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This is a timeline of life extension, attempting to describe significant and illustrative events on the topic, covering advocacy, experiments, some scientific research, and industry. For more content on life extension research, visit Timeline of senescence research and Timeline of calorie restriction.

A new type of blood test can detect a hidden toxin behind Alzheimer’s disease years before a patient shows any symptoms of memory loss or confusion.

If the proof-of-concept can be further tested and scaled, the test could significantly speed up diagnosis, giving millions of patients answers and access to proper care long before their disease progresses.

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) created the novel blood test. It’s designed to pick up on a molecular precursor in the blood that can cause proteins to irregularly fold and clump in the brain, ultimately forming amyloid beta (Aβ) plaques.

Studying the large-scale structure of our galaxy isn’t easy. We don’t have a clear view of the Milky Way’s shape and features like we do of other galaxies, largely because we live within it. But we do have some advantages. From within, we’re able to carry out close-up surveys of the Milky Way’s stellar population and its chemical compositions. That gives researchers the tools they need to compare our own galaxy to the many millions of others in the Universe.

This week, an international team of researchers from the USA, UK, and Chile released a paper that does just that. They dug through a catalogue of ten thousand galaxies produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, searching for galaxies with similar attributes to our own.

They discovered that the Milky Way has twins – many of them – but just as many that are only superficially similar, with fundamental differences buried in the data. What they discovered has implications for the future evolution of our own galaxy.

In April 2016, Waseem Qasim, a professor of cell and gene therapy, was intrigued by a new scientific paper that described a revolutionary way to manipulate DNA: basic gene editing. The articlepublished by David Liu’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, described a version of Crispr gene editing that allowed for more precise changes than ever before.