Taking it easy as you get older? Wrong.
Message of new Lieberman study: ‘Because we evolved to be active throughout our lives, our bodies need physical activity to age well.’
Just about everyone knows that exercise is good for you. Some people can even rattle off reasons it keeps your muscles and joints strong, and how it fights off certain diseases. But how many people can tell you the story of why and how physical activity was built into human biology?
More than fine, actually. Much more, she says.
“This is major for me and my family,” she says. “Two years without me being in the hospital? Wow. We just can’t believe it. But we’re so grateful.”
She’s doing so well for so long that she’s officially no longer in the landmark study she volunteered for. That involved doctors taking cells out of her bone marrow, and editing a gene in the cells in their lab, using the revolutionary gene-editing technique known as CRISPR. CRISPR allows scientists to make very precise changes in DNA much more easily than ever before. Many think it will revolutionize medicine.
As we close out 2021 and ring in what we hope to be a bright and fulfilling year, it’s time to reflect on the trends that will likely shape the months that lie ahead of us. We live in a world experiencing major transformations and exponential trends, and we’re likely to see significant developments in the new year.
So what might those changes be? Here are a few of my predictions:
COVID slides into the background.
Just as we were expecting the pandemic to fade away and become endemic, the Omicron strain surprised us yet again with a large number of mutations, increased virality and an ability to land the unvaccinated in hospitals. The fact that it hit right around the holiday season, causing thousands of flight cancellations and millions of upended plans, made its psychological impact even worse. But, on the positive side, this too shall pass. Successive mutations will likely become less deadly and eventually go the way of every other pandemic. Perhaps Omicron itself is the last major mutation. Time will tell, but it is likely that we see the end of COVID as an economy-stopping phenomenon by the end of 2022.
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Our bodies have some healing and regenerative capabilities. For most of us, cuts will mend, we’ll recover from mild infections, and at the cellular level, | Genetics And Genomics.
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Thyme and oregano possess an anti-cancer compound that suppresses tumor development, but adding more to your tomato sauce isn’t enough to gain significant benefit. The key to unlocking the power of these plants is in amplifying the amount of the compound created or synthesizing the compound for drug development.
Researchers at Purdue University achieved the first step toward using the compound in pharmaceuticals by mapping its biosynthetic pathway, a sort of molecular recipe of the ingredients and steps needed.
“These plants contain important compounds, but the amount is very low and extraction won’t be enough,” said Natalia Dudareva, a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry in Purdue’s College of Agriculture, who co-led the project. “By understanding how these compounds are formed, we open a path to engineering plants with higher levels of them or to synthesizing the compounds in microorganisms for medical use.
The US population is almost not growing.
The U.S. population grew at the slowest rate on record in 2021 as slowing migration, an aging population and low birth rates were exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday show.
The population expanded by just 0.1% or 392,665 people this year, a smaller increase than during the influenza pandemic and World War I in the early years of the last century. It’s also the first time since 1937 that the population has expanded by less than 1 million.
Washington and New York were among the regions with the biggest drop in people while Idaho, Utah and surrounding states gained the most, the data show.
The Neuro-Network.
𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐚 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐛𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐞’𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦, 𝐬𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐩𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭
𝙄𝙩’𝙨 𝙪𝙨𝙪𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙪𝙢𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙤𝙣 𝙞𝙣 𝙖 𝙫𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙝𝙖𝙨… See more.
It’s usually assumed that a person in a vegetative state has no awareness of the world around them. Dr Adrian Owen, who pioneered groundbreaking research that has proven otherwise, explains why we need to be talking to these patients.
We thought that all the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid hit the earth some 65 million years ago until recently. Now we know that some of the dinosaur species, mostly avians, survived and become birds. Scientists are trying to tweak chicken DNA to produce atavistic, dinosaur-like, traits that are embedded in the genes of birds for years.
A research team led by Yale paleontologist and developmental biologist Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar and Harvard developmental biologist Arhat Abzhanov conducted the first successful reversion of a bird’s skull features back in 2015. The team replicated ancestral molecular development to transform chicken embryos in a laboratory to turn its beak into a snout and palate configuration similar to that of small dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx.
“I wanted to know what the beak was skeletally, functionally and when this major transformation occurred from a normal vertebrate snout to the very unique structures used in birds,” Bhullar said.
