Lifeboat Foundation

“This is a fascinating study of gut microbiome in older adulthood,” wrote Barbara Bendlin from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “While the investigators did not look at brain health or cognitive outcomes, it’s interesting to see that they found that healthy aging was accompanied by gut microbiomes that became increasingly more unique to each person starting in middle age. This type of divergence is also observed in brain aging.” (Full comment below.)

Past studies have shown that the gut microbiome undergoes rapid changes in the first three years of life, followed by a longer period of relative stability, then more change once again in later years (Yatsunenko et al., 2012; O’Toole and Jeffery, 2015). Research has also found that centenarians have fewer of the gut microbes commonly seen in younger, healthy people. Instead, they live with an increasingly rarefied microbiota (Kim et al., 2019). This suggests that gut microbiomes become increasingly personalized as people get older, but little is known about how these gut profiles affect the aging process or longevity.

To find out, first author Tomasz Wilmanski and colleagues analyzed gut microbiomes, personal traits, and clinical data from more than 9000 people 18 to 101 years old. They came from three independent cohorts. One was a group of 3653 people aged 18 to 87 who had signed up with Arivale, a now-defunct scientific wellness company co-founded by systems biology pioneer Leroy Hood and Price. Arivale provided personalized wellness coaching by collecting and analyzing data on participants’ genomes and other systems, including their gut microbiomes. Hood founded the Institute for Systems Biology.

Creating 200 billion-plus brand-new red blood cells a day can take a toll on a body. The capacity to replace components charged with the life-sustaining task of carrying oxygen eventually wears out with aging, resulting in health problems, from anemia to blood cancers.

What if we could halt the aging process and maintain young blood cells for life? With blood cells making up a whopping 90% of the body’s cells, it makes sense that keeping them abundant and fit could boost vitality into our golden years.

Now, a group of researchers, including experts at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, has discovered ways to do just that – keep the blood manufacturing process flowing. The work, recently published in the journal Nature, could open doors to everything from disease-preventive therapies to better blood banks.

A new book from Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson offers an incisive portrait of the gene editing field that is changing modern medicine.

Rapamycin is the drug used to suppress the immune system after organ transplants, but in reduced doses, it appears it may have other health benefits and as such is discussed considerably in the longevity community, and taken regularly my some very famous proponents.

So I thought I would give you some background, alongside the pros and cons, to see what all the fuss is about…

Continue reading “Rapamycin Anti Aging — Worth The Hype?” »

North Carolina State University engineers continue to improve the efficiency of a flexible device worn on the wrist that harvests heat energy from the human body to monitor health.

In a paper published in npj Flexible Electronics, the NC State researchers report significant enhancements in preventing heat leakage in the flexible body heat harvester they first reported in 2017 and updated in 2020. The harvesters use heat energy from the human body to power wearable technologies —think of smart watches that measure your heart rate, blood oxygen, glucose and other health parameters—that never need to have their batteries recharged. The technology relies on the same principles governing rigid thermoelectric harvesters that convert heat to electrical energy.

Flexible harvesters that conform to the human body are highly desired for use with wearable technologies. Mehmet Ozturk, an NC State professor of electrical and computer engineering and the corresponding author of the paper, mentioned superior skin contact with flexible devices, as well as the ergonomic and comfort considerations to the device wearer, as the core reasons behind building flexible thermoelectric generators, or TEGs.

Non-rigid point set registration is the process of finding a spatial transformation that aligns two shapes represented as a set of data points. It has extensive applications in areas such as autonomous driving, medical imaging, and robotic manipulation. Now, a method has been developed to speed up this procedure.

In a study published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, a researcher from Kanazawa University has demonstrated a technique that reduces the computing time for non-rigid point set registration relative to other approaches.

Previous methods to accelerate this process have been computationally efficient only for shapes described by small point sets (containing fewer than 100000 points). Consequently, the use of such approaches in applications has been limited. This latest research aimed to address this drawback.

You’ve heard of animals that can lose and then regenerate a tail or limb. But scientists reporting in the journal Current Biology on March 8 have now discovered two species of sacoglossan sea slug that can do even better, shedding and then regenerating a whole new body complete with the heart and other internal organs. The researchers also suggest that the slugs may use the photosynthetic ability of chloroplasts they incorporate from the algae in their diet to survive long enough for regeneration.

“We were surprised to see the head moving just after autotomy,” said Sayaka Mitoh of Nara Women’s University in Japan. “We thought that it would die soon without a heart and other important organs, but we were surprised again to find that it regenerated the whole body.”

Continue reading “These sea slugs sever their own heads and regenerate brand-new bodies” »

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a “wearable microgrid” that harvests and stores energy from the human body to power small electronics. It consists of three main parts: sweat-powered biofuel cells, motion-powered devices called triboelectric generators, and energy-storing supercapacitors. All parts are flexible, washable and can be screen printed onto clothing.

The technology, reported in a paper published Mar. 9 in Nature Communications, draws inspiration from community microgrids.

“We’re applying the concept of the microgrid to create wearable systems that are powered sustainably, reliably and independently,” said co-first author Lu Yin, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Just like a city microgrid integrates a variety of local, renewable power sources like wind and solar, a wearable microgrid integrates devices that locally harvest energy from different parts of the body, like sweat and movement, while containing energy storage.”

Astronauts face many challenges to their health, due to the exceptional conditions of spaceflight. Among these are a variety of infectious microbes that can attack their suppressed immune systems.

Now, in the first study of its kind, Cheryl Nickerson, lead author Jennifer Barrila and their colleagues describe the infection of human cells by the intestinal pathogen Salmonella Typhimurium during spaceflight. They show how the microgravity environment of spaceflight changes the molecular profile of human intestinal cells and how these expression patterns are further changed in response to infection. In another first, the researchers were also able to detect molecular changes in the bacterial pathogen while inside the infected host cells.

The results offer fresh insights into the infection process and may lead to novel methods for combatting invasive pathogens during spaceflight and under less exotic conditions here on earth.