Lifeboat Foundation

NORWICH, United Kingdom — The coronavirus pandemic is causing extra concern for many people with high blood pressure and heart disease. Though these patients are at higher risk, a new study reveals their medications may be doing more good than realized. British researchers find patients taking antihypertensives are at “significantly lower risk” of ending up on a ventilator or dying from COVID-19.

The University of East Anglia says Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme inhibitors (ACEi) and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers (ARB) both reduce the chances of a severe COVID-19 illness in patients with high blood pressure. The findings look at 28,000 patients taking antihypertensives in the largest, coronavirus-related study to date.

“We know that patients with cardiovascular diseases are at particular risk of severe Covid-19 infection. But at the start of the pandemic, there was concern that specific medications for high blood pressure could be linked with worse outcomes for Covid-19 patients,” Dr. Vassilios Vassiliou says in a university release.

Middle-aged mice that had the naturally-occurring metabolite alpha-ketaglutarate (AKG) added to their chow had a better “old age.” They were healthier as they aged and experienced a dramatically shorter time of disease and disability before they died, a first for research involving mammals. Results from the double-blinded study, published in Cell Metabolism, were based on clinically-relevant markers of healthspan.

Previous studies show that blood plasma levels of AKG can drop up to 10-fold as we age. Fasting and exercise, already shown to promote longevity, increase the production of AKG is not found in the normal diet, making supplementation the only feasible way to restore its levels.

“The standard for efficacy in research on aging is whether interventions actually improve healthspan. We’ve reached that mark here with a compound that is naturally produced by the body and is generally shown to be safe,” said Buck professor and senior author Gordon Lithgow, Ph.D… Noting that some of the mice did experience moderate lifespan extension (the average was around 12%), measures of healthspan increased more than 40 percent. Lithgow says the goal is always to compress the time of disease and frailty. “The nightmare scenario has always been life extension with no reduction in disability. In this study, the treated middle-aged mice got healthier over time. Even the mice that died early saw improvements in their health, which was really surprising and encouraging.”

MIT engineers have developed a novel platform for the controlled delivery of certain important drugs, nutrients, and other substances to human cells.

In work that could impact industries from pharmaceuticals to cosmetics, MIT engineers have developed a platform for the controlled delivery of drugs and more to human cells. The simple approach creates capsules containing nanoscale droplets loaded with an active ingredient.

According to a recent survey of more than 1,500 US based respondents, workers are now three times more likely to report poor mental health than they were before the pandemic. The study also claims that seventy-five percent of people have experienced burnout at work, with 40 percent saying they’ve experienced burnout during the pandemic specifically. The report suggests that this is not surprising, given that 37 percent of employed respondents are currently working longer hours than usual since the pandemic started.

However, just 21 percent said they were able to have open, productive conversations with HR about solutions to their burnout. Fifty-six percent went so far as to say that their HR departments did not encourage conversations about burnout. This survey was conducted by FlexJobs, fielded in partnership with Mental Health America (MHA) in late July 2020.

Key findings:

Fifty years after the classic Star Trek episode “Space Seed,” life imitates art…

The controversial decision to genetically edit the embryos of two girls born in China last year might have enhanced their memory and cognition, scientists say.

Chinese scientist He Jiankui reported in November that he’d used the CRISPR editing tool to delete a gene called CCR5, which enables humans to contract HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In addition to potentially blocking the development of AIDS, recent research suggests knocking out CCR5 can also make mice smarter and help the human brain recover from strokes.

As an added safety measure, American Airlines is testing an antimicrobial surface coating that could make the coronavirus inactive for up to a week.

Researchers are developing a new battery powered by lab-grown gems made from reformed nuclear waste. If it works, it will last thousands of years.

It shouldn’t be any secret that mitochondria can make their own fatty acids. The enzymes mitochondria use to do it were discovered decades ago. Unfortunately, only a few individuals among the biologically literate masses have come to appreciate this critical fact about mitochondrial behavior. Perhaps the bigger issue is why mitochondria would go to all the trouble when cells can already make all the fatty acids they need.

Wikipedia itself remains largely in the dark when it comes to mitochondrial fatty acid synthesis. It does contain several exhaustive entries for enzymatic players in the main cellular fatty acid processes, but it is hard pressed even to mention that mitochondria can do it, too. For years, the small cadre of devotees who studied it referred to it as FASII, for fatty acid synthesis type II. This was because it looked just like the pathways of the same name used by bacteria, from which mitochondria are derived. Eukaryotes, on the other hand, employ FAS type I (FASI) in the cytoplasm.

The main difference seems to be that the FASI enzymes have partially merged into large multifunctional conglomerates that carry out whole sequences of reactions together. Presumably, this makes for greater efficiency because the many enzymes and substrates needn’t slowly diffuse to find each other within a large cytoplasmic reaction space. In the fullness of time, something curious happened to the field: A trickle of more recent papers began using a new name for FASII as done by mitochondria: It was now mtFAS.