The February 2013 issue of Cryonics magazine features an upgraded presentation of Alcor’s membership data, including a complete breakdown of US membership by state and international membership by country. The editor further weighs in on the new membership statistics and discusses what has changed since the last time Alcor published a state-by-state overview. Alcor staff member Michael Perry reviews Michael… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] By Laurence Mueller, Cassandra Rauser, and Michael Rose, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Book Review by R. Michael Perry The book here reviewed is a technical study on the effects of aging, mainly using fruit flies as a model, since these creatures are short-lived so that research involving many generations is feasible. The findings appear to have… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] By Chana de Wolf This is the first entry in a new series of short articles about neuroscience and its implications for the field of human cryopreservation and life extension. In this article I discuss the relationship of the brain to consciousness and knowledge acquisition before venturing into more specific and practical topics What is consciousness? Most of… Read more »
The January 2013 issue of Cryonics magazine contains a detailed report of our successful 2012 Alcor-40 conference, including a summary of the presentations of all speakers. This issue also features an extensive review of chemopreservation as an alternative to cryopreservation by Cryonics magazine editor Aschwin de Wolf. Among the topics discussed are the necessity of functional assays to evaluate progress… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] By Chana de Wolf In honor of its 40th anniversary, Alcor held its first conference in 5 years on October 19-21, 2012, in Scottsdale, Arizona. The program featured a wide variety of topics for presentation, with themes regarding how to improve the odds of a successful cryopreservation and theories of aging and their implications for stopping or reversing… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] By Aschwin de Wolf Executive Summary Scientific and practical considerations strongly support cryopreservation rather than chemopreservation for the stabilization of critically ill patients. Technology for achieving solid state chemopreservation of brains larger than a mouse brain does not yet exist. Chemical fixation is irreversible without very advanced technologies. Chemical fixation permits no functional feedback or development pathway toward… Read more »
In the November-December issue of Cryonics magazine former Alcor President Michael Darwin takes aim at the (in his eyes) mistaken idea that preservation of the exact concentration and location of neurotransmitters is important for long-term memory and identity, Stephen Bridge reviews Stephen Cave’s recent book “Immortality: the Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization,” and editor Aschwin de… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] As evidence is emerging that contemporary vitrification technologies are adequate to preserve identity-critical information in the brain, critics of cryonics have tried to raise the bar by postulating that the neuroanatomical basis of memory is so fragile and transient that it cannot be captured by technologies that can successfully preserve the connectome. The online exchange that gave rise… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] By Aschwin de Wolf The cryonics organizations Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have taken great care to correct some of the persistent myths about cryonics. With so much widespread misinformation being circulated in the media it seems trivial to pay attention to some of the misconceptions that some people who are sympathetic to cryonics hold. But the price… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Researchers have learned how a synthetic molecule destroys complexes that induce allergic responses—a discovery that could lead to the development of highly potent, rapidly acting interventions for a host of acute allergic reactions. The study, published online Oct. 28 in Nature, was led by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of Bern, Switzerland. The… Read more »
