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The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And then, of course, the more Goop was criticized: by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous — no, now it was dangerous. And elsewhere people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site — among them those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn’t find help in mainstream medicine.


Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the magazine and a writer for The Times’s culture desk. She last wrote for the magazine about the author Jonathan Franzen.

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Skin is your largest organ. There are about 2 square metres (22 square feet) of it enveloping you right now, and it’s not the shape we thought it was.

In fact, scientists have just discovered an entirely new geometric shape previously unknown to science or mathematics, and it looks like it’s been hiding in your skin all along. By which we mean, in epithelial cells, the building blocks of the structural tissue forming our external (and internal) skin layers.

These epithelial cells are some of the most important cells early in life, helping to build structures in developing embryos that ultimately become all our different bodily organs.

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Hopefully in the future, when somebody tells you they will be making an appointment with a surgeon for an augment, they will come back smarter. The world will be a better place for it.

Reprinted with permission from the author.

Eric C. Leuthardt, M.D., is a neurosurgeon who is currently a professor with the Department of Neurological Surgery and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He is Director of the Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology and the Brain Laser Center. His work has yielded him numerous accolades as a scientist, a neurosurgeon, and an inventor. He was named one of the Top Young Innovators by MIT’s magazine Technology Review. The magazine names individuals under the age of 35 each year whose work in technology has global impact. In addition to numerous peer reviewed publications, Leuthardt has numerous patents on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for medical devices and brain computer interface technologies.

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A new interview on LEAF with biogerontologist Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães.


Today, we have an interview with Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães, the biogerontologist who created and runs senescence.info. In the unlikely event that his name is new to you, we had another interview with him last year, which you can check out here.

How do you think we age; are we programmed to die, do we wear out, or is the truth a mixture of both?

I don’t think we wear out. Humans and complex animals are made of cells and molecules that, by and large, have some turnover; we can replace most of our components, so I don’t think it’s correct to see aging as wearing out, at least not in complex animals like humans. (Please see here.) That said, I do think that some forms of cumulative damage contribute to the aging process, such as DNA damage. I also think that there are programmatic aspects to aging. That is, I think that genetic programs coordinating some aspects of growth and development persist into adulthood and become detrimental as forms of antagonistic pleiotropy. It is probably a combination of molecular damage and the inadvertent actions of genetic programs that causes aging.

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Published in Scientific Reports, this study is the first to provide evidence of new neuron formation—and the presence of stem cells—in the leopard gecko brain.


University of Guelph researchers have discovered the type of stem cell allowing geckos to create new brain cells, providing evidence that the lizards may also be able to regenerate parts of the brain after injury.

This finding could help in replacing human brain cells lost or damaged due to injury, aging or disease.

“The brain is a complex organ and there are so few good treatments for brain injury, so this is a very exciting area of research,” said Prof. Matthew Vickaryous in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC).

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Billed as the Chinese answer to Dallas Buyers Club, the tear-jerking film Dying to Survive last week became Premier Li Keqiang’s new rallying cry for speeding up price cuts for cancer medications. It is an issue of such complexity that he has held two cabinet meetings about it in the past three months.


Li Keqiang has been trying to speed up price cuts for life-saving medication for months, and it’s a boon that the box-office hit has generated widespread awareness.

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