Lifeboat Foundation

In recent years the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever took place in the wider area and, despite the availability of vaccines and treatments, posed considerable challenges.

What needs to happen

A recent article we co-authored in The Lancet Global Health outlines what needs to be done to contain this outbreak and prevent it from turning into an epidemic, possibly even a pandemic.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the ongoing mpox outbreak in Africa a global health emergency.

WHO convened its emergency committee amid concerns that a deadlier strain of the virus, clade Ib, had reached four previously unaffected countries in Africa. This strain had previously been contained to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The independent experts met virtually Wednesday to advise WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on the severity of the outbreak. After that consultation, he announced that he had declared a public health emergency of international concern — the highest level of alarm under international health law.

Researchers found that removing certain inflammation-causing cells from mice every month, starting in their middle age, not only extended their lifespans but also improved their heart health and overall physical function throughout their lives. This method shows promise for extending the period of good health as mice age, potentially pointing to new aging treatments for humans.

Everyone wants to live to a ripe old age, but no one wants to be decrepit. Now, University of Connecticut researchers have demonstrated a treatment that could lengthen life—and vigor—up to the very end.

Even as human lifespans have lengthened over the past century, most people in old age suffer a serious health decline in the last decade of life. Chronic illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease may begin, followed by frailty. Many interventions can prolong life, but not necessarily good health. And nobody wants to spend the last years of an extra-long life in decrepitude.

Pancreatic cancer cells can “starve” thanks to a combination of a cancer drug and a keto diet, an early study has suggested.

Researchers said that their new study points to a “vulnerability” which could potentially lead to a new treatment for the most deadly common cancer.

Only around 5% of people with the disease survive for a decade after diagnosis.

Alarmed by the surge in mpox cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control has taken the unprecedented step of declaring the outbreak sweeping through African countries a continental public health emergency.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is also meeting to decide whether to trigger its highest global alert level over the epidemic.

These moves come after a virulent strain of the disease spread rapidly to 16 countries and six new countries were affected in 10 days.

At the risk of sounding a bit woo-woo, as any speculation about the “hard problem” of the unknowns of consciousness does, can’t both be true? In other words, is it possible that Schrödinger’s “total mind” is a kind of quantum reserve downloaded and differentially phased into qualia through the materialist medium of natural selection, which Edelman calls “neural Darwinism”? Is it the embodied human sensory organs interacting with their environment in feedback loops that unveils the unformed wave of fundamental consciousness through the particle of particular experience?

The correct answer is: Who knows?

“Who Knows?” would be an apt title for the best inventory to date of the myriad views on consciousness, from the metaphysical to the materialist, compiled by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and titled “A landscape of consciousness: toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications,” recently published in the journal “Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.”

Significant change can be stressful – divorce, death and moving all make the list – but when it comes to aging, a new paper identifies two flashpoints of enormous biological change. The recent study, by researchers at Stanford Medicine, uncovered evidence that human aging does not occur at a constant, gradual pace – but rather is marked by two significant bursts of molecular change. These bursts, observed in people around the ages of 44 and 60, suggest that aging may be driven by more complex biological processes than previously thought. The findings, published in Nature Aging, are based on comprehensive multi-omics profiling of 108 participants, providing a detailed look at how the human body changes during these key periods of life [1].

Longevity. Technology: The research sheds light on the nonlinear nature of aging, challenging the traditional view that aging is a steady, continuous process. By understanding why and how these bursts of aging occur, scientists may be able to uncover more about the mechanisms of aging and leverage that knowledge to improve both lifespan and healthspan. The findings also highlight the ever-evolving nature of aging research, which continues to refine our understanding of how and why we age.

The Stanford Medicine team, led by Professor Michael Snyder, PhD, analyzed a vast array of molecular data from participants aged between 25 and 75 years. Over a period spanning several years, the researchers collected blood and other biological samples from the participants, tracking more than 135,000 different molecules and microorganisms. The data set included a total of nearly 250 billion distinct data points, making this one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind [1].

First described by Nedergaard and her colleagues in 2012, the glymphatic system is the brain’s unique waste removal process that uses cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to wash away excess proteins generated by energy hungry neurons and other cells in the brain during normal activity.

A drug used to induce labor in pregnant women has been shown to reactivate tiny waste-clearing pumps in the brains of old mice. The finding could hold promise as a new way to fight Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and overall cognitive decline.

When our brains are working properly, there is an excess of proteins that build up from the energy intensive processes that take place between our neurons. Those proteins need to be removed in order for the brain to continue to operate properly. When they aren’t, they can gunk up the works, leading to the beta amyloid and tau protein tangles that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease or the build up of alpha-synuclein that accompanies Parkinson’s.

Continue reading “Common drug restores youthful function to clean up aging brains” »

Bacteria defend themselves from viral infection using diverse immune systems, many of which sense and target foreign nucleic acids. Defense-associated reverse transcriptase (DRT) systems provide an intriguing counterpoint to this immune strategy by instead leveraging DNA synthesis, but the identities and functions of their DNA products remain largely unknown. Here we show that DRT2 systems execute an unprecedented immunity mechanism that involves de novo gene synthesis via rolling-circle reverse transcription of a non-coding RNA (ncRNA). Unbiased profiling of RT-associated RNA and DNA ligands in DRT2-expressing cells revealed that reverse transcription generates concatenated cDNA repeats through programmed template jumping on the ncRNA. The presence of phage then triggers second-strand cDNA synthesis, leading to the production of long double-stranded DNA. Remarkably, this DNA product is efficiently transcribed, generating messenger RNAs that encode a stop codon-less, never-ending ORF (neo) whose translation causes potent growth arrest. Phylogenetic analyses and screening of diverse DRT2 homologs further revealed broad conservation of rolling-circle reverse transcription and Neo protein function. Our work highlights an elegant expansion of genome coding potential through RNA-templated gene creation, and challenges conventional paradigms of genetic information encoded along the one-dimensional axis of genomic DNA.

One-Sentence Summary Bacterial reverse transcriptases synthesize extrachromosomal genes via rolling-circle amplification to confer potent antiviral immunity.

Columbia University has filed a patent application related to this work. S.H.S. is a co-founder and scientific advisor to Dahlia Biosciences, a scientific advisor to CrisprBits and Prime Medicine, and an equity holder in Dahlia Biosciences and CrisprBits.