Did you know that obesity, autoimmune disease, diabetes, arthritis, depression, anxiety and eczema all have one thing in common? It’s the gut.
In a classic episode of an old-school TV comedy called I Love Lucy, we see Lucille Ball stepping into an assembly line job at a candy factory. As the pace of the conveyor belt exceeds her ability to wrap the candy, the frenzy gets the best of her. She shoves candy into her pockets, into her hat, into her mouth—it’s a job fail.
As we know, faster doesn’t always mean better. And precision can take a big bite out of speed.
CDC Sends Surge Staffers To Stop Vaccine-Derived Polio Outbreaks In Africa : Goats and Soda Health officials have long known that virus from the oral vaccine can contaminate water supplies; they underestimated how big a problem this would be.
While the transhumanism movement is making progress, it isn’t without its skeptics. Some don’t think it will ever work the way we want it to, because it asks science to turn back a natural process of aging that has an uncountable number of manifestations. Critics of anti-aging research envision any number of dystopian futures, in which we defeat many of the causes of death before very old age, leaving only the most ghastly and intractable — but not directly lethal — maladies.
Lest you think this concept is limited to snake-oil salesmen and science-fiction writers, the idea that aging is not inevitable is now in the mainstream of modern medical research at major institutions around the world. The journal Nature dubbed research from the University of California at Los Angeles a “hint that the body’s ‘biological age’ can be reversed.” According to reporting by Scientific American on research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies: “Aging Is Reversible — at Least in Human Cells and Live Mice.”
CRISPR, the revolutionary ability to snip out and alter genes with scissor-like precision, has exploded in popularity over the last few years and is generally seen as the standalone wizard of modern gene-editing. However, it’s not a perfect system, sometimes cutting at the wrong place, not working as intended and leaving scientists scratching their heads. Well, now there’s a new, more exacting upgrade to CRISPR called Prime, with the ability to, in theory, snip out more than 90% of all genetic diseases.
Just what is this new method and how does it work? We turned to IEEE fellow, biomedical researcher and dean of graduate education at Tuft University’s school of engineering Karen Panetta for an explanation.
Bubonic Plague’s Most Dangerous Strain Reported By Chinese Authorities : Goats and Soda Authorities have censored Chinese-language news of the hospitalization of a couple who traveled from Mongolia to Beijing for treatment, perhaps to tamp down fears.
The large-scale study got it right for 83 percent of participants. Would you take the blood test?
This could be happening to me.
An international research team led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has found that microorganisms living in the gut may alter the aging process, which could lead to the development of food-based treatment to slow it down.
All living organisms, including human beings, coexist with a myriad of microbial species living in and on them, and research conducted over the last 20 years has established their important role in nutrition, physiology, metabolism and behavior.
Continue reading “Bacteria in the gut may alter aging process, study finds” »
New research from Dr. Luis M. Schang and his group at the Baker Institute for Animal Health has identified a new mechanism that plays a role in controlling how the herpes virus alternates between dormant and active stages of infection.
The herpes virus causes cold sores and genital sores, as well as life-threatening infections in newborns, encephalitis and corneal blindness.
Treatment of the virus is difficult, because it hides out in nerve cells and emerges months or years later to reactivate the infection.
