The slow march of time is inexorable and irreversible, but that doesn’t mean its effects on our bodies have to be etched in stone.
One of the more intriguing ideas in aging research is that growing old isn’t just a matter of damage accumulating over the years.
It may also be a story of lost information – the gradual breakdown of the molecular instructions that tell cells which genes to use and which to keep quiet.
Frog metamorphosis reveals how spinal circuits adapt to new motor demands. Vijatovic et al. demonstrate that the shift from tail-to limb-based locomotion coincides with expansion and diversification of V1 inhibitory neurons. Cross-species comparisons identify a conserved blueprint of tail and limb locomotion, with Engrailed-1 a global regulator of movement frequency.
I recorded this interview 13 years ago.
It should feel dated by now. It doesn’t. It feels like a prophecy.
Back in 2013, Dr. Ann Cavoukian sat down with me as the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and the mind behind Privacy by Design. She told me privacy was not dead. She told me security and freedom were not a trade-off. She told me metadata reveals more about you than the content ever could.
Then she said something I have never been able to shake:
“We have to protect privacy globally, or we protect it nowhere.”
Think about where we are now. Surveillance is the business model. Your data trains systems you will never see. The “nothing to hide” crowd got louder, and the borders she warned about got thinner. She saw all of it coming.
NASA’s vision for a future, long-term sustained presence on the Moon gained more clarity on Tuesday as the agency announced a series of contract awards for future robotic missions.
The agency announced that two companies developing lunar terrain vehicles (LTVs), Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, would each be receiving contracts valued at about $220 million each to finish their designs and get them to the Moon’s surface.
Astrolab’s Crewed Lunar Vehicle (CLV-1) takes after its original design, called FLEX, and Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus vehicle takes heritage from its earlier Eagle design. NASA previously put out a call for LTVs that would be capable of surviving on the Moon for up to 10 years, but revised its requirements to have more readily available options to augment earlier astronaut missions.
A supplement widely promoted for athletic performance may interfere with some of the heart’s beneficial adaptations to exercise, according to new Dalhousie University research published in Scientific Reports.
While these supplements are often promoted to support exercise performance and cardiovascular function, researchers found the combination of sodium nitrate and running prevented several beneficial cardiac improvements normally associated with exercise in females.
Those benefits included changes linked to heart structure, ventricular function and calcium handling in heart cells, which helps regulate contraction and relaxation. The effects were much less pronounced in males, pointing to important sex differences that researchers say are too often overlooked in supplement research.