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Category: biotech/medical – Page 71

Mice, like humans, compete for territory and mates, becoming more confident in their fighting abilities with each victory. Early on, a brain chemical called dopamine.

Dopamine is a crucial neurotransmitter involved in many important functions in the brain, particularly those related to pleasure, reward, motivation, and motor control. It plays a central role in the brain’s reward system, where it helps reinforce rewarding behaviors by increasing pleasure and satisfaction, making it critical for habit formation and addictive behaviors. Dopamine is also vital for regulating movement, and deficiencies in dopamine production are linked to neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Additionally, dopamine influences various other functions, including mood regulation, learning, and attention, making it a key focus in studies of both mental health and neurodegenerative diseases.

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A review of the most interesting and impactful longevity related studies from December, including how gene therapy can increase telomere length and how the immune system can be used to clear senescent cells.

Contents:

1. Intro 0:00
2. Gene Therapy To Increase Telomere Length 0:48
3. Freeing The Immune System To Remove Senescent Cells 15:20
4. Using Probiotics To Help With Sarcopenia 27:39.

Canadian Content Study.

Continue reading “December 2024 Longevity Review” | >

A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, the team was able to richly label whole rodent brains and other large tissue samples in a single day.

In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also demonstrate that the ability to label proteins with antibodies at the single-cell level across whole brains can reveal insights left hidden by other widely used labeling methods.

Profiling the proteins that cells are making is a staple of studies in biology, neuroscience and related fields because the proteins a cell is expressing at a given moment can reflect the functions the cell is trying to perform or its response to its circumstances, such as disease or treatment.

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A novel in vivo screening strategy identifies new modifiers of somatic CAG repeat expansion that contribute to age of onset in Huntington’s disease.

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In a groundbreaking shift in our understanding of mutations, researchers have discovered types of DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

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As the capabilities of generative AI models have grown, you’ve probably seen how they can transform simple text prompts into hyperrealistic images and even extended video clips.

More recently, generative AI has shown potential in helping chemists and biologists explore static molecules, like proteins and DNA. Models like AlphaFold can predict molecular structures to accelerate , and the MIT-assisted “RFdiffusion,” for example, can help design new proteins.

One challenge, though, is that molecules are constantly moving and jiggling, which is important to model when constructing new proteins and drugs. Simulating these motions on a computer using physics—a technique known as —can be very expensive, requiring billions of time steps on supercomputers.

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Researchers led by electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a better way to perform the comparative analysis of entire genomes. This approach can be used to study relationships between different species across geological time scales.

This new approach is poised to unlock discoveries regarding how evolution has shaped present-day genomes and also how the tree of life is organized. The new method, named CASTER, is described in a paper published in Science on 23 January 2025.

CASTER is poised to offer biologists a far more scalable approach than state-of-the-art for comparing full genomes. This is especially relevant given the exploding number of sequenced genomes of both living and also .

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Many science fiction authors try to incorporate scientific principles into their work, but Ian Tregillis, who is a contributing author of the Wild Cards book series when he’s not working as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, took it one step further: He derived a formula to describe the dynamics of the fictional universe’s viral system.

In independent research published in the American Journal of Physics, Tregillis and George R.R. Martin derive a formula for viral behavior in the Wild Cards universe.

Wild Cards is a science fiction series written by a collection of authors and edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass. Sitting at over 30 volumes, the books are about an alien called the Wild Card that mutates human DNA. Martin is credited as a co-author of the paper, making it his first peer-reviewed physics publication.

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Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a new thermometer using atoms boosted to such high energy levels that they are a thousand times larger than normal. By monitoring how these giant “Rydberg” atoms interact with heat in their environment, researchers can measure temperature with remarkable accuracy. The thermometer’s sensitivity could improve temperature measurements in fields ranging from quantum research to industrial manufacturing.

Unlike traditional thermometers, a Rydberg doesn’t need to be first adjusted or calibrated at the factory because it relies inherently on the basic principles of quantum physics. These fundamental quantum principles yield that are also directly traceable to international standards.

“We’re essentially creating a thermometer that can provide accurate temperature readings without the usual calibrations that current thermometers require,” said NIST postdoctoral researcher Noah Schlossberger.

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