Lifeboat Foundation

Maintaining five healthy habits—eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, keeping a healthy body weight, not drinking too much alcohol, and not smoking—at middle-age may increase years lived free of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

People who practice healthy habits at age 50 lived more years free of chronic diseases compared to those who did not practice any of these habits. Women who practiced all five habits gained about ten years of disease-free life, and men who did so gained about eight years. A healthy lifestyle not only improves lifespan (overall life expectancy) but also healthspan (healthy or disease-free life expectancy).

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The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) will be a state-of-the-art biocontainment laboratory for the study of diseases that threaten both America’s animal agricultural industry and public health. DHS S&T is building the facility to standards that fulfill the mission needs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) which will own, manage and operate (PDF, 16 pgs., 165 KB) the NBAF once construction and commissioning activities are complete. The NBAF will strengthen our nation’s ability to conduct research, develop vaccines, diagnose emerging diseases, and train veterinarians. DHS S&T will leverage the facility as a national asset to fulfill homeland security mission needs.

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If you look up ‘scientific overachiever’ in the dictionary, you’re likely to find a two-word definition: George Church.

The American geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist splits his time between roles as Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT. He’s also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, acts as an advisor to a plethora of cutting edge companies, and heads up synthetic biology at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, of which he’s a founding member.

Oh, and George is author to hundreds of published papers, 60 patents and a popular science book (also, theoretically, George Church may live in an alternate reality where there are more than 24 hours in a day).

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Tim Sawley’s wife Talitha donated the kidney to him in a medical first.

A lack of tools to precisely control gene expression has limited our ability to evaluate relationships between expression levels and phenotypes. Here, we describe an approach to titrate expression of human genes using CRISPR interference and series of single-guide RNAs (sgRNAs) with systematically modulated activities. We used large-scale measurements across multiple cell models to characterize activities of sgRNAs containing mismatches to their target sites and derived rules governing mismatched sgRNA activity using deep learning. These rules enabled us to synthesize a compact sgRNA library to titrate expression of ~2,400 genes essential for robust cell growth and to construct an in silico sgRNA library spanning the human genome. Staging cells along a continuum of gene expression levels combined with single-cell RNA-seq readout revealed sharp transitions in cellular behaviors at gene-specific expression thresholds. Our work provides a general tool to control gene expression, with applications ranging from tuning biochemical pathways to identifying suppressors for diseases of dysregulated gene expression.

We are all aware of the health benefits of regular exercise, but what if we could reap the rewards of a good workout without any of the effort? Michigan Medicine researchers have found that a conserved class of proteins known as Sestrins can mimic many of the beneficial effects of exercise on metabolism in flies and mice, and boost their physical endurance. The findings could eventually help scientists to devise strategies that combat muscle wasting due to aging or disease. “These results indicate that Sestrin is a key integrating factor that drives the benefits of chronic exercise to metabolism and physical endurance … Sestrin may serve as a promising therapeutic molecule for obtaining exercise-like benefits such as improving mobility and metabolism,” commented the researchers, headed by Myungjin Kim, PhD, a research assistant professor in the department of molecular & integrative physiology, and first author of the team’s published paper in Nature Communications, which is titled, “Sestrins are evolutionarily conserved mediators of exercise benefits.”

As the percentage of older members in the population continues to increase, so do concerns about keeping an aging population healthy and mobile. In fact, elderly people put mobility as their biggest age-related concern, the authors stated. “Mobility is important both for direct health reasons (e.g., preventing falls, retaining access to relatives and health care providers) and for psychological reasons, as it is highly correlated with retained morale personal satisfaction and morale.”

One promising therapeutic intervention that can help to hold back age-related functional decline is endurance exercise, they noted. But endurance exercise isn’t suitable for everyone. While evidence in humans and other animals suggests that endurance exercise has substantially protective effects on measures of healthspan, not everyone can train to the level needed to achieve the resulting health benefits, perhaps due to age, injury, or illness. “Therefore, generation of therapeutic mimetics to induce the benefits of exercise could provide broad ranging benefits to the medical community,” the researchers suggested.

In the popular book The Demon in the Machine, physicist Paul Davies argues that what’s missing in the definition of life is how biological processes create “information,” and such information storage is the stuff of life, like a bird’s ability to navigate or a human’s ability to solve complex problems. The “Demon” Davies refers to is Maxwell’s Demon, as proposed by 19th century physicist James Clerk Maxwell as a thought experiment. Maxwell’s hypothetical “demon” controls a gate between two chambers of gas and knows when to open the gate only to allow gas molecules moving faster than average to pass through it. This way, a chamber could be heated and create “energy” to be put to work. Such a demon would amount to a workaround of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And that, as we know, is impossible. We also know, of course, that demons don’t exist.

However, living things use many protein devices called enzymes that mimic such a demon each time a muscle contracts or when any chemical reaction needs to be driven uphill and away from thermodynamic equilibrium like the gas molecules chosen by the demon. How these dynamic machines work has long been puzzling. Over the past 75 years, scientists have chipped away at this problem without identifying precise details of how any of these enzyme machines accomplishes the sleight of hand that sustains living things, such as humans who live in a chemical state far from equilibrium.

For the first time, in a paper published in Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics by Charlie Carter, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the UNC School of Medicine, and supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, describes the details that enable one such machine to work like Maxwell’s demon.

Artificial Intelligence can now detect over 50 eyes diseases as accurately as doctors!