Dogs may be even more attuned to people’s feelings than we think.
Man’s best friend has a knack for knowing what humans are thinking, reading signs as subtle as jangling keys or a dangling leash. But a new brain-imaging study suggests that dogs may even be able to distinguish between certain negative emotions without using clues like our body language, odor or words. Just looking at people’s faces may be enough, scientists report August 10 in iScience.
Dogs have been shaping—and being shaped by—humans for about 15,000 years, evolving from early partners of hunter-gatherers into an astonishing range of specialized companions. Across the globe, they adapted alongside people to wildly different environments and needs, from powerful Arctic sled dogs and agile rainforest hunters to high-altitude dogs with genetic traits for surviving thin air. Some were even bred for wool, while others played important spiritual or ceremonial roles.
Supporting scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and institutional partners in advancing biotechnology to reverse aging, extend human healthspan, and improve the human condition. This group is sponsored by 100 Plus Capital. http://100pluscap.com/
Dr. Dominique Darvas | The Bioreactor of Youth.
Abstract: For five thousand years, humanity has sought the fountain of youth. Today, the stem cells we expand in our laboratories also dream of it. Before we were born, each of us held it in our veins for a fleeting moment. HALOS Biosciences is engineering it in a bioreactor.
Company profile: HALOS Biosciences is engineering the world’s first lab-grown human fetal plasma: a synthetic, scalable, and ethical recreation of the most regenerative biochemical environment in human biology as a platform technology for cell culture and regenerative medicine.
Short Bio: Dr. Dominique Darvas, CEO MD PhD with a clinical background in emergency medicine and a first doctoral thesis in emergency blood transfusion protocols. Second specialization in anti-aging and longevity medicine at Université Paris Descartes with a second thesis in mitohormesis. Co-founder of Clinique Cleage Genève (anti-aging and aesthetic clinic in Geneva). Direct clinical experience with blood composition, therapeutic protocols, and regenerative medicine. Active in the longevity biotech community as both fellow and counsellor of the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, resident at Vitalist Bay 2025 and speaker at Synbiobeta 2026.
About The Foresight Institute.
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have uncovered how a key Parkinson’s protein called LRRK2 shifts between inactive and active forms, revealing the structural changes that enable certain mutations to push the protein into an overactive state. Mutations that cause LRRK2 to become abnormally active are among the most common genetic causes of Parkinson’s disease. Even without these mutations, some people with Parkinson’s disease have elevated LRRK2 activity.
Understanding exactly how LRRK2 becomes overactive has become increasingly important because it is one of the leading targets for developing treatments that could slow Parkinson’s disease.
Using electron microscopy and biochemistry, the team captured the structure of LRRK2 in different states, enabling them to elucidate how the protein toggles between active and inactive forms. The findings, published in Cell, point toward a new generation of targeted therapies.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a new method for diagnosing lung cancer: a simple, fast, low-cost blood test that does not require DNA sequencing. The method identifies a chemical fingerprint of cancer cells in the blood by analyzing cell-free DNA originating from those cells. In the study, the test distinguished between lung cancer patients and healthy individuals with a sensitivity of 93.1% and a specificity of 90.3% for patients with stage 2–4 disease.
The study was led by Prof. Yuval Ebenstein of the School of Chemistry at the Faculty of Exact Sciences, the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Zimin Institute at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with researchers from JaxBio Technologies, Bnai Zion Medical Center and Sheba Medical Center. The paper is published in the journal npj Precision Oncology.
A new theory of rare recurrent events dispenses with the simplifying assumption that recent events lack memory of previous ones.
Recurring earthquakes, stock-market crashes, catastrophic floods, and other rare events are statistically unlikely but significantly impactful. Their prediction is commonly based on the Arrhenius-Kramers paradigm [1], one of the most broadly applied frameworks in statistical physics. Implicit in this formalism are two strong universal features. First, the distribution of times to reach a rare event is exponential and independent of initial conditions, implying no correlation exists between successive rare events. Second, the mean waiting time increases exponentially with the size of the energy barrier (or effective energy) to be overcome. Despite its applicability, nature sometimes defies the Arrhenius-Kramers paradigm. Proteins can cross energy barriers with nonexponential kinetics [2], rainfall extremes can cluster in time [3] (Fig.