Full house at Biotech Investing in Longevity last night! We’re thrilled about the interest in this space: We had 2x as many applications as we could accommodate and are looking into making this a recurring event to give this community a continuous point of contact.
Thank you to our co-hosts Aikora Health, and IndieBio for collaborating on this event.
Dubbed by one scientist as, “probably the most important paper to be published in the field of dementia in the last five years,” a team of researchers has described a newly defined neurodegenerative disease that closely mimics the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, but which has an entirely different pathological cause.
Two regions of our brain are central for storing memories: the hippocampus and the neocortex. While the hippocampus is primarily responsible for learning new information and its short-term storage, the neocortex is able to store large amounts of information for a long time. Lea Himmer, Dr. Monika Schönauer and Professor Steffen Gais of the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Tübingen and their team investigated how these brain areas interact during the consolidation of new memories and which role sleep plays in that process. The team of researchers used functional neuroimaging to show that repeated rehearsal can lead to the establishment of memory traces in the neocortex within a short timeframe. However, these traces are only sufficiently stable if a sleep phase follows learning – otherwise the brain continuously needs to call on the hippocampus to help with long-term storage of new memories. The new study is published in Science Advances.
In this new study, the researchers had their participants study a list of words, which was repeated seven times. While they conducted this task, their brain activity was recorded by an MRI scanner. Twelve hours later, the participants repeated the task with the learned words and a new word list. Half of the subjects had slept in the meantime, while the other half had remained awake. Repeated practice led to increased involvement of the posterior parietal cortex, a region of the neocortex, within an hour. At the same time, the hippocampus became less and less engaged in the process.
Researchers in Australia are on the verge of discovering a universal flu vaccine — one which would be effective against all strains of the virus. When they do, we won’t have to take a new flu shot every year anymore. We’ll just get this one shot, and never more. It’s a finding that is being heralded as an “extraordinary breakthrough.” It could even end the flu and influenza epidemic once and for all.
The Epidemic
Scientists have discovered a new method for quickly and efficiently mapping the vast network of connections among neurons in the brain.
Researchers combined infrared laser stimulation techniques with functional magnetic resonance imaging in animals to generate mapping of connections throughout the brain. The technique was described in a study published in the journal Science Advances.
“This is a revolution in detecting connections in the brain,” said senior author Anna Wang Roe, Ph.D., a professor in the Division of Neuroscience at OHSU’s Oregon National Primate Research Center. “The ability to easily map connections in the living brain with high precision opens doors for other applications in medicine and engineering.”
We submitted the Longevity Peace Prize, worth $5 million dollars to be awarded to any longevity activist(s) in the next 5 years who can get a major world government or the UN to declare “aging a disease” as a policy and to help reverse regulatory hurdles on life extension research. Hopefully, this early version of a prize may one day become reality. https://xprize.org/
A new way to store information in molecules could preserve the contents of the New York Public Library in a teaspoon of protein, without energy, for millions of years.
Books can burn. Computers get hacked. DVDs degrade. Technologies to store information–ink on paper, computers, CDs and DVDs, and even DNA–continue to improve. And yet, threats as simple as water and as complex as cyber-attacks can still corrupt our records.
As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud–whose name promises opaque, endless space–will eventually run out of space, can’t thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet, and, once written, uses no energy. All you need is a chemist, some cheap molecules, and your precious information.
