Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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To answer this question, an internal team of scientists, consisting of researchers affiliated with the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, and researchers from Nanjing University decided to modify both the Insulin and the rapamycin pathways of a group of C.elegans worms, expecting to see a cumulative result of a 130% increase in lifespan. However, instead of seeing a cumulative effect in lifespan, the worms lived five times longer than they normally would.

“The synergistic extension is really wild. The effect isn’t one plus one equals two, it’s one plus one equals five. Our findings demonstrate that nothing in nature exists in a vacuum; in order to develop the most effective anti-aging treatments we have to look at longevity networks rather than individual pathways.” – Jarad Rollins of Nanjing University.

What could this mean for human regenerative medicine? Humans are not worms, however on a cellular level they do possess very similar biology. Both the insulin pathway and the rapamycin pathway are what is known as ‘conserved’ between humans and C.elegans, meaning that these pathways have been maintained in both organisms. In the distant past, both humans and C.elegans had a common ancestor, in exactly the same way as humans and Chimpanzees have a common ancestor. Evolution has changed our bodies significantly over the millions of years that humans and C.elegans have diverged from one another, but a lot of our fundamental biological functions remain largely unchanged.

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Using an advanced microscopy technique, Texas A&M researchers have uncovered a twin boundary defect in a soft polymer that has never been observed before.

Texas A&M University scientists have for the first time revealed a single microscopic defect called a “twin” in a soft-block copolymer using an advanced electron microscopy technique. This defect may be exploited in the future to create materials with novel acoustic and photonic properties.

“This defect is like a black swan — something special going on that isn’t typical,” said Edwin Thomas, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Although we chose a certain polymer for our study, I think the twin defect will be fairly universal across a bunch of similar soft matter systems, like oils, surfactants, biological materials, and natural polymers. Therefore, our findings will be valuable to diverse research across the soft matter field.”

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Early in the testing phase of Apple’s M1 chipset, a milestone new product for the company, the processor was installed in a batch of Mac computers and given to staffers working on applications that demanded heavy processing power. It was a pivotal moment: the first time Apple had made its own chip for any of its computers, shifting away from years of using a one-size-fits-all option from Intel.

After multiple teams tested the devices for a few hours while working on tasks, they reported lightning-fast performance but nearly all flagged an apparent problem. The MacBook Pro’s battery indicator, featured on the upper right hand corner of the computers, was broken. It had barely moved despite running power-hungry programs, the company told CNN Business.

The gag, of course, is that the battery indicator was working just fine. The M1 chip was so efficient, according to Apple, that it showed no real strain — one of several major selling points for products that now carry the chip. (Apple promises 20 hours of battery life for its 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro — what it says is the longest battery in any Mac to date).

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Amazon says it will be ‘even more seamless for customers’.

Amazon is shutting down its standalone Prime Now delivery app, with its speedy two-hour delivery options moving exclusively into the company’s main app and website, the company announced today. Prime Now services have already moved into the main app in India, Japan, and Singapore, while in other countries Amazon is already directing Prime Now users into its main app and website via a pop-up, CNBC notes. The standalone Prime Now app and website will be retired by the end of the year.

Originally launched in 2014, Prime Now was designed to offer deliveries of essential items within hours rather than days for Prime members. The service was initially available in just a small number of cities, but has since expanded to over 5000 locations around the world, CNBC notes. Writing in a blog post, Amazon’s vice president of grocery Stephenie Landry said shutting down the separate app will “make this experience even more seamless for customers.”

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**Low birth weight tied to accelerated aging in boys**

A study in Pediatrics found that boys who weigh less than 2 pounds at birth aged faster and were five years older biologically in their early 30s, compared with boys who were born at the same time but whose birth weights were normal. The findings were based on the genes of 45 individuals who were extremely low birth weight and those of 47 whose birth weights were normal.

MONDAY, May 17, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Boys who weigh less than 2 pounds at birth don’t age as well as their normal-weight peers, a long-term study finds.

Canadian researchers have followed a group of extremely low birth weight (ELBW) babies and their normal-weight counterparts since 1977.

Continue reading “Boys Born Very Prematurely May Age Faster as Men” | >

The modern idea that nature is discrete originated in Ancient Greek atomism. Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus all argued that nature was composed of what they called ἄτομος (átomos) or ‘indivisible individuals’. Nature was, for them, the totality of discrete atoms in motion. There was no creator god, no immortality of the soul, and nothing static (except for the immutable internal nature of the atoms themselves). Nature was atomic matter in motion and complex composition – no more, no less.

Despite its historical influence, however, atomism was eventually all but wiped out by Platonism, Aristotelianism and the Christian tradition that followed throughout the Middle Ages. Plato told his followers to destroy Democritus’ books whenever they found them, and later the Christian tradition made good on this demand. Today, nothing but a few short letters from Epicurus remain.

Atomism was not finished, however. It reemerged in 1417, when an Italian book-hunter named Poggio Bracciolini discovered a copy of an ancient poem in a remote monastery: De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), written by Lucretius (c99–55 BCE), a Roman poet heavily influenced by Epicurus. This book-length philosophical poem in epic verse puts forward the most detailed and systematic account of ancient materialism that we’ve been fortunate enough to inherit. In it, Lucretius advances a breathtakingly bold theory on foundational issues in everything from physics to ethics, aesthetics, history, meteorology and religion. Against the wishes and best efforts of the Christian church, Bracciolini managed to get it into print, and it soon circulated across Europe.

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On a good day, things exit through the anus. But in rodents and pigs in respiratory distress, oxygen can be absorbed by tissues in the rectum, helping the animals recover, a new study suggests. The scientists behind the research propose that flushing oxygen into the rectum could one day help save human lives if conventional ventilation methods are unavailable.

“It looks like a crazy idea,” says Sean Colgan, a gastroenterologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved in the study. “But if you look at the data, it’s actually a very compelling story.”

Most mammals breathe through their mouths and noses and send oxygen to their body via the lungs. A few aquatic animals, including sea cucumbers and catfish, breathe through their intestines, and the intestinal tissues of humans can readily absorb pharmaceuticals. But no one knew whether oxygen could enter the bloodstream via mammalian intestines.

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Scientists said the findings indicated that the virus likely recently jumped from animals to humans, but stressed that additional studies are necessary.

Scientists have reportedly discovered a new kind of coronavirus that is believed to have originated in dogs – in what may be the eighth unique form of the bug known to cause disease in humans.

Researchers in a study published in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal said their findings from patients hospitalized with pneumonia in 2017–2018 underscored the public health threat of animal coronaviruses, Reuters reported.

They said they had tested nasal swab samples taken from 301 pneumonia patients at a hospital in the east Malaysian state of Sarawak.

Continue reading “Scientists find new human coronavirus that originated in dogs” | >