A fascinating study from scientists at Rockefeller University has shed new light on a deep brain mechanism that can stimulate awareness and cognition. The research homes in on a collection of giant neurons in the brain that seem to be able to modulate stimulation of the entire central nervous system.
A new study shows that mice reprogram their gut tissues to repair injury rolling them from an aged state back to a more fetal-like one.
Getting old is one thing; getting old in a healthy way is another. Many elderly people suffer from all kinds of diseases and disorders, ranging from cardiovascular problems and diabetes to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep the body young as we grow older to prevent disease associated with old age? For instance, would it be possible to slow down or reverse the aging processes in the cells of our body?
This question has gained a lot of interest from scientists, and their research has led to the discovery of the important role that the shortening of telomeres, the protective caps on our DNA, plays in aging. While this has been described in recent posts on the LEAF blog, I would like to address another mechanism that has seen an interesting leap forward, more or less by accident: rejuvenation of tissue.
Rejuvenation is a term that has recently been used in the context of senolytics. These are newly discovered compounds that decrease the number of senescent cells in the body. For the purpose of this article, I define rejuvenation as the resetting of a genetic program within a cell or tissue, from adult back to fetal. Typically, cells develop from stem cells, which are cells that can differentiate into many different cell types. During cell differentiation, certain genetic programs in the stem cell are turned off, while others are turned on to make the formation of a specific cell type possible. During rejuvenation, this process is reversed: differentiated cells are reset to an embryonic state.
Designer babies are on the horizon after an influential group of scientists concluded that it could be ‘morally permissible’ to genetically engineer human embryos.
In a new report which opens the door to a change in the law, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, said that DNA editing could become an option for parents wanting to ‘influence the genetic characteristics of their child.’
Although it would be largely used to cure devastating genetic illnesses, or predispositions to cancers and dementia, the experts said they were not ruling out cosmetic uses such as making tweaks to increase height or changing eye or hair colour, if it would make a child more successful.
Think you’re totally in control of your thoughts? Maybe not as much as you think, according to a new San Francisco State University study that examines how thoughts that lead to actions enter our consciousness.
While we can “decide” to think about certain things, other information—including activities we have learned like counting—can enter our subconscious and cause us to think about something else, whether we want to or not. Psychologists call these dispositions “sets,” explains SF State Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella, one of four authors on a new study that examines how sets influence what we end up thinking about.
Morsella and the other researchers conducted two experiments with SF State students. In the first experiment, 35 students were told beforehand to not count an array of objects presented to them. In 90 percent of the trials, students counted the objects involuntarily. In a second experiment, students were presented with differently colored geometric shapes and given the option of either naming the colors (one set) or counting the shapes (a different set). Even though students chose one over the other, around 40 percent thought about both sets.
http://undoing-aging.org/videos/doug-ethell-presenting-at-undoing-aging-2018
Btw: the facebook event page for Undoing Aging 2019 is already up fb.com/events/2044104465916196/
Researchers involved in the Blue Brain Project – which aims to create a digital reconstruction of the brain – have announced the deployment of a next-generation supercomputer.
Credit: HPE
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Swiss university and research institute developing the Blue Brain Project, has announced the selection of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build a next-generation supercomputer. This will model and simulate the mammalian brain in greater detail than ever before. The powerful new machine, called “Blue Brain 5”, will be dedicated to simulation neuroscience, in particular simulation-based research, analysis and visualisation, to advance the understanding of the brain.
Exciting new research from Yale University has revealed a new method that could potentially objectively diagnose if a person is suffering through the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease using a non-invasive PET scan.
A major roadblock slowing down effective Alzheimer’s research is our inability to easily, or clearly, diagnose the disease at its early stages. Several blood tests are being explored that can identify biomarkers signaling the early presence of the disease, but nothing has proved conclusive enough to move into general clinical use.
The new Yale University innovation uses PET imaging technology to evaluate cognitive decline by effectively measuring how much synaptic loss or degradation has occurred in a patient’s brain. To quantify a person’s “synaptic density” the researchers homed in on a protein called SV2A. This protein is found in nearly all healthy synapses, but as those connections degrade, so does the presence of SV2A.
