Is this a new frontier in personal privacy or is it just a handy tool for criminals? (via Freethink)
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Category: biotech/medical
The researchers, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, are calling for senolytic drugs to make the leap from animal research to human clinical trials. They outlined potential clinical trial scenarios in a paper published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society on Monday.
“This is one of the most exciting fields in all of medicine or science at the moment,” said Dr. James Kirkland, director of the Kogod Center on Aging at the Mayo Clinic and lead author of the new paper.
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Senolytic compounds hold promise to reverse aging in humans. Researcher James Kirkland publishes a list of senolytics in a review published yesterday. Two of the senolytics are currently in clinical trials. [Cover photo: Can Senolytic Drugs Reverse Aging? Credit: Getty Images.]
Imagine if you were able to reverse aging and bring your body back to its original health and vigor.
Researchers have already discovered a group of drugs called senolytics which perform this miraculous transformation in mice and are testing them in humans as we speak.
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UCLA scientists working with middle-aged fruit flies say they were able to improve the insects’ health while markedly slowing down their aging process. The team thinks its technique could eventually help delay the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and other age-related diseases in humans.
The researchers zeroed in on mitochondria, which often become damaged with age. When cells can’t eliminate the damaged mitochondria, they can become toxic and contribute to a wide range of age-related diseases, said David Walker, Ph.D., a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology, and the study’s senior author.
Dr. Walker and his colleagues found that as fruit flies reach middle age—about one month into their two-month lifespan—their mitochondria change from their original small, round shape.
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Why is it that a cut on your finger seems to last for days, but a cut in your mouth is usually healed by morning? There are a lot of factors at play, but 2017 research found one intriguing answer that could benefit more than just your mouth: there’s a molecule in your saliva that can help grow new cells.
Scientists already knew that saliva contains a peptide called histatin-1 that fights off bacteria and aids in wound healing. For a 2017 study published in the FASEB Journal, Chilean researchers set out to discover exactly how the little molecule helped heal wounds. In a series of experiments, they added histatin-1 to chicken embryo cells and several types of human blood-vessel cells, and watched what happened.
There are many steps that have to happen for a wound to heal. New skin cells have to form and migrate from the wound’s edges little by little to cover the whole thing like a Band-Aid. Active cells called fibroblasts move in, too, helping to produce collagen, elastin, and other proteins that the new skin will need. The body also starts regrowing blood vessels, which boosts blood flow to the wound and makes it heal even faster.
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The robots are coming.
Actually, they’re already here. Machines are learning to do tasks they’ve never done before, from locating and retrieving goods from a shelf to driving cars to performing surgery. In manufacturing environments, robots can place an object with millimeter precision over and over, lift hundreds of pounds without getting tired, and repeat the same action constantly for hundreds of hours.
But let’s not give robots all the glory just yet. A lot of things that are easy for humans are still hard or impossible for robots. A three-year-old child, for example, can differentiate between a dog and a cat, or intuitively scoot over when said dog or cat jumps into its play space. A computer can’t do either of these simple actions.
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Research led by The University of Western Australia has discovered a new, simple and less expensive way of growing human stem cells.
Using hydrogel, a gel with a gradient that can be used to mimic the stiffness of human body tissues, the researchers were able to generate positive outcomes for the growth of stem cells.
Dr Yu Suk Choi from UWA’s School of Human Sciences at The University of Western Australia led the international collaboration which also included researchers from the University of California, San Diego (USA) and Max Planck Institute for Medical Research (Germany).
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The secret to a long life? A protein that acts as a cellular ‘time machine’ is found to extend the lifespan of fruit flies by 20%.
Biologists have turned back the clock on ageing in the cells of fruit flies, by increasing levels of a protein called Drp1.
This cellular time machine was found to lengthen the life-span of the insects by between 10 and 20 per cent.
Experts hope to develop drugs to mimic this effect in humans with age-related diseases including Alzheimer’s, extending people’s life expectancy and giving them more healthy years towards the end of their lives.
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