High posting volume today. I just find it remarkable that in the last 2 weeks I've seen several incredible breakthrough level stories on health and life extension.

Today sees this story on understanding how caloric restriction works which will appear in Nature. We've been wondering about this for a while, obviously I'm not the sort of person who would have an easy time following caloric restriction. Some people have wondered if Resveratrol might mimic the actions of CR, but this shows we're coming to a much deeper understanding of it.

Yesterday I learned that we have misunderstood death and in particular how to revive the recently dead. New research suggests that when the blood stops flowing, the cells go into a hibernation that might last for hours. They don't die after 4 minutes of ischemia the way people have commonly thought. In fact, this theory suggests, the thing that kills patients we attempt to revive is the sudden inflow of oxygen we provide for revival. It seems to trigger a sort of "bug" in the [[w:mitochondria], triggering apoptosis. As we learn to restore oxygen in a way that doesn't do this, especially at cool temperatures, it may be possible to revive the "dead" an hour later, which has all sorts of marvelous potential for both emergency care and cryonics.

Last week we were told of an absolutely astounding new drug which treats all sorts of genetic disorders. A pill curing all those things sounds like a miracle. It works by altering the ribosome so that it ignores certain errors in the DNA which normally make it abort, causing complete absence of an important protein. If the errors are minor, the slightly misconstructed protein is still able to do its job. As an analogy, this is like having parity memory and disabling the parity check in a computer. It turns out parity errors are quite rare, so most of the time this works fine. When a parity check fails the whole computer often aborts, which is the right move in the global scale -- you don't want to risk corrupting data or not knowing of problems -- but in a human being, aborting the entire person due to a parity check is a bit extreme from the individualistic point of view.

These weren't even all the big medical stories of the past week. There have been cancer treatments and more, along with a supercomputer approaching the power of a mouse brain.