The longevity sector is showing signs of being taken more seriously. On Tuesday, Mehmood Khan, vice chairman and chief scientific officer of PepsiCo, announced he’s joining Life Biosciences, a startup dedicated to “age-reversal.” Khan will become the startup’s CEO and a member of its board of directors.
In the world of social media, this is just the most recent panic over children’s time on places like Youtube. however, it’s important to note that many of these things ARE just hoaxes. As the article mentions, this hoax plays on the guilt some parents have over how much time their children spend on computer screens.
The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know.
Researchers from the University of Luxembourg and the German Cancer Research Center have rejuvenated stem cells in the brains of old mice. The rejuvenated stem cells appear to improve regeneration in areas of damaged or diseased brain tissue.
A new way to model stem cells
A new study that was published in the journal Cell sheds light on why many stem cell populations in aged brains stop dividing and enter a dormant state known as quiescence. Quiescent stem cells have ceased to divide, so they no longer support the tissues of which they are part and play no role in regenerating damaged tissue by supplying fresh cells to replace losses. As we age, an increasing number of stem cells, not just in the brain, enter this quiescent state and impair our ability to heal injury and recover from diseases.
Continue reading “Rejuvenating Aged Brains by Waking Up Dormant Stem Cells” »
The biggest source of variability in the microbiome is the person-to-person variability. It’s a problem if you’re looking for causality. That’s a red flag word for us – causality – meaning something about the bacterial community causes some disease. You actually don’t know whether it’s the bacteria or whether the bacteria are a sign of something that happened before. It’s very much individualized, so everybody’s history matters.
We are all teeming with bacteria that help us digest food or fight disease, but two people might play host to a very different array of bacteria due to diet, where they live, hobbies or even medical histories.
As a result, scientists have struggled to understand which bacteria are linked to disease and which protect against it. Studies comparing people’s bacterial companions – known as the microbiome – to explore what that variation means might disagree because they analyzed different groups or didn’t sample enough people.
Continue reading “Linking bacterial populations with health” »
China says it is working to develop a solar energy plant in space that could one day beam enough power back to Earth to light up an entire city.
If scientists can overcome the formidable technical challenges, the project would represent a monumental leap in combating the Earth’s addiction to dirty power sources which worsen air pollution and global warming.
A space-based solar power station could also provide an alternative to the current generation of earthbound and relatively ineffective renewable energy sources.
Continue reading “Exploring China’s latest space ambitions” »
NEW YORK (AP) — Did you hear what happened when Bill Gates walked into a bar? Everybody there immediately became millionaires — on average.
That joke about a very rich man is an old one among statisticians. So why did Peter Smibert use it to explain a revolution in biology?
Because it shows averages can be misleading. And Smibert, of the New York Genome Center, says that includes when scientists are trying to understand the basic unit of life, the cell.
