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Sonia Poulton Abandons Large Parts of Case

I have seen a surprisingly upbeat post from Sonia Poulton about Sam Smith’s appeal against her. In fact, like so much of what she says, she is misleading her followers. To explain briefly, earlier this year Sam and I applied to strike out parts of Sonia’s case in the ongoing lawsuit between Sonia on one side, myself Sam and Darren Laverty on the other. Sam helped with both applications along with two barristers. They were heard on 1 May 2024. The first application won - part of Sonia’s case was struck out as inconsistent with an earlier witness statement. Some would call that, “lies”. Sonia did not appeal. The rest of the strike-outs failed. After taking advice from counsel, Sam appealed and got permission from Mrs Justice Steyn DBE. The appeal failed, except that the judge ordered Sonia to clarify her case in a formal statement called a Part 18 Response. In effect, she abandoned 11 of the 21 pleadings we were trying to strike out, promising not to rely on them or file evidence on t...
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Biohacking to Improve Everyone's Health Reaches Top Ten in 2nd Round of Biomarkers of Aging Competition

Biohacking to Improve Everyone's Health, the team of Biohackers intending to compete in XPRIZE Healthspan, have reached the top ten in prediction of mortality using methylation data in the second round of the Biomarkers of Aging competition. The contest aims to use data on methylation of DNA sites and other biomarkers to determine the biological age of individuals and predict outcomes such as mortality. The Biohacking team, including software developer and machine learning expert Samuel Collingwood Smith, used their own proprietary software called LearnSilver to develop their prediction models, in combination with other tools. LearnSilver is a .NET C# / C++ / CUDA software library that allows execution of complex neural networks, including recurrent networks, on consumer hardware along with efficient serialisation. The library can execute in single-threaded mode on a CPU, or multi-threaded mode and it can also leverage nVidia hardware for massively parallel operations. Sam Smit...

Biohacking Team wins prizes in medical innovation

Biohacking to Improve Everyone's Health , the team of Biohackers intending to compete in XPRIZE Healthspan, have won some early prizes in the 2024 MEDICAL AFFAIRS INNOVATION OLYMPICS #MAIO2024 . The MAIO is organised by The Medical Affairs Professional Society and sponsored by a number of leading biotech companies including Amadea Pharma . Of all of the biotech groups proposing ideas the Biohacking Team won the "high jump" the prize for the most lofty idea. The team also got the overall bronze award in Patient Centricity. John Hemming, leader of the Biohacking Team said, "I am pleased that the MAIO recognised our proposal for improving gene expression as being the most 'idealistic, lofty concept with a vision' of the varied ideas being presented at the contest. Our challenge, of course, is to refine the proposal and demonstrate that it broadly has beneficial effects in extending healthspan." These are the main two presentations at the MAIO 202...

Are some premature births caused by a average lower mitochondrial membrane potential in the baby?

When it comes to development there are a number of steps which can be quite well defined. One, of course, is death. Another is birth. Then there is sexual maturity and for some people menopause. There are plenty of papers which link precocious puberty with early menopause. There are also those which link early menopause with higher mortality and earlier age based diseases. This points to those being driven by the mRNA splicing changes and other changes in mRNA transcription primarily from the average mitochondrial membrane potential. I was wondering recently, however, about birth. Is that step potentially driven by MMP. There are a number of pieces of evidence that point to this. One is that mothers who were born prematurely are also likely to have premature children. Importantly people who are born prematurely also face health problems in their lives at an earlier stage. An overview of adult health outcomes after preterm birth " Large cohort studies have shown that ...

The Genome Rides on a Citric Acid Bicycle

I recently attended the British Society for Research on Aging annual scientific conference which was held this year in Birmingham. There were a number of interesting talks and about 45 posters were presented. This included one from me. The details in that poster can be seen on this link . One benefit of conferences which are in person is that conversations can continue after the presentations and issues can be refined through discussions either in the corridors or over food. The area I am particularly interested in is how the links between mitochondrial efficiency and the genome operate. I managed to refine my understanding of two of the aspects here. The Citric Acid Bicycle The first area I managed to refine is to understand the mechanisms that underpin citrate efflux from the mitochondria. To understand this fully it is perhaps best to consider the operation of two citric acid cycles. In fact realistically it is a Citric Acid Bicycle - as the two cycles are linked. Th...

Trudiagnostic change PACE leaderboard algorithm - was in position 40, now position 44 - does it matter?

Trudiagnostic have changed the way they handle the Rejuvenation Olympics Leaderboard algorithm. The result of this initially was that I was globally no 40 and have now dropped to 44. Trudiagnostic are a US company that get samples of blood and they look at the DNA to see which parts of the DNA have methyl groups (CH3) attached to them. These modifications to DNA are called methylation markers. DunedinPACE is an algorithm which uses DNA methylation markers in white blood cells to work out how quickly or slowly someone is aging. I had three results on this. The odd thing about the results was that whilst my epigenetic age calculated from the same methylation markers was going down, the speed at which I was aging was going up. I find this somewhat counterintuitive. It is, however, I think relevant that in a global contest my approach on biochemistry which is quite different to many other people's does seem to keep up with others working in the same area. To that extent it...

Why are babies born young?

Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin...