Lifeboat Foundation

In the style of Sleeping Beauty, Tardigrades, the adorable, tiny animals that can withstand extreme environments and are also known as “water bears,” can withstand freezing without losing their vitality. Despite harsh environmental conditions, tardigrades are very adaptable. According to Ralph Schill, a professor at the University of Stuttgart, anhydrobiotic (dry) tardigrades can survive for many years without absorbing water. In a frozen state, there was no clear indication of whether aging increased or decreased. It turns out that frozen tardigrades don’t age.

Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are nematodes. They have the same gait as bears, but that’s about the only thing that connects them to bears. As a result of their adaptability to rapidly changing environmental conditions, tardigrades, which are barely one millimeter in size, can freeze in extreme cold and dry out in extreme heat. Rather than dying, Schill explains that they fall into a deep sleep. A cell organism experiences different types of stress when it freezes or dries out. Despite this, tardigrades are equally capable of surviving both extremes of heat and cold. No obvious signs of life can be seen on them. In this state of rest, the animal’s internal clock might be slowed down, which raises the question of whether it ages.

Schill and his team investigated the aging process of dried tardigrades several years ago, which waited in their habitat for rain for many years. Grimm brothers’ fairytales depict a princess who is deeply asleep. A young prince kisses her 100 years later, and she awakes looking as beautiful and young as ever. In a dried state, tardigrades are the same, and therefore this hypothesis is called the “Sleeping Beauty” hypothesis. Schill explains that the internal clock stops during inactivity and resumes once the organism has been reactivated. Accordingly, the researcher explained that tardigrades, whose lifespan usually lasts only a few months without rest, can survive for decades.

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Commonly assumed to be silent, 53 animals have had their ‘voices’ added to a family tree of vocalizations in an effort to determine when acoustic communication emerged in evolutionary history.

The species that are finally being heard come from four different animal clades, including 50 turtle species, the South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa), a limbless amphibian called Cayenne caecilian (Typhlonectes compressicauda), and a reptile from New Zealand known as a tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus).

“All recorded species were found to possess a varied acoustic repertoire comprising a number of different sounds,” the authors conclude.

Turning back the clock on aging may be attainable via a controversial method known as “reprogramming.” But other experts in the field are skeptical.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of skeletal F-actin show solvent-driven rearrangements governing actin filament assembly and aging with potential application in design of drugs and small molecules for imaging and therapy.

From a Transhumanist Perspective.

The overexpression of a gene tied to cell division and the structure and function of neurons may prevent and protect against cognitive decline in both mice and humans with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), according to a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

The gene, Kinesin-5 or KIF11, does this despite the presence of amyloid beta (Abeta), the main component of plaques in the brains of those with AD. Scientists have traditionally targeted the plaques when looking for treatments for the fatal disease. In this case, they went around them.

The study was published online last week in the journal iScience.

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Spaceships getting damaged or crashing is common story in science fiction but it’s also terrifyingly common with real spaceships. So what do we if our spaceship gets damaged?

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If you thought it was easy to analyze brain cells, think again.

When you take a brain tissue sample, all that your analysis would normally show you is an average for all the cell types present. And since there are a whole lot of cell types in our brain— neurons and others—you’ll get a sort of cell smoothie, which makes it difficult if not impossible to tell the cells apart, let alone study them.

It is like wanting to know how many green M&M’s there are in a bowl, but instead just getting told how many colors there are. You are not really getting the answer you wanted.