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Reprogramming Life: Aging, Gender & Identity

Biology is Not Destiny.

For most of human history, aging seemed irreversible and the body’s fundamental characteristics appeared fixed. Today, advances in gene therapy, stem cell biology, epigenetics, and cellular reprogramming are challenging those assumptions and opening possibilities once considered impossible.

In Reprogramming Life, stem cell biologist and biotechnology entrepreneur Dana Larocca brings the history of biotechnology to life through the story of her own scientific career. Her journey begins with a childhood question—why do we grow old?—and leads to the frontiers of regenerative medicine and longevity research.

Along the way, Dana led the team that reprogrammed cells from a 114-year-old woman, showing that even cells from someone approaching the known limit of human lifespan could be returned to a youthful, embryonic-like state capable of becoming many different kinds of cells.

At the same time, she was living another story of transformation. From childhood, Dana knew herself to be female, but she kept that truth private for decades while building a career, marrying, and raising a family. She eventually transitioned at the age of sixty-three, giving the idea of biological flexibility a deeply personal meaning.

At its heart, Reprogramming Life asks how much of our biology is truly fixed—and what new choices may become possible as we learn to reprogram life itself.

🧬 Reprogramming the Biology of Life: Aging, Gender, & Identity.

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Elusive ‘Geoneutrinos’ Are Building a New Map of Earth’s Volatile Interior

Scientists are using ultra-sensitive underground particle detectors around the world to track geoneutrinos—subatomic particles generated deep within the planet by the radioactive decay of elements like uranium and thorium. By detecting these “ghostly” particles, researchers are beginning to map and understand the radioactive heat engine driving Earth’s plate tectonics, mantle convection, and magnetic field.

* Deep Underground Observatories: To catch geoneutrinos, detectors must be shielded from background cosmic rays.

Experiments like SNO+ (located 2 km underground in Sudbury, Canada) and the JUNO experiment in China utilize thousands of tons of ultrapure liquid and light sensors buried deep in rock mines to capture the faint flashes of light produced when neutrinos hit the detectors.

* Probing Earth’s Hidden Heat: A significant portion of the heat driving Earth’s interior processes comes from radioactive decay within the crust and mantle. Because neutrinos pass through solid rock unhindered, geoneutrinos provide a direct line of sight into inaccessible regions thousands of kilometers below the surface.

* Building a Global Map: A growing network of underground detectors is gathering substantial new measurement data, helping geoscientists test and refine models of Earth’s mantle composition, thermal budget, and volatile internal dynamics.

1. What are Geoneutrinos?

Neutrinos are extremely lightweight, subatomic particles that rarely interact with ordinary matter. Geoneutrinos are specifically the electron antineutrinos produced when radioactive isotopes—primarily uranium, thorium, and potassium—decay deep within Earth’s crust and mantle.

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SKA may detect magnetic fields on distant exoplanets

Studying exoplanets has given astronomers insights into the characteristics that could help them find life beyond Earth. For years, astronomers thought an exoplanet’s location in a star’s habitable zone was enough to make it an Earth-like world. But some stars are more active than our sun, exposing planets in their habitable zones to far more radiation than Earth receives. Astronomers have increasingly recognized that a planet’s magnetic field, which shields Earth from harmful radiation, could be a key characteristic in identifying Earth-like worlds.

Now, an international team of scientists is shedding light on how to study exoplanet magnetic fields in a chapter published in Advancing Astrophysics with the SKA II, a 2026 science book sponsored by the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO). The researchers discuss how the SKA could be used to study magnetic fields not only on exoplanets but also on ultracool dwarfs (UCDs). The chapter is also available on the arXiv preprint server.

As their name suggests, UCDs are stars smaller and cooler than our sun. Some are brown dwarfs, objects between Jupiter and the sun in size that did not grow large enough to achieve nuclear fusion.

Experimental drug reverses paralysis and vision loss in multiple sclerosis model

A drug developed by a UVA Health scientist has not only stopped but reversed paralysis and vision loss in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis. The results are striking because existing MS treatments are designed to reduce future inflammatory attacks, not restore neurological function already lost.

The research is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The drug, Kamuvudine K-9, is a derivative of HIVdrugs already approved for use in people. It was developed by Jayakrishna Ambati, MD, founding director of UVA’s Center for Advanced Vision Science and the DuPont Guerry III Professor in the UVA School of Medicine’s Department of Ophthalmology.

Can aging be treated like a disease? Scientists are starting to find out

As research into longevity advances, scientists are finding new ways to test a once-speculative idea: that aging itself could become a target of medicine.

Researchers are investigating whether, instead of doctors waiting for age-related diseases to appear, it could be possible to measure and influence the biological changes that happen as we age.

The goal would be to intervene in the biological processes of aging before they contribute to disease, so that people would not just live longer, but also have more years of good health, known as health span.

This Dangerous Fungus Has Become Resistant to Every Major Antifungal Drug We Have… Twice

There’s a new fungus amongus, and it’s raising red flags among health care experts because it resists all the major antifungal treatments.

The discovery involves Candidozyma auris (formerly known as Candida auris), an emerging fungal pathogen that has already become a serious problem in hospitals around the world.

Since it was first described in 2009, this fungus has spread to more than 60 countries across six continents, causing healthcare-associated outbreaks and invasive infections, with mortality rates of 30–50 percent reported in some situations.

Targeting CDK2 Could Boost Cancer Immunotherapy Response

The study, published Sept. 2 in Molecular Cell, identifies a previously unrecognized role for CDK2 in shaping a tumor’s interaction with the immune system. In mice, blocking CDK2 helped immunotherapy drugs known as immune checkpoint inhibitors eradicate colorectal and breast tumors, including a form of triple-negative breast cancer that did not respond to immunotherapy alone.

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“CDK2 inhibitors are being tested in clinical trials now, primarily in forms of ovarian and breast cancer known to require CDK2 for cancer cell growth,” said co-senior author Peter Sicinski, HMS professor of genetics at Dana-Farber. “But we’ve found that CDK2 inhibitors can be used in a way we did not expect, to overcome resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors.”

Equatorial Circular and Spherical Photon Orbits around Kerr-Type Black Holes in Expanding Universe

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects that may arise in null (light-like) geodesics in the vicinity of Kerr-type black holes. Exact solutions for circular equatorial and spherical photon orbits are obtained using the geodesic equations of the Kerr-de Sitter metric, which includes the cosmological constant lambda. By solving the radial equation simultaneously with its first derivative, expressions for the photon angular momentum and Carter constant are derived. Based on these results, an equation for equatorial circular photon orbits around Kerr black holes is obtained, generalizing the well-known Bardeen-Press-Teukolsky formula to the case of a nonzero cosmological constant. An equation describing spherical photon orbits is also derived and solved, extending the known result of E. Teo to include the influence of the cosmological constant. A comparison between expressions with and without the cosmological constant makes it possible to estimate its potential influence and determine the threshold above which these effects become significant.

Black Hole, Photon Orbit, Cosmological Constant, Null Geodesics

Old Hearts Become Biologically Younger When Transplanted Into Younger People

The heart is, inarguably, one of the most important organs in the body.

It sits in your chest, carefully armored by sternum and ribs, constantly pulsing to maintain the flow of blood, transporting oxygen, nutrients, and other essential substances to every extremity of your body.

It might be reasonable to think that there’s an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in – the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other.

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