New blood test shows how long you will live

Note, this will only give the estimated genetic potential of your lifespan, it will NOT tell you when you die but it's still pretty cool.

A controversial test capable of revealing just how long you have to live is set to hit the market in Britain within the year. The test measures a person's telomeres which are the structures found on the tips of chromosomes and researchers believe that these telomeres are crucial indicators of the speed in which a body is ageing.

The test was developed by Maria Blasco from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre. Blasco’s company, Life Length, is in negotiations with medical diagnostic businesses throughout Europe in order to collect blood samples and market the tests.

The test works by measuring the length of the and is able to then determine the biological age of a person. Research shows that individuals with shorter than normal telomeres have a shorter span than those individuals with longer telomeres. The test, however, is not capable of giving an exact length of life in terms of months or years.

 

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US astronomers launch search for alien life on 86 planets

Nice, now that we know where some plants actually are it's about time they actually started listening to them instead of random sections of space... although I doubt we will find anything unless a civilization specifically have set up radio beacons as extra-planetary radio broadcast didn't even last long here on Earth as it was mostly just an accident/byproduct of transmitting at high powers until Satellites came along.

 

A massive radio telescope in rural West Virginia has begun listening for signs of alien life on 86 possible Earth-like planets, US astronomers said Friday.

The giant dish began this week pointing toward each of the 86 planets -- culled from a list of 1,235 possible planets identified by NASA's Kepler -- and will gather 24 hours of data on each one.

"It's not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they're very good places to look for ET," said University of California at Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion.

The mission is part of the SETI project, which stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, launched in the mid 1980s.

Last month the announced it was shuttering a major part of its efforts -- a 50 million dollar project with 42 telescope dishes known as the (ATA) -- due to a five million dollar .

 

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Man Officially Cured of HIV

I mean the title kinda says it all... this is awesome, now to develop a repeatable cure from this that isn't so dangerous and not an accident.

 

For the first time, a man has been declared officially cured of HIV. The remedy may nearly have killed him, but it opens a door—just a crack—to hope that we may someday kill off the scourge for good.

Strangely enough, the diagnosis that most concerned Timothy Ray Brown in 2007 was acute myeloid leukemia. HIV has been increasingly thought of as a manageable disease, though certainly a terribly burdensome one. What brought the 42-year old Brown under the care of Germany's Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin hospital was the more immediate threat his cancer posed.

The treatment Brown underwent was aggressive: chemotherapy that destroyed the majority of his immune cells. Total body irradiation. Finally, a risky stem-cell transplant that nearly a third of patients don't survive—but that appears to have completely cured Brown of HIV.

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FBI tracking device found; disassembled

[ifixit] has apparently grown tired of tearing apart Apple’s latest gizmos, and their latest display of un-engineering has a decidedly more federal flair. You may have heard about Yasir Afifi’s discovery of a FBI-installed tracking device on his car back in October of last year. Apparently, the feds abandoned a similar device with activist Kathy Thomas. Wired magazine managed to get their hands on it, and gave it to ifixit to take apart. There’ve even posted a video.

The hardware itself isn’t that remarkable, it’s essentially a GPS receiver designed before the turn of the century paired with a short range wireless transceiver. The whole device is powered by a set of D-sized lithium-thionyl chloride batteries which should be enough juice to run the whole setup for another few decades–long enough to outlast any reasonable expectations of privacy, with freedom and justice for all.