Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute have made progress in the quest to rejuvenate the aging immune system by identifying the factors responsible for the age-related decline of the thymus.

The thymus shrinks as we age

The thymus is one of the most important organs in the body, and it is where thymocytes produced in the bone marrow travel to become new T cells before being trained in the lymph nodes to become the defenders of the adaptive immune system. However, as we get older, the thymus increasingly turns to fat and starts to shrink, causing its ability to produce new T cells to fall dramatically. This process is known as thymic involution and actually begins shortly after puberty, so this is one aspect of aging that begins fairly early in life, although it is many decades later before its decline causes serious health issues.

A grid full of 10 giant coaxial octocopters, each with a pilot on board, racing each other head-to-head through the air at speeds up to 200 km/h (120 mph)? That’s exactly what the Airspeeder racing series is set to introduce in 2020 with the aim of being a kind of Formula One for flying cars.

The emerging field of synthetic biology—designing new biological components and systems—is revolutionizing medicine. Through the genetic programming of living cells, researchers are creating engineered systems that intelligently sense and respond to diverse environments, leading to more specific and effective solutions in comparison to current molecular-based therapeutics.

At the same time, cancer immunotherapy—using the body’s immune defenses to fight cancer—has transformed cancer treatment over the past decade, but only a handful of solid tumors have responded, and systemic therapy often results in significant side effects. Designing therapies that can induce a potent, anti–tumor immune response within a solid tumor without triggering systemic toxicity has posed a significant challenge.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) announced today that they are addressing this challenge by engineering a strain of non–pathogenic bacteria that can colonize solid tumors in mice and safely deliver potent immunotherapies, acting as a Trojan Horse that treats tumors from within. The therapy led not only to complete tumor regression in a mouse model of lymphoma, but also significant control of distant, uninjected tumor lesions. Their findings are published today in Nature Medicine.

http://undoing-aging.org/videos/graham-pawelec-presenting-at…jA8AFapRLc

____________

Attackers would use the pages to post malicious URLs, disguising the links as news or mobile applications. Facebook said it removed the pages — which collectively had hundreds of thousands of followers — after notification from researchers…

If we don’t know how AIs make decisions, how can we trust what they decide?

• By Shohini Kundu on July 3, 2019

A new system called BrainNet lets three people play a Tetris-like game using a brain-to-brain interface.

This is the first demonstration of two things: a brain-to-brain network of more than two people, and a person being able to both receive and send information to others using only their brain.

“Humans are social beings who communicate with each other to cooperate and solve problems that none of us can solve on our own,” says corresponding author Rajesh Rao, a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and a co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington.

Montgomery worked closely with the Apollo astronauts to train them to use handheld tools and equipment on the moon.

How do the communities of microbes living in our gastrointestinal systems affect our health? Carnegie’s Will Ludington was part of a team that helped answer this question.

For nearly a century, evolutionary biologists have probed how genes encode an individual’s chances for success—or fitness—in a specific environment.

In order to reveal a potential evolutionary trajectory biologists measure the interactions between genes to see which combinations are most fit. An organism that is evolving should take the most fit path. This concept is called a fitness landscape, and various mathematical techniques have been developed to describe it.