Our longevity may actually turn out to have a hard limit. In a new study this week, scientists show that the long rise in our collective life expectancy seen during the 20th century has started to slow down as of late. The findings suggest that focusing on simply expanding our lifespan might be short-sighted, the researchers say.
Tiffani Gay, 16, is trying to make the world a better place for those with vision impairments.
Tiffani Gay created a visor to help the visually impaired.
Summary: A new study has shown that conscious thought relies on synchronized brain rhythms to maintain communication between sensory and cognitive brain regions. Under general anesthesia, this rhythm-based communication breaks down, disrupting the brain’s ability to detect and process surprising stimuli.
The research provides evidence that specific brain frequencies enable conscious awareness by linking the front and back of the brain, where cognitive and sensory functions reside. This finding sheds light on the neural mechanisms of consciousness and offers insights into how anesthesia disrupts our ability to perceive and respond to unexpected events.
Summary: A recent study has mapped how molecules in food interact with gut bacteria, revealing why people respond differently to the same diets. By examining 150 dietary compounds, researchers found that these molecules can reshape gut microbiomes in some individuals, while having little effect in others.
This breakthrough could enable personalized nutrition strategies to better manage health risks. The findings offer a deeper understanding of the gut microbiome’s role in health and disease.
Ian Pamerleau: “We used multiple observations made with Dawn data as motivation for finding an ice-rich crust that resisted crater relaxation on Ceres. Different surface features (e.g., pits, domes and landslides, etc.) suggest the near subsurface of Ceres contains a lot of ice.”
Was the dwarf planet Ceres once an ocean world like Europa and Enceladus? If so, how did it become the cratered and icy world we see today? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of researchers from Purdue University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) investigated the formation and evolution of the internal geological processes of Ceres and how this could help scientists better understand ocean worlds throughout the solar system.
“We think that there’s lots of water-ice near Ceres surface, and that it gets gradually less icy as you go deeper and deeper,” said Dr. Mike Sori, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University and a co-author on the study. “People used to think that if Ceres was very icy, the craters would deform quickly over time, like glaciers flowing on Earth, or like gooey flowing honey. However, we’ve shown through our simulations that ice can be much stronger in conditions on Ceres than previously predicted if you mix in just a little bit of solid rock.”
Continue reading “How Ceres Challenges Our Understanding of Icy Bodies” »
The 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who discovered microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that help to control how genes are expressed in multicellular organisms.
MicroRNAs perform a multitude of tasks in complex organisms, from…
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun identified a class of tiny molecules that have a crucial role in controlling gene expression.
Continue reading “Medicine Nobel awarded for gene-regulating ‘microRNAs’” »
A novel peptide could provide a more targeted approach to Alzheimer’s treatment by inhibiting two key Tau protein regions.
AI-powered assistants are set to become a part of daily life, offering guidance and reminders through body-worn devices that blend AI with XR.
Abstract Over the course of the twentieth century, human life expectancy at birth rose in high-income nations by approximately 30 years, largely driven by advances in public health and medicine.
In the twentieth century, human life expectancy rose dramatically. Based on the past three decades of observed mortality in the eight countries with the longest-lived populations and in Hong Kong and the United States, Olshansky et al. propose that, without medical breakthroughs that slow aging, radical lifespan extension is implausible in this century.
Canción perteneciente al álbum ‘Fire of Unknown Origin’ (1981). Letra del escritor de fantasía Michael Moorcock.
