These findings […] strongly suggest that high levels of iron in the blood reduces our healthy years of life, and keeping these levels in check could prevent age-related damage.
Genes linked to ageing that could help explain why some people age at different rates to others have been identified by scientists.
The international study using genetic data from more than a million people suggests that maintaining healthy levels of iron in the blood could be a key to ageing better and living longer.
The findings could accelerate the development of drugs to reduce age-related diseases, extend healthy years of life and increase the chances of living to old age free of disease, the researchers say.
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Scientists find that A. echinatior ants have biomineral armour to help them in battle with other ants and protect them from pathogens. 😃
Ants are pretty organised little creatures. Highly social insects, they know how to forage, build complicated nests, steal your pantry snacks, and generally look after the queens and the colony, all by working together.
Leaf-cutter ants turn that cooperation up several notches. Leaf-cutter ant colonies like Acromyrmex echinatior can contain millions of ants, split into four castes that all have different roles to maintain a garden of fungus that the ants eat.
These farming ants might make a top-tier team of gardeners, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get into the occasional scrap, and living in such large groups usually also means facing an increased risk of pathogens.
Whole-body positron emission tomography combined with computed tomography (PET/CT) is a cornerstone in the management of lymphoma (cancer in the lymphatic system). PET/CT scans are used to diagnose disease and then to monitor how well patients respond to therapy. However, accurately classifying every single lymph node in a scan as healthy or cancerous is a complex and time-consuming process. Because of this, detailed quantitative treatment monitoring is often not feasible in clinical day-to-day practice.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have recently developed a deep-learning model that can perform this task automatically. This could free up valuable physician time and make quantitative PET/CT treatment monitoring possible for a larger number of patients.
To acquire PET/CT scans, patients are injected with a sugar molecule marked with radioactive fluorine-18 (18 F-fluorodeoxyglucose). When the fluorine atom decays, it emits a positron that instantly annihilates with an electron in its immediate vicinity. This annihilation process emits two back-to-back photons, which the scanner detects and uses to infer the location of the radioactive decay.
We know that spending hour after hour sitting down isn’t good for us, but just how much exercise is needed to counteract the negative health impact of a day at a desk? A new study suggests about 30–40 minutes per day of building up a sweat should do it.
Up to 40 minutes of “moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity” every day is about the right amount to balance out 10 hours of sitting still, the research says – although any amount of exercise or even just standing up helps to some extent.
That’s based on a meta-analysis across nine previous studies, involving a total of 44,370 people in four different countries who were wearing some form of fitness tracker.
Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Hugh Herr, Associate Professor MIT Media Lab and head of the Biomechatronics group, @MIT Media Lab.
Ira Pastor comments:
Dr. Hugh Herr, is Associate Professor MIT Media Lab, heads the Biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab, as well as the Center for Extreme Bionics at MIT, and is creating bionic limbs that emulate the function of natural limbs.
In 2011, TIME magazine coined him the “Leader of the Bionic Age” because of his revolutionary work in the emerging field of biomechatronics – technology that marries human physiology with electromechanics.
A double amputee himself, Dr Herr is responsible for breakthrough advances in bionic limbs that provide greater mobility and new hope to those with physical disabilities. He is the author and co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and patents, chronicling the science and technology behind his many innovations. These publications span the scientific fields of biomechanics and biological motion control, as well as the technological innovations of human rehabilitation and augmentation technologies.
Dr. Herr’s Biomechatronics group has developed gait-adaptive knee prostheses for transfemoral amputees and variable impedance ankle-foot orthoses for patients suffering from drop foot, a gait pathology caused by stroke, cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis. He has also designed his own bionic limbs, the world’s first bionic lower leg called the BiOM Ankle System.
