Despite its checkered reputation, cryptocurrency is being considered by a handful of academics as a means to funnel funds into translational research. Is the trend likely to spread? Laura DeFrancesco and Ariel Klevecz investigate.
Hevolution Foundation, a non-profit organisation that provides grants and early-stage investments to incentivise research and entrepreneurship in healthspan science, and the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) have today announced an international research grant programme to enable early-career investigators to conduct research into healthspan-expanding therapeutics and treatments.
Longevity. Technology: Founded in the belief that every person has the right to live a longer, healthier life, Hevolution Foundation is on a mission to drive efforts to extend healthy human lifespan and understand the processes of aging. With a focus on aging as a treatable process, the Foundation aims to increase the number of aging-related treatments on the market, compress the timeline of drug development and increase accessibility to therapeutics that extend healthspan.
A non-profit organisation headquartered in Riyadh, with an annual budget of up to $1 billion, Hevolution Foundation plans to open hubs in North America and other global locations to support a cutting-edge, global ecosystem of talent to propel aging and geroscience research forward and achieve medical breakthroughs to help humanity live healthier, longer.
Are you ready to put mini robots in your mouth?
Do you get lazy about brushing your teeth? Well, soon microbots could do the whole thing for you. A multidisciplinary team at the University of Pennsylvania has created a novel automated way to perform brushing and flossing through robotics, according to a press release published by the institution last month.
The development could be particularly useful for those who lack the manual dexterity to clean their teeth effectively themselves.
Continue reading “Shapeshifting Microrobots Can Brush and Floss Teeth” »
Summary: Newly discovered sensory neurons send information related to stress and metabolism from adipose fat tissue to the brain.
Source: Scripps Research Institute.
What did the fat say to the brain? For years, it was assumed that hormones passively floating through the blood were the way that a person’s fat—called adipose tissue—could send information related to stress and metabolism to the brain.
Scientists study the immortal jellyfish to learn about its DNA reproduction, life cycle and telomeres. New research reveals its special genes.
Some neuroscientists believe we will never solve the hard problem. Just as a goldfish will never be able to read a newspaper or write a sonnet, Homo sapiens, these scholars argue, are cognitively closed to such knowledge. It is a great but impenetrable mystery. The psychologist Steven Pinker calls the hard problem “the ultimate tease… orever beyond our conceptual grasp.” Echoing the view that consciousness remains outside the limits of human comprehension, one of the best entries in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is the following:
“Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself.”
Others believe that if we just keep solving the easy problems, the hard problem will disappear. By locating and understanding what we call the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) — neural mechanisms that researchers say are responsible for consciousness, typically gleaned using brain scans or neurosurgery to compare conscious and unconscious states — we will march ever closer to solving the mystery, until one day there is nothing left to solve. Defining an NCC starts as a process of elimination: the spinal cord and cerebellum can be ruled out, for instance, because if both are lost to stroke or trauma, nothing happens to the victim’s consciousness. They still perceive and experience their surroundings as they did before. The best candidates for NCC (so far) are a subset of neurons in a posterior hot zone of the brain that comprises the parietal, occipital and temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex. When the posterior hot zone is electrically stimulated, as it sometimes is during surgery for brain tumors, a person will report experiencing a menagerie of thoughts, memories, sensations, visual and auditory hallucinations, and an eerie feeling of surrealism or familiarity. So if the consciousness illusion is located anywhere, it might be in this mysterious region of the posterior cortex.
Managing Complex Transplant (and Xenotransplant) Cases Globally — Dr Robert A Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS, Director, NYU Langone Health
Dr. Robert A. Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS, (https://nyulangone.org/doctors/1467404137/robert-montgomery) is the Director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, and Chair and a Professor in their Department of Surgery, where he oversees a diverse team of medical and surgical specialists who provide a wide variety of surgery and transplantation services including bone marrow, heart, kidney, liver, lung, and facial transplantation.
Circa 2016 This gives more exacting detail of the Tasmanian devils resistance to cancer.
A recently emerged infectious cancer has caused the near extinction of the Tasmanian devil, but some populations persist. Here, Epstein et al. provide evidence for possible resistance via rapid evolution in two genomic regions that contain cancer-related immune response genes.
Researchers have developed a new chip-based beam steering technology that provides a promising route to small, cost-effective, and high-performance lidar systems. Lidar, or light detection and ranging, uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object. It is used in a wide range of applications such as autonomous driving, 3D holography, biomedical sensing, free-space optical communications, and virtual reality.
“Optical beam steering is a key technology for lidar systems, but conventional mechanical-based beam steering systems are bulky, expensive, sensitive to vibration, and limited in speed,” said research team leader Hao Hu from the Technical University of Denmark. “Although devices known as chip-based optical phased arrays (OPAs) can quickly and precisely steer light in a non-mechanical way, so far, these devices have had poor beam quality and a field of view typically below 100 degrees.”
Too much screen use has been linked to obesity and psychological problems. Now a new study has identified a new problem—a study in fruit flies suggests our basic cellular functions could be impacted by the blue light emitted by these devices. These results are published in Frontiers in Aging.
“Excessive exposure to blue light from everyday devices, such as TVs, laptops, and phones, may have detrimental effects on a wide range of cells in our body, from skin and fat cells, to sensory neurons,” said Dr. Jadwiga Giebultowicz, a professor at the Department of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University and senior author of this study. “We are the first to show that the levels of specific metabolites—chemicals that are essential for cells to function correctly—are altered in fruit flies exposed to blue light.”
“Our study suggests that avoidance of excessive blue light exposure may be a good anti-aging strategy,” advised Giebultowicz.
