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In a study published Nov. 21 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, researchers have uncovered significant genetic connections between human language abilities and musical rhythm skills, providing new insights into the biological underpinnings of these fundamental human traits.

The study brought together leading experts in the areas of musicality genetics and language genetics from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in close collaboration with researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

The study revealed overlapping genetic underpinnings between rhythm-related skills and language-related traits, including dyslexia. Multiple datasets were used from over 1 million individuals. By applying advanced multivariate methods, the researchers were able to identify common genetic factors and explore their biological and evolutionary significance.

A research team from the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health (SINH) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed that aging specifically impairs the generation of CD8⁺ tissue resident memory T cells (TRM) and thus compromises the antitumor defensive activity of aged CD8⁺ T cells. The study is published in Nature Aging.

With the aging process, the risk of developing cancer significantly increases. In recent years, it has been reported that immune aging has an important impact on tumor development. Immune aging is a degenerative change in the immune system that occurs with aging, leading to a decline in immune response and ultimately triggering diseases including tumors.

Within the immune system, CD8⁺ T cells are the main defensive adaptive immune cells protecting against tumor cells. However, the mechanism by which aging impairs the antitumor response of CD8⁺ T cells was not previously understood.

CRISPR is a way off being used in human therapeutics, but a new discovery could unlock its potential.

The molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying ovarian aging are incompletely understood. Here the authors provide single-nuclei RNA and ATAC-seq of human ovarian tissue from four young and four reproductively aged donors, revealing coordinated transcriptomic and epigenomic changes across cell types and highlighting a role for mTOR signaling in reproductive aging.

In case you thought science was going to take a day off, researchers have just figured out a way of reversing brain aging – in fruit flies, but still.

They previously did something similar in lab mice, claiming to “reverse and repair” damage done by Alzheimer’s disease. The brain is a fascinating thing: it behaves weirdly after midnight, performs a magical reset while sleeping to “save memories,” and automatically corrects spelling errors even when you don’t see them yourself. Whatever next, health experts?!

When a common type of protein builds up in the brain, it stops cells from getting rid of “unnecessary or dysfunctional components,” i.e., waste.

Cell-to-cell communication through nanosized particles, working as messengers and carriers, can now be analyzed in a whole new way, thanks to a new method involving CRISPR gene-editing technology. The particles, known as small extracellular vesicles (sEVs), play an important role in the spread of disease and as potential drug carriers. The newly developed system, named CIBER, enables thousands of genes to be studied at once, by labeling sEVs with a kind of RNA “barcode.” With this, researchers hope to find what factors are involved in sEV release from host cells. This will help advance our understanding of basic sEV biology and may aid in the development of new treatments for diseases, such as cancer.

Your body “talks” in more ways than one. Your cells communicate with each other, enabling your different parts to function as one team. However, there are still many mysteries surrounding this process. Extracellular vesicles (EVs), small particles released by cells, were previously thought to be useless waste. However, in recent decades they have been dramatically relabeled as very important particles (VIPs), due to their association with various diseases, including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and age-related diseases.

Small EVs have been found to play a key role in cell-to-cell communication. Depending on what “cargo” they carry from their host cell (which can include RNA, proteins and lipids), sEVs can help maintain normal tissue functions or can further the spread of diseases. Because of this, researchers are interested in how sEVs form and are released. However, separating sEVs from other molecules and identifying the factors which lead to their release is both difficult and time-consuming with conventional methods. So, a team in Japan has developed a new technique.

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The secret to cellular youth may depend on keeping the nucleolus—a condensed structure inside the nucleus of a cell—small, according to Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. The findings were elucidated in yeast, a model organism famous for making bread and beer and yet surprisingly similar to humans on the cellular level.

The study, published Nov. 25 in Nature Aging, may lead to new longevity treatments that could extend human lifespan. It also establishes a mortality timer that reveals how long a cell has left before it dies.

As people get older, they are more likely to develop health conditions, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases.

This is the first symposium of Xapiens at MIT — “The Future of Homo Sapiens”

The future of our species will be majorly influenced by the technical advancements and ethical paradigm shifts over the next several decades. Artificial intelligence, neural enhancement, gene editing, solutions for aging and interplanetary travel, and other emerging technologies are bringing sci-fi’s greatest ideas to reality.

Continue reading “Ed Boyden — The Future of Humanity | Xapiens Symposium” »