A 4,900-year-old skeleton has turned the accepted story of the disease on its head.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,664
Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis
Virginia Tech announced Thursday it will receive a record $50 million gift to support biomedical research, a landmark donation for the public university that will expand the influence of its academic health center in Roanoke.
The gift comes from the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust and from Heywood and Cynthia Fralin. It is twice as large as the previous record, a $25 million donation from Alice and Bill Goodwin for an engineering building that opened in 2014 on the university’s main campus in Blacksburg.
The new funding will help the university recruit and retain researchers, a spokesman said. A biomedical research institute will be named for the Fralin family and based within the Virginia Tech Carilion Academic Health Center.
Jan Gruber – Looking at synergistic effects in longevity therapies
And his team at Yale-NUS have recently completed a detailed set of studies looking at eleven of the most promising anti-aging single drugs, using nematode worms (C. elegans) as their model organism.
Drug synergy found to increase lifespan in worms
Even though testing the effects of single drugs on health and longevity in various organisms is challenging by itself, and testing multiple drugs and their synergistic effects can be a logistical and statistical nightmare, they found some surprising results, including up to a 96 percent increase in lifespan [1]. As they conclude in their new paper:
Double the stress slows down evolution
Neoliberalism slows down evolution! Just kidding…or am I? 🧐😁🤣🙈.
Like other organisms, bacteria constantly have to fight to survive in hostile living conditions. Together with colleagues in Finland, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön have discovered that bacteria adapt to their environment more slowly and less efficiently as soon as they are exposed to two stress factors rather than one. This is due to mutations in different genes. The slower rate of evolution led to smaller population sizes. This means that evolution can take divergent paths if an organism is exposed to several stress factors.
Bacteria rarely live alone; they are usually part of a community of species that is exposed to various stress factors. They can often react to these factors by adapting to new environmental conditions with astonishing speed. Antibiotics that enter soil and water via waste water and accumulate there in low concentrations can trigger the evolution of resistance in bacteria – even though these concentrations are so low that they inhibit bacterial growth only slightly or not at all. However, bacteria do not only have to fight antibiotics; they also have to deal with predators. This is why they often grow in large colonies that cannot be consumed by predatory organisms.
Typically, scientists investigate the effects that a single stress factor has on an organism. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön and the Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä, Finland, have now investigated the question of how microorganisms behave when they are confronted with more than one stress factor. “We simulated natural environmental conditions in the lab and exposed bacteria to both predators and antibiotics. This allows us to estimate how likely it is to find evolution of resistance to antibiotics outdoors,” explains study leader Lutz Becks.
Apple’s highly anticipated heart monitoring feature is finally available for the Apple Watch
Starting on Thursday, the latest Apple Watch models will be able to take an ECG reading, a kind of heart-rate reading that doctors can use to diagnose heart conditions.
To activate the feature, you need the Apple Watch Series 4 and the latest version of WatchOS, which will be available for download on Thursday.
Apple made it easy to access the feature: turn on the app, hold your finger on the device’s crown for 30 seconds, and it will provide a heart rhythm reading that you can use to figure out whether you need to contact your doctor to get your heart checked out. It saves the reading in a PDF file that you can send to your doctor.
Scientists say they’re one step closer to being able to build a new you, using your own stem cells
One of the biggest obstacles to transplanting organs from one person to another is that the immune system of the person getting the new life-saving organ often tries to reject it. The immune cells see the new material as “foreign” and attacks it, sometimes destroying it.
Right now, the only way to prevent that is by using powerful immunosuppressive drugs to keep the patient’s immune system at bay and protect the new organ. It’s effective, but it also comes with some long-term health consequences.
But now researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel say they may have found a way around that, using the patient’s own stem cells.
LEAF at the Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing
The Fourth Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing (EHA) was held in Brussels on November 8–10, 2018, and we had the opportunity to give talks about aging, advocacy, and engaging new audiences.
The EHA is a conference hosted every two years by Heales, and it sees like-minded people from the research and advocacy community come together to share knowledge and listen to talks from various researchers and other experts in the field. We were very pleased to be invited to give two presentations during the conference and share our knowledge and experience with the audience there.
LEAF staff writer Nicola Bagalà gave a talk about the social issues relating to rejuvenation biotechnology, including the global need for longer, healthier lives, reasons for public skepticism, and the common pitfalls of advocacy.