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Category: health

Wearable fitness devices could help you with your personal longevity strategy.

NEW YORK — Activity monitors could improve our health and extend our lives — if only we could be motivated to use them. Those are the conclusions of two new studies about the promise and perils of relying on fitness trackers to measure and guide how we move.

The monitors, which are expected to be a popular holiday gift again this year, can generally track our steps, speed, stance (sitting or not), distance, energy expenditure and heart rate. The absolute accuracy of these numbers, however, is somewhat suspect, with past studies finding errors in many of the monitors’ measurements. But the inaccuracies are usually consistent, the studies show, so the trackers can reliably indicate how our movements change from day to day.

The broader problem with activity monitors has been that we have not known whether the information they generate actually relates directly to our health. We have not had proof that what most trackers tell us is healthy actually is.

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You get out what you put in.

You are what you eat, the old saying goes, but why is that so? Researchers have known for some time that diet affects the balance of microbes in our bodies, but how that translates into an effect on the host has not been understood. Now, research in mice is showing that microbes communicate with their hosts by sending out metabolites that act on histones—thus influencing gene transcription not only in the colon but also in tissues in other parts of the body. The findings publish November 23 in Molecular Cell.

“This is the first of what we hope is a long, fruitful set of studies to understand the connection between the microbiome in the gut and its influence on host health,” says John Denu, a professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the study’s senior authors. “We wanted to look at whether the gut microbiota affect epigenetic programming in a variety of different tissues in the host.” These tissues were in the proximal colon, the liver, and fat .

In the study, the researchers first compared germ-free mice with those that have active gut microbes and discovered that gut microbiota alter the host’s epigenome in several tissues. Next, they compared mice that were fed a normal chow diet to mice fed a Western-type diet—one that was low in complex carbohydrates and fiber and high in fat and simple sugars. Consistent with previous studies from other researchers, they found that the of mice fed the normal chow diet differed from those fed the Western-type diet.

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Longevity a challenge or an opportunity?

This autumn, The Economist Events will bring global leaders from business, finance and health care together with policymakers to explore the opportunities of an ageing world.

Together they will discuss how best to adapt financial products and realign business and public policies in ways that will drive economic growth and mitigate problems that ageing societies could otherwise bring.

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Terahertz (THz) radiation is used today most prominently for security screening at the airport. It’s the machine you stand in with your hands up as it swings its scanning arms in front and behind you. In medicine, terahertz imaging has the potential to help diagnoze certain types of cancer and to monitor a variety of health parameters to aid in assessment of overall health. Because of the extremely short length of terahertz waves, this imaging modality has a lot of limitations, including shallow penetration into tissues, and that prevents it from being used more widely. Yet, since it’s non-ionising, it’s probably safe and may even replace dangerous X-rays for some applications.

Currently, terahertz imaging is very poor at scanning curved surfaces even though it can peer a few millimeters deep into some tissues. To overcome this, researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a flexible and even wearable terahertz scanner that can image curved 3D surfaces such as our skin.

Made of 23 carbon nanotube detectors that work as a unified imaging array, their device can be wrapped around a finger, for example. Because carbon nanotubes are able to absorb a wide range of terahertz radiation, there’s no need for planar antennas.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJSCYvFk6r4

A quick dash of Aubrey to remind us of the goal and the importance of research.

Aubrey believes ageing is a serious issue, not only because people die of old age, but because it causes suffering. He discusses the fact that many diseases including chronic cancer, are the result of ageing and that by tackling ageing of cells, we can address many of the issues associated with poor health. To find out more about Aubrey and the SENS Research Foundation visit: http://www.sens.org/

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Fancy a bit of cheese?

(Medical Xpress)—A large team of researchers with members from several Europeans countries and the U.S. has found that mice fed a compound called spermidine lived longer than ordinary mice and also had better cardiovascular heath. In their paper published in the journal Nature Medicine, the researchers describe experiments they carried out with the compound and mice, what they found and why they believe the compound might provide benefits for humans.

Prior research has found that ingestion of spermidine—which was first discovered in semen samples, hence its name—led to longer lifespans in simple organisms such as fruit flies, yeast and roundworms. In this new study, the researchers sought to find out if the same would prove true for more complex creatures.

The researchers chose mice as their target, feeding some groups water with spermidine mixed in, while other groups received plain water. After observing the rodents over the course of their lifespans, the researchers discovered that those who had been given spermidine lived longer than those who had not—even if the supplement was not given to them until middle age. Closer examination of the rodents revealed that those given the supplement also had better heart function and lower . They also found that rats fed a high-salt diet, which causes , had lower pressure readings when given spermidine.

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Heart disease prevention measures have made some impact on mortality rates. Looking after your heart is absolutely critical for your longevity plan.

Despite the rising proportion of the older population who choose to be overweight or obese, risk of heart disease has declined somewhat in past few decades. This outcome can be attributed to prevention in the sense of at least some people taking better care of their health by specifically targeting measures such as blood pressure and blood lipid levels, coupled with prevention in the sense of treatments such as statins that also reliably influence these measures. Increased blood pressure with age, or hypertension, directly impacts risk of cardiovascular disease and other conditions by putting additional stress on tissue structures and causing the heart to remodel itself detrimentally. Higher blood lipid levels on the other hand contribute to the progression of atherosclerosis, attacking blood vessel walls to form fatty deposits that can later break to cause blockages or ruptures of blood vessels. These are all things best avoided if possible, but until the advent of rejuvenation therapies after the SENS model the best that can be done is to slow down the damage.

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Once synbio computing is fully matured then our tech dev work maybe done.

By Frances Van Scoy, West Virginia University.

The first computers cost millions of dollars and were locked inside rooms equipped with special electrical circuits and air conditioning. The only people who could use them had been trained to write programs in that specific computer’s language. Today, gesture-based interactions, using multitouch pads and touchscreens, and exploration of virtual 3D spaces allow us to interact with digital devices in ways very similar to how we interact with physical objects.

This newly immersive world not only is open to more people to experience; it also allows almost anyone to exercise their own creativity and innovative tendencies. No longer are these capabilities dependent on being a math whiz or a coding expert: Mozilla’s “A-Frame” is making the task of building complex virtual reality models much easier for programmers. And Google’s “Tilt Brush” software allows people to build and edit 3D worlds without any programming skills at all.

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“According to the US Department of Veteran’s Affairs about 11 out of every 100 veterans who served in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom have PTSD in a given year as well as about 12 out of every 100 veterans who served in Desert Storm.”

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Bacteria are among the oldest life forms on Earth and exist nearly everywhere; in the soil, water, deep in the earth’s crust and in our own bodies. Actually, there are at least as many bacterial cells in the human body as human cells.

Bacteria tend to get a bad rap, but now, armed with new research on the bacterial world (or microbiome) in our bodies, we are starting to understand how important a role microorganisms play in our health (good as well as bad).

And beyond merely understanding the relationship between our bodies and the microorganisms inhabiting it, we’re on the cusp of significantly altering that relationship.

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