Lifeboat Foundation

If you looked at two snapshots of the same maple tree taken in July and December, you’d see a dramatic change from summer’s full green crown to winter’s bare branches. What those two photos don’t show you, however, is how the change occurred—gradually or all at once? In truth, deciduous trees tend to hold out for an environmental signal—a change in light or temperature—and then shed all their leaves within just a week or two.

When it comes to aging, we may be more like these trees than we realized.

According to new work from Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics, mammals follow a similar aging trajectory at the cellular level. As described in a new paper in Science, lab head Junyue Cao and his colleagues used single-cell sequencing to simultaneously scan more than 21 million cells from every major mouse organ across five stages of life. This enormous collection is now the world’s largest cellular atlas within a single study.

Scientists have used a pair of lasers and a supersonic sheet of gas to accelerate electrons to high energies in less than a foot. The development marks a major step forward in laser-plasma acceleration, a promising method for making compact, high-energy particle accelerators that could have applications in particle physics, medicine, and materials science.

In a new study soon to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers successfully accelerated high-quality beams of electrons to more than 10 billion electronvolts (10 gigaelectronvolts, or GeV) in 30 centimeters. The preprint can be found in the online repository arXiv.

The work was led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), with collaborators at the University of Maryland. The research took place at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator Center (BELLA), which set a world record of 8-GeV electrons in 20 centimeters in 2019. The new experiment not only increases the beam energy, but also produces high-quality beam at this energy level for the first time, paving the way for future high-efficiency machines.

Recent research from the S: CORT team has identified key biomarkers and treatment strategies that predict and enhance effectiveness of radiotherapy in rectal cancer treatment.

Patients with advanced rectal cancer often receive radiotherapy before surgery. However, despite this being standard practice, this treatment only results in complete disappearance (complete response) prior to surgery in 15% of patients.

Currently, there are no reliable biomarkers (a biological molecule found in blood, other body fluids, or tissues that is a sign of a normal or abnormal process, or of a condition or disease) to predict which colorectal patients will benefit from radiotherapy, meaning that many patients are unnecessarily exposed to significant side effects.

Researchers have discovered new connections between the gut and brain that hold promise for more targeted treatments for depression and anxiety, and could help prevent digestive issues in children by limiting the transmission of antidepressants during pregnancy.

The study, published in the journal Gastroenterology, shows that increasing serotonin in the gut epithelium—the thin layer of cells lining the small and large intestines—improves symptoms of anxiety and depression in animal studies. The researchers also found that, in humans, antidepressant use during pregnancy increases the risk of babies developing constipation in the first year of life.

“Our findings suggest that there may be an advantage to targeting antidepressants selectively to the gut epithelium, as systemic treatment may not be necessary for eliciting the drugs’ benefits but may be contributing to digestive issues in children exposed during pregnancy,” said Kara Margolis, director of the NYU Pain Research Center and associate professor of molecular pathobiology at NYU College of Dentistry, who co-led the study with Mark Ansorge, associate professor of clinical neurobiology at Columbia University.

More and more people under 50 have been diagnosed with bowel cancer in different parts of the world over the past few decades.

By Grace Wade

HighlyCitedPapers.

📝 — Schulze, et al.

The present work reviews the strategies and technical approaches used to overcome the multilayered problems associated with large bone defect healing in long bones, with emphasis on research rooted in scaffold-guided tissue regeneration.

Continue reading “Scaffold Guided Bone Regeneration for the Treatment of Large Segmental Defects in Long Bones” »

HighlyCitedPapers.

📝 The Many Faces of Immune Activation in HIV-1 Infection: A Multifactorial Interconnection — Mazzuti, et al.

Full text is available 👇

Continue reading “Patient-Derived Organoids: The Beginning of a New Era in Ovarian Cancer Disease Modeling and Drug Sensitivity Testing” »

A new mRNA therapy tested in mice may target the root cause of the potentially fatal pregnancy disorder preeclampsia. It’s yet to be tested in humans.

To predict your #longevity, you have two main options. You can rely on the routine tests and measurements your doctor likes to order for you, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, weight, and so on. Or you can go down a biohacking rabbit hole the way tech millionaire turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson did to live longer. Johnson’s obsessive self-measurement protocol involves tracking more than a hundred biomarkers, ranging from the telomere length in blood cells to the speed of his urine stream (which, at 25 milliliters per second, he reports, is in the 90th percentile of 40-year-olds).

Scientists crunched the numbers to come up with the single best predictor of how long you’ll live—and arrived at a surprisingly low-tech answer.