Toggle light / dark theme

Air pollution is responsible for millions of deaths every year, worldwide. According to a State of Global Air report, air pollution is the fifth greatest global mortality risk.

Air is the fifth highest cause of death among all health risks, ranking just below smoking; each year, more people die from related disease than from road traffic injuries or malaria.”

No wonder, then, that when Google.org issued an open call to organizations around the world to submit ideas for how they could use AI for societal challenges, Google chose one of the 20 winning organizations as one that was out to address pollution.

Read more

Physicists have demonstrated a new way to obtain the essential details that describe an isolated quantum system, such as a gas of atoms, through direct observation. The new method gives information about the likelihood of finding atoms at specific locations in the system with unprecedented spatial resolution. With this technique, scientists can obtain details on a scale of tens of nanometers—smaller than the width of a virus.

Experiments performed at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a research partnership between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, use an optical lattice—a web of laser light that suspends thousands of —to determine the probability that an atom might be at any given location. Because each individual atom in the lattice behaves like all the others, a measurement on the entire group of atoms reveals the likelihood of an individual atom to be in a particular point in space.

Published in the journal Physical Review X, the JQI technique (and a similar technique published simultaneously by a group at the University of Chicago) can yield the likelihood of the atoms’ locations at well below the wavelength of the light used to illuminate the atoms—50 times better than the limit of what optical microscopy can normally resolve.

Read more

This therapy can aid in several other cases, and one day it may help patients diagnosed with diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and cancer.


Kristopher Boesen’s life changed in a minute after he survived a car accident. The young man lost control over his car, and crashed it into a tree and lamp post. The terrible accident almost took his life, but Kristopher survived. Unfortunately, he was paralyzed from the neck down, and doctors were almost convinced that he will never regain the control over his body.

Read more

Nina Khera writes about the aging processes and why she took an interest in aging research and why she thinks young people should too.


Aging is a series of processes in which the body’s ability to perform functions gradually decreases. The Hallmarks of Aging includes such things as an increase in senescent cells and a decrease in stem cells, but decreasing NAD+ and increasing free radicals matter as well. This article will cover a few root causes of aging and their total impact on humanity.

Senescent cells

One root cause of aging is senescent cells. These are aged or damaged cells that normally would initiate the self-destruct sequence known as apoptosis to dispose of themselves, but, for some reason, they evade this process and stay alive in the body.

Wondering if your kid is dealing with an ear infection? Soon, according to researchers at the University of Washington, there’ll be an app for that. They claim to have created a simple test that uses a smartphone and folded up paper to detect one of the telltale signs of infection—fluid in the ears—with about the same or greater accuracy as a doctor.

Ear infections are one of the first health problems people tend to experience. By the age of three, most everyone has had at least one ear infection. These infections often cause fluid build-up in the ear, as can another condition called otitis media with effusion (OME). But though most infections or cases of OME go away on their own, too much or chronic fluid can cause pain or even severe complications like hearing loss.

Read more

We’re offering a few discounted tickets to our conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019, in order to celebrate the 174th birthday of Élie Metchnikoff, the father of gerontology. We’re selling these tickets at the previous early bird price of $350 instead of the current $400!

This special, lower-price offer is valid from May 15, Noon EDT to May 17, Noon EDT, so this is the ideal time to guarantee your place at this exciting event. Prices will also be rising to $500 from June 10th onwards as we draw closer to the conference.

You can get your discounted ticket by visiting our Eventbrite page and using the discount code Metchnikoff.

Read more

A pair of collaborative studies led by Fen-Biao Gao, Ph.D., have identified two potential drug targets for the diseases amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The studies, which appear in Nature Neuroscience and PNAS, provide a new layer of detail about how hexanucleotide repeat expansions in the C9ORF72 gene, the most common genetic mutation responsible for both ALS and FTD, causes neuron cell death. The Nature Neuroscience study also describes a new mouse model that more closely mimics the gradual build-up of toxins in patients with the diseases.

“Understanding how these mutations lead to motor neuron damage is important to the development of new treatment approaches,” said Dr. Gao, the Governor Paul Cellucci Chair in Neuroscience Research and professor of neurology. “We know that this mutation can cause these diseases. These studies show that both and DNA repair pathways are disrupted when the mutated gene is present in cells. That makes them potentially druggable targets.”

In ALS, a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder affecting the motor neurons in the central nervous system, the C9ORF72 gene accounts for 40 percent of inherited forms of the disease and 6 percent of sporadic cases. As motor neurons die, the brain’s ability to send signals to the body’s muscles is compromised. This leads to loss of voluntary muscle movement, paralysis and eventually death from respiratory failure.

Read more

Our brains have a remarkable knack for picking out individual voices in a noisy environment, like a crowded coffee shop or a busy city street. This is something that even the most advanced hearing aids struggle to do. But now Columbia engineers are announcing an experimental technology that mimics the brain’s natural aptitude for detecting and amplifying any one voice from many. Powered by artificial intelligence, this brain-controlled hearing aid acts as an automatic filter, monitoring wearers’ brain waves and boosting the voice they want to focus on.

Though still in early stages of development, the technology is a significant step toward better hearing aids that would enable wearers to converse with the people around them seamlessly and efficiently. This achievement is described today in Science Advances.

“The area that processes sound is extraordinarily sensitive and powerful; it can amplify one voice over others, seemingly effortlessly, while today’s hearings aids still pale in comparison,” said Nima Mesgarani, Ph.D., a principal investigator at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and the paper’s senior author. “By creating a device that harnesses the power of the brain itself, we hope our work will lead to technological improvements that enable the hundreds of millions of hearing-impaired people worldwide to communicate just as easily as their friends and family do.”

Read more

A new way to cleanly separate out cancer cells from a blood sample enables comprehensive genetic profiling of the cancer cells, which could help doctors target tumors and monitor treatments more effectively.

It is a dramatic improvement over current approaches because it also encompasses the variation among cells within a single patient.

“This could be a whole different ball game,” said Max Wicha, the Madeline and Sidney Forbes Professor of Oncology at the University of Michigan and senior physician on the study in Nature Communications.

Read more