In 2019, the European Union banned chlorpyrifos, allowing three more months of use. Canada’s three-year phaseout risks ongoing harms, as well as dumping of this product on our market.
Back in 2000, Canadian politicians spoke up against commonly used lawn and household chlorpyrifos products when the U.S. banned domestic uses. Despite a year of study, the PMRA had not taken action.
How long will chlorpyrifos persist in commerce?
Circa 2010
Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line’s impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.
HeLa (/ ˈ h iː l ɑː / ; also Hela or hela) is an immortal cell line used in scientific research. It is the oldest and most commonly used human cell line.[1] The line is named after and derived from cervical cancer cells taken on February 8, 1951,[2] from Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American mother of five, who died of cancer on October 4, 1951.[3] The cell line was found to be remarkably durable and prolific, which allows it to be used extensively in scientific study.[4][5]
Scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic HeLa cell. Zeiss Merlin HR-SEM.
The gentic code found in cancer cells could actually be used in crispr to end aging.
Cancer cell immortality leads to massive tumors, metastatic spread, and potentially re-emergence. Researchers are working to determine how cancer cells achieve immortality.
Fireflies.ai, an AI-powered videoconference note-taking tool, has raised $14 million in a series A funding round.
Some might like.
The research team of Gero, a Singapore-based biotech company in collaboration with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo NY, has presented a study in Nature Communications on associations between aging and the loss of the ability to recover from stresses.
Recently, scientists have reported the first promising examples of biological age reversal by experimental interventions. Indeed, many biological clock types properly predict more years of life for those who choose healthy lifestyles or quit unhealthy ones, such as smoking. Still unknown is how quickly biological age is changing over time for the same individual, and distinguishing between the transient fluctuations and the genuine bioage change trend.
The emergence of big biomedical data involving multiple measurements from the same subjects brings about a whole range of novel opportunities and practical tools to understand and quantify the aging process in humans. A team of experts in biology and biophysics presented results of a detailed analysis of dynamic properties of the fluctuations of physiological indices along individual aging trajectories.
Might interest some.
A new study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London has established that Intermittent Fasting (IF) is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice, in what the researchers hope has the potential to slow the advance of cognitive decline in older people.
The study, published today in Molecular Biology, found that a calorie restricted diet via every other day fasting was an effective means of promoting Klotho gene expression in mice. Klotho, which is often referred to as the “longevity gene” has now been shown in this study to play a central role in the production of hippocampal adult-born new neurons or neurogenesis.
Adult-born hippocampal neurons are important for memory formation and their production declines with age, explaining in part cognitive decline in older people.
Is this the reason why the general public view the emerging field of regenerative medicine with such scepticism? Has a combined cultural history of being bombarded with empty promises of longevity made us numb to such a prospect? Possibly, although I believe it might go deeper than old fashioned scepticism. After all, our species is hardly a stranger to believing something if we desire for it to be true, regardless of how much evidence is presented to us.
Maybe we are simply experiencing just another example of humans finding dramatic change to our way of life hard to comprehend and accept. After all, practically every major change in our recent history was largely believed to be an impossibility by the general public, right up until the point that it became the norm. Everything from the aeroplane to the internet was seen as science fiction, but yet today they are integral parts of our lives. Now, this is not to say that everything the general public is sceptical of will inevitably turn out to prove them wrong, but lessons from our history do show that when it comes to scientific progress, the public will not believe it until they can see it.
Some would believe that scepticism towards regenerative medicine strikes at something much deeper in our psych, as it threatened to fundamentally change our entire outlook on the world. For our entire lives, we have been taught by our interactions with others exactly how life is supposed to progress. You are supposed to suffer a gradual decay of mental and physical abilities, until eventually you die. That is just how it is, and if that were to ever change then we would all have to change how we think about the world. The concept of a 125 year old with the appearance of a 25 year old seems bizarre to us right now, and to many the idea of ever lasting health just goes against their fundamental beliefs of how the world functions to such an extent that they cannot comprehend anything different. Some would even go far as to defend the ageing process as being an integral part of life, displaying what can only be described as ‘Stockholm syndrome with extra steps’.
Of 25000+ people who tested positive for #COVID19 in Germany, 8% had very high viral loads; about a third of these had little to no symptoms. The results suggest asymptomatic people can be expected to be as infectious as hospitalized patients.
Read more from Science:
Two elementary parameters for quantifying viral infection and shedding are viral load and whether samples yield a replicating virus isolate in cell culture. We examined 25381 German SARS-CoV-2 cases, including 6110 from test centres attended by pre-symptomatic, asymptomatic, and mildly-symptomatic (PAMS) subjects, 9519 who were hospitalised, and 1533 B.1.1.7 lineage infections. The youngest had mean log10 viral load 0.5 (or less) lower than older subjects and an estimated ~78% of the peak cell culture replication probability, due in part to smaller swab sizes and unlikely to be clinically relevant. Viral loads above 109 copies per swab were found in 8% of subjects, one-third of whom were PAMS, with mean age 37.6. We estimate 4.3 days from onset of shedding to peak viral load (8.1) and cell culture isolation probability (0.75). B.1.1.7 subjects had mean log10 viral load 1.05 higher than non-B.1.1.7, with estimated cell culture replication probability 2.6 times higher.
Respiratory disease transmission is highly context dependent and difficult to quantify or predict at the individual level. This is especially the case when transmission from pre-symptomatic, asymptomatic, and mildly-symptomatic (PAMS) subjects is frequent, as with SARS-CoV-2 (1–8). Transmission is therefore typically inferred from population-level information and summarized as a single overall average, known as the basic reproductive number, R0. While R0 is an essential and critical parameter for understanding and managing population-level disease dynamics, it is a resultant, downstream characterisation of transmission. With regard to SARS-CoV-2, many finer-grained upstream questions regarding infectiousness remain unresolved or unaddressed. Three categories of uncertainty are 1) differences in infectiousness among individuals or groups such as PAMS subjects, according to age, gender, vaccination status, etc.
Researchers have also long been chasing lithium-air batteries that could realize a huge jump in energy density. And beyond lithium, there are other entirely different chemistries in development out there. At some point, one of them should click for one application or another.
Lithium-ion or not, an explosion of grid-scale battery installations is coming as prices continue to fall. The nascent art of lithium-ion battery recycling is also sure to mature and expand, improving the sustainability of these batteries by recovering and resetting their chemical building blocks.
Adopt cold-fusion-like skepticism of any of these future-looking statements as you please, but today’s batteries aren’t those of 20 or even 10 years ago. The same thing is bound to be true in another 10 years—even if that progress doesn’t come in a single, giant leap with global fanfare.