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Is comprehensive damage repair feasible? A debate at Undoing Aging 2019 between Vadim Gladyshev, Harvard Medical School and Aubrey de Grey, SENS Research Foundation.

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Vadim N. Gladyshev is a professor at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an expert and pioneer in antioxidant/redox biology. He is known for his characterization of the human selenoproteinencoded by 25 genes. He has conducted studies on whether organisms can acquire cellular damage from their food;the role selenium plays as a micro-nutrient with significant health benefits;In 2013 he won the NIH Pioneer Award.

Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English author and biomedical gerontologist. He is the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation and VP of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics, Inc.

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Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3rI_ysqB8I&feature=youtu.be

A new study, led by Dr. Dan Knights from the University of Minnesota (USA), has found that the gut microbiome responds more to particular foods than to combinations of nutrients and that microbiome responses to diet are personalized.

The researchers studied the impact of habitual diet on the gut microbiome in 34 subjects for 17 consecutive days. Both the fecal microbiome and the participants’ diet were sampled every day through shotgun metagenomic sequencing and daily 24-hour dietary records, respectively.

Although the relative abundance of gut microbial species showed a high variation within and between individuals, functional traits tended to remain stable across individuals. In contrast, a specific group of functions related to stress response, the conversion of nitrate to nitrogen and the conversion of formate to methane showed a high interindividual variability that did not correlate with nutrient and food intake.

Think of DNA and chances are the double helix structure comes to mind, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Another major part is mitochondrial DNA, and in plants that’s even more important – and so complex that scientists haven’t yet been able to edit the genes in there. Now a team of Japanese researchers has managed to do just that, which could help improve the genetic diversity of crops.

A vegetable-picking robot that uses machine learning to identify and harvest a commonplace, but challenging, agricultural crop has been developed by engineers.

The ‘Vegebot’, developed by a team at the University of Cambridge, was initially trained to recognise and harvest iceberg lettuce in a lab setting. It has now been successfully tested in a variety of field conditions in cooperation with G’s Growers, a local fruit and vegetable co-operative.

Although the prototype is nowhere near as fast or efficient as a human worker, it demonstrates how the use of robotics in agriculture might be expanded, even for like iceberg lettuce which are particularly challenging to harvest mechanically. The results are published in The Journal of Field Robotics.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Fifty years ago this month, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission transformed the idea of putting people on the moon from science fiction to historical fact. Not much has changed on the moon since Apollo, but if the visions floated by leading space scientists from the U.S., Europe, Russia and China come to pass, your grandchildren might be firing up lunar barbecues in 2069.

“Definitely in 50 years, there will be more tourism on the moon,” Anatoli Petrukovich, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute, said here today during the World Conference of Science Journalists. “The moon will just look like a resort, as a backyard for grilling some meat or whatever else.”

Wu Ji, former director general of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Space Science Center, agreed that moon tourism could well be a thing in 2069.

Cold Spring Harbor, NY — Cancer cells use a bizarre strategy to reproduce in a tumor’s low-energy environment; they mutilate their own mitochondria! Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) also know how this occurs, offering a promising new target for pancreatic cancer therapies.

Why would a cancer cell want to destroy its own functioning mitochondria? “It may seem pretty counterintuitive,” admits M.D.-Ph. D. student Brinda Alagesan, a member of Dr. David Tuveson’s lab at CSHL.

According to Alagesan, the easiest way to think about why cancer cells may do this is to think of the mitochondria as a powerplant. “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” she recites, recalling the common grade school lesson. And just like a traditional powerplant, the mitochondria create their own pollution.