Ideas: January 2025 Release
THE MOTIVATION
The ideas section is a place to offload and share various ideas I’ve come up. Although these are only the ideas that have already been implemented, tested, something I’m not interested in doing, or technically incomplete (meaning there’s various technical progress that needs to be accomplished before it’s applicable), however, it has definitely been conceived by me independently. Then there’s the secret ideas that I can’t quite reveal yet because I want to develop it first or because it maybe patentable and I want to protect my ability to patent it and open source it globally. Overall, these ideas serve to share the kind of practical imagination I have but also to share the journey into the future:
Theories of aging
I believe aging is evolutionarily favored, but in a particular way. First aging is the trade off between genomic-stability/long-life vs evolution. The more stable your genome, the fewer mutations, the less epigenetic aging, and the longer you live, but the less you’ll evolve. Or another way to put it, if you had an organism that had very high mutation rates, it wouldn’t live very long but would evolve quickly; whereas if you had a organism that had very low mutation rates, it would live much longer but wouldn’t evolve very fast. That’s why when animals find a very stable protective niche, they live longer because then they don’t need to evolve; while living longer still evolved even with more genomic stability since it provides a very strong selective benefit to be able to have more children over their lifespan. And the research backs this idea, it was found that the somatic mutation rate of a species is inversely correlated with lifespan meaning the more basal-level mutations there were the shorter the lifespan and vice versa. Second, aging speeds up the evolutionary cycles kind of like planned obsolescence, which was already published here, but here’s the gist of it. There’s an evolutionary advantage to aging, by making individuals age, it makes room for their offspring who could be better adapted to their environment. It fits alongside the disposable soma theory where as long as the organism can reproduce what happens to the main body afterwards doesn’t matter; but not only does it not matter, it’s good for evolution. And again animals in a safe protective niche live longer because they don’t have the evolutionary pressure requiring faster evolutionary cycles and therefore live longer. Plus it explains how a single mutated gene in C. elegans allowed it to double it’s lifespan; why wasn’t this already evolved by evolution, because population wise it was evolutionarily disadvantageous. A key experiment I want to run to verify this is to run an ecological study where long lived yeast are competing against short lived yeast on the same petri dish in the face of evolutionary pressure like changes in resources, pH, temperature, etc, and see which population wins out.
Finally I believe aging is in part a epigenetically heritable stress response to damage for planned demolition. This is because OSK factors would not be able to revert old cells back to the youthful cells (to the point where you can create a healthy mouse from the youthful IPSCs) if the aging damage was random. It is in response to multiple sources of damage like DNA damage (seen from experiments with ICE mice, which have repairable DNA breaks induced in their genome or the paper that described how somatic mutation rates are inversely related to lifespan), but also other damage like mitochondrial activity or nutrient sensing. The Hovath clock is a measure of this epigenetically heritable stress response, since it measures the common epigenetic changes across cells over increasing age. And there needs to be a way of reversing this stress response in preparation for the next generation of the organism, which is why OSK, pluripotent master transcription regulators induced in the early stages of the embryo, reverses it. The purpose of this aging stress response is to either prevent cellular decoherence or cancer. Cellular decoherence is when cells in the same organism evolve away from each other thus making them unable to function as a whole (in terms of DNA damage but also other forms of damage like mitochondrial damage). And cancer is just a variant of cellular decoherence where a cell evolved to the point of uncontrolled growth. And there’s evidence of this, a paper used the Horvath epigenetic clock to check the age of cancer cells, and found across all considered cancer types significant age acceleration with an average of 36 years. A further experiment could take regular cells and cells aged via ICE method, then knock out specific tumor suppressors to turn them into cancerous cells, then inject them into mice of various ages to observe survival rates with the expectation that the younger the mouse and the older the cancer the better the survival rates.
I think there’s likely not a single reason why organisms age, but it’s all these different forces put together sum up to what we see as aging.
Wearable sleep timer
Instead of a dumb sleep timer that just turns off after a certain amount of time, it can be connected to your smartwatch and turns off when you actually fall asleep.
Lawn care robot
So not just a robot that cuts the grass automatically, but can intelligently plant seeds, apply fertilizer or water. Completely within grasp but just not implemented yet.
Modernizing libraries
Physical books are a relic at this point, you can’t google search a physical book and find out exactly what you need from it. The space should be reassigned into coworking spaces, maker spaces, and meeting rooms. This will also turn what was once a money sink into a revenue stream. WeWork charges very high fees and is still successful at their business model. Imagine that applied to all the libraries we have.
Emergency call Hook ins
Apple/Google should allow app creators to hook into when you call 911, so that they can do things like alert certain people, set off an alarm, etc.
Dog Aging paradox
Why is it that when we domesticated wolves, the smaller we made them, the longer they live? We domesticated them over a relatively short time period and the small dogs now live twice as long as big ones. It’s not like small animals universally live longer like smaller humans don’t live longer than normal sized ones. And when domesticating wolves, I don’t think we selected for lifespan either.
Bed time yoga
Stretches you can do in bed to help you fall asleep faster
Metal detector MRI Safety
Combine metal detector with MRI so that it doesn’t turn on if it detects metal on the person or even maybe metal around it.
Real time online dating
Chat roulette style dating app where you fill out a portfolio, then you’re shown other people’s portfolio you match with, and decide whether to video chat with them or not for 5 minutes. It’s a real time web speed dating app. It could be setup so that you had to spend at least five minutes with each person before you can see the next person. From an economics perspective, a good dating app could boost populations, happiness, and output.
Seeing perspectives
To get an idea of someone’s perspective about other people, ask them to describe movie/TV characters, which is a neutral topic rather than gossip.
3D Camera green screens
Using 3D cameras instead of green screening to separate foreground from background.
Parachute Rotational dampener
Imagine if a parachute had an rotational dampeners through gyroscopes that would physically prevent you from tumbling through the air. Could be a life-saving idea.
iPhone faceid aesthetic
When you lock an app behind FaceID, to unlock it, it gives an ugly grey text box that says “FaceID required to unlock <insert app>”. Given how useful it is to further secure some apps and how likely the feature is used, it can be given more treatment to make it look better.
Updated Soldier glasses
For the military, eyeglasses/sunglasses should be more like (maybe ski) goggles with sides cut out for ventilation and visibility. this way you don’t need to constantly keep pushing it up the bridge of your nose. At least while deployed.
Gun perspective
Now I’m neutral about guns leaning to more democratic position, but I see the gun argument is kind of like the tradeoff between privacy and security. The more privacy you give up to the government, the more secure you are, but the power is all in the government. The more guns you give up to the government, the more secure you are, but the power is all in the government. People especially those on the right feel that’s too much of a monopoly on power and therefore a dictatorship.
Sirutins
Double strand breaks have epigenetics that lead to an unpacked DNA (via histone acetylation) to fix the DNA break. Once it’s fixed, the acetylation is supposed to be removed. So when this deacetylation process is not 100%, there’ll be leftover acetyl groups on the histones contributing to an unpacked phenotype. This could be what leads to a more globally unpacked phenotype with age and why overexpressing sirtuins (a histone deacetylase) improves lifespan. This can be assessed experimentally by comparing aged cells vs youthful cells. And overall, in the normal functioning of the genome opening and closing DNA could result in leftover marks that contribute together to increased age.