic diseases.

via Longevity extension in Drosophila through gut-brain communication | Scientific Reports

How Civilization Started

The world has indeed got richer, but any such shift in morals and values is hard to detect. Money and the value system around its acquisition are fully intact. Greed is still good.

The study of hunter-gatherers, who live for the day and do not accumulate surpluses, shows that humanity can live more or less as Keynes suggests. It’s just that we’re choosing not to. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most valuable thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants, whose proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted meat is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . . We can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material inequality were not tolerated.

”This egalitarian impulse, Suzman suggests, is central to the hunter-gatherer’s ability to live a life that is, on its own terms, affluent, but without abundance, without excess, and without competitive acquisition. The secret ingredient seems to be the positive harnessing of the general human impulse to envy. As he says, “If this kind of egalitarianism is a precondition for us to embrace a post-labor world, then I suspect it may prove a very hard nut to crack.” There’s a lot that we could learn from the oldest extant branch of humanity, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to put the knowledge into effect. A socially positive use of envy—now, that would be a technology almost as useful as fire.

Source: How Civilization Started | The New Yorker

A Hyperintelligent Superfluid

The child’s mind arises from these explorations, we shall renew them in adulthood in ways unseen in human history, to ends better than we have thus far been able or willing to dream together.

Source: A Hyperintelligent Superfluid – The Pivot – Medium

Of, for, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons

Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect.

Source: Of, for, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons | SpringerLink

Dead World

Source: Dead World (by Paul J. Ennis) | Three Pound Brain

The Ontology of Non-Being

Source: Postnihilistic Speculations: The Ontology of Non-Being | Techno Occulture

Burning Man Suicide and Sacred Self Sacrifice

Then in my lunch break I sat down to read further in my current literary indulgence, “The Old Sod: The life and inner work of William G Gray” and came across this quote…

“There seems to be a psychological urge in young men to make them deliberately risk their own lives for seemingly no reason, but I believe there is a deep-down instinct to do so in order that the Gods (or Goddess) will have the opportunity to select the best for breeding purposes. In other words, if the Fates spare their offered lives, the they are meant to go on living and are fit to breed. If their lives are taken then, then they were never meant to mate and carry on their race. Thus it is an atavistic impulse bred into our genes from the very dawn of our civilisation. After they become older and have probably started a family, the instinct alters into one of wanting to live so as to care for that family until it can look after itself. That was why the act of sacred self-sacrifice on the altars of any Temple had to be absolutely voluntary in order to be valid.” ~ William G Gray

Source: Burning Man Suicide and Sacred Self Sacrifice — Steemit

How families and feelings built human culture

The evolution of human culture can be explained, not by the size of our brains, but by the quality of our relationships

Source: How families and feelings built human culture | Aeon Essays

Source: The Languages of Tékumel | Tekumel Collecting

Source: A Design School for Planetary Collapse – Age of Awareness – Medium