The Unmentioned Trade-Offs in Life Extention

Now it is not that the cell biologists can’t point to experiments which seem to fit their views, as is common in natural science. (After all, the Earth’s Moon does indeed have a geocentric orbit.) Good colleagues of mine like Robert Reis are able to produce nematode worms that live ten times longer than their unmutated controls, if they use ingenious genetic and environmental manipulation. But nematodes have well-developed physiological machinery for sustaining states of metabolic arrest,...

 A Worm's Mind in a Lego Robot Body

The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is tiny and only has 302 neurons. These have been completely mapped and the OpenWorm project is working to build a complete simulation of the worm in software. One of the founders of the OpenWorm project, Timothy Busbice, has taken the connectome and implemented an object oriented neuron program. The model is accurate in its connections and makes use of UDP packets to fire neurons. If two neurons have three synaptic connections then when ...