Lifeboat Foundation

If you take a look at the life of freshwater shrimp in the sleepy English countryside, you’ll find enough drugs to keep a funk band on tour very happy.

A new study has found notable levels of cocaine, ketamine, Valium, Xanax, t ramadol, and other pharmaceuticals in the bodies of freshwater shrimp and their habitat in Suffolk, UK. The researchers also found traces of numerous pesticides that are now banned by the EU.

Reporting in the journal Environment International, scientists from King’s College London analyzed levels of micropollutants in surface water samples and Gammarus pulex freshwater shrimp from 15 different sites across the county of Suffolk in the east of England. To their surprise, they discovered trace levels of at least 67 different contaminant compounds. The most frequently detected contaminant was cocaine, which was detected in every single shrimp from all 15 sites.

Continue reading “Shrimp Fail Drug Test For Cocaine, Ketamine, Xanax, And Valium” »

An end to the AIDS epidemic could be in sight after a landmark study found men whose HIV infection was fully suppressed by antiretroviral drugs had no chance of infecting their partner.

The success of the medicine means that if everyone with HIV were fully treated, there would be no further infections.

Among nearly 1,000 male couples across Europe where one partner with HIV was receiving treatment to suppress the virus, there were no cases of transmission of the infection to the HIV-negative partner during sex without a condom. Although 15 men were infected with HIV during the eight-year study, DNA testing proved that was through sex with someone other than their partner who was not on treatment.

Continue reading “End to AIDS in sight as huge study finds drugs stop HIV transmission” »

Given the chance, there are very few of us who wouldn’t want to slow down the aging process. Chasing that fountain of youth is a major branch of medical science at the moment, and a hardy little worm known as C. elegans is probably the most prolific test subject. Now, a team at Scripps Research has found that blocking a particular enzyme can extend the lifespan of these worms by almost half again.

Today, we want to spotlight a new publication that charts the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), which consists of the various secreted signals given out by senescent cells during aging.

Senescent cells and the SASP

As we get older, an increasing number of our cells enter into a state known as senescence. They cease dividing and supporting the tissues and organs of which they are part and, instead, secrete a range of harmful chemical signals. This cocktail of harmful signals is known as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP).

Continue reading “A New Database for Senescent Cells” »

Clinical trials to remove senescent cells have now begun.

Dubbed by one scientist as, “probably the most important paper to be published in the field of dementia in the last five years,” a team of researchers has described a newly defined neurodegenerative disease that closely mimics the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, but which has an entirely different pathological cause.

Two regions of our brain are central for storing memories: the hippocampus and the neocortex. While the hippocampus is primarily responsible for learning new information and its short-term storage, the neocortex is able to store large amounts of information for a long time. Lea Himmer, Dr. Monika Schönauer and Professor Steffen Gais of the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Tübingen and their team investigated how these brain areas interact during the consolidation of new memories and which role sleep plays in that process. The team of researchers used functional neuroimaging to show that repeated rehearsal can lead to the establishment of memory traces in the neocortex within a short timeframe. However, these traces are only sufficiently stable if a sleep phase follows learning – otherwise the brain continuously needs to call on the hippocampus to help with long-term storage of new memories. The new study is published in Science Advances.

In this new study, the researchers had their participants study a list of words, which was repeated seven times. While they conducted this task, their brain activity was recorded by an MRI scanner. Twelve hours later, the participants repeated the task with the learned words and a new word list. Half of the subjects had slept in the meantime, while the other half had remained awake. Repeated practice led to increased involvement of the posterior parietal cortex, a region of the neocortex, within an hour. At the same time, the hippocampus became less and less engaged in the process.