In January of 2024 I shared a post about Lantern Bio, who’s “product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself”. This data scientist makes the valid point […]
This is a very provocative analysis. Are there implications for aging science? “Let’s start with calorie restriction, shall we? Everyone knows that it slows aging, isn’t it? Well, not really. Take a look at the chart below… Each bar represents […]
“An individual E. coli has no brain, obviously, and is even many orders of magnitude simpler than a human cell, and yet already it possesses something like a sense of smell, drive, even a memory. Chemotaxis recasts E. coli not […]
What a breakthrough! This builds on the researcher’s 2021 finding that linked DNA breaks with learning. “When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory […]
“Scientists achieved this effect by changing each animal’s ‘epigenome’, one feature of which is a collection of chemical tags that are bound to DNA and affect gene activity. After the treatment, activity of the targeted gene dropped and remained low […]
A win for machine learning algorithms. The article does quote a critic who says this is not yet good enough to be a legit test. “The proteins were able to predict all-cause dementia as well as particular types, including Alzheimer’s […]
Some of you may remember that I’m a big fan of the idea of direct air capture. “The material could slash the energy costs associated with so-called direct air capture systems, which conventionally rely on energy-intensive temperature or pressure shifts […]
Researchers from Illinois did, and then they created it. The first mass-market insulin came from livestock. Nowadays it’s largely made by bacteria in reactors. Maybe (long shot) things will go full circle back to livestock? “An unassuming brown bovine from […]
“For the high-experience musicians, the high-flow state was associated with increased activity in auditory and visual areas and reduced activity in key parts of the default-mode network. This suggested that the default-mode network wasn’t contributing much to flow-related idea generation. […]
Our bodies produce keratin, and it’s already added to shampoos to strengthen hair. When researchers encapsulated it in microspheres, good things happened. “In the keratin microsphere-treated group, hair regrowth commenced on the second day after treatment, with the growth rate […]