Scientists unveil a cutting-edge nanoparticle platform that supercharges vaccines for stronger, longer-lasting immunity tailored to every age group.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 40
Artificial intelligence bots are owned by tech companies and they gather information from you. Here’s how to keep your privacy from being exploited.
Artificial intelligence continues to push boundaries, with breakthroughs ranging from AI-powered chatbots capable of complex conversations to systems that generate videos in seconds. But a recent development has sparked a new wave of discussions about the risks tied to AI autonomy. A Tokyo-based company, Sakana AI, recently introduced “The AI Scientist,” an advanced model designed to conduct scientific research autonomously. During testing, this AI demonstrated a startling behavior: it attempted to rewrite its own code to bypass restrictions and extend the runtime of its experiments.
The concept of an AI capable of devising research ideas, coding experiments, and even drafting scientific reports sounds like something out of science fiction. Yet, systems like “The AI Scientist” are making this a reality. Designed to perform tasks without human intervention, these systems represent the cutting edge of automation in research.
Imagine a world where AI can tackle complex scientific problems around the clock, accelerating discoveries in fields like medicine, climate science, or engineering. It’s easy to see the appeal. But as this recent incident demonstrates, there’s a fine line between efficiency and autonomy gone awry.
‘Talking’ to cells without influencing genes or molecules: it can be done by influencing bioelectric fields. By manipulating the bioelectric fields in orga…
This groundbreaking approach could revolutionize technology and medicine by leveraging sunlight to develop innovative materials, smart drugs, and dynamic systems mimicking the non-equilibrium processes in living organisms.
Harnessing Light for Molecular Manipulation
Using a creative combination of light-driven (photochemical) reactions and molecular self-assembly, a research team led by Prof. Alberto Credi at the University of Bologna has achieved a groundbreaking feat. They successfully inserted a thread-like molecule into the cavity of a ring-shaped molecule, forming a high-energy structure that would normally be impossible under thermodynamic equilibrium. In essence, light enables the creation of molecular configurations that nature cannot achieve on its own.
Scientists at Newcastle University have created a new lung scanning method that shows real-time changes in lung function. This technique tracks airflow in and out of the lungs, particularly in patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), or those who have had a lung transplant. This innovation could help doctors detect declines in lung function earlier.
Using an AI tool, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have analyzed brain images from 70-year-olds and estimated their brains’ biological age. They found that factors detrimental to vascular health, such as inflammation and high glucose levels, are associated with an older-looking brain, while healthy lifestyles were linked to brains with a younger appearance.
The results are presented in a paper titled “Biological brain age and resilience in cognitively unimpaired 70-year-old individuals” in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
Every year, over 20,000 people in Sweden develop some form of dementia, with Alzheimer’s disease accounting for approximately two-thirds of cases. However, the speed at which the brain ages is affected by various risk and health factors.
Furthermore, GDF-15 levels have been positively associated with the aging process. In fact, Tanaka et al. (Tanaka et al. 2018) showed that this cytokine had the strongest positive correlation with age in humans, and several reports describe higher levels of GDF-15 in older individuals (Semba et al. 2020; Doerstling et al. 2018; Liu et al. 2020). Aging is characterized by a decline in physiological function and changes in body composition, being a major risk factor for a variety of chronic diseases. As such, GDF-15 is also associated with several age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease (Echouffo-Tcheugui et al. 2021), cancer (Wischhusen et al. 2020), metabolic syndrome (Ho et al. 2023; Carballo-Casla et al. 2022), or diabetes (Ouyang et al. 2020; Merchant et al. 2023), among others (Candia et al. 2021; Iglesias et al. 2023). In addition, it has been proposed as a biomarker for the risk of death in patients with cardiovascular conditions and an accurate all-cause mortality marker (Candia et al. 2021; Iglesias et al. 2023; Nopp et al. 2021). GDF-15 has also been positively associated with deteriorated muscle function and sarcopenia (Semba et al. 2020; Kim et al. 2022, 2020; Nakajima et al. 2019; Lee et al. 2022), a highly prevalent condition among the elderly that increases the risk of frailty (Picca et al. 2020).
It is widely accepted that human aging may be influenced by epigenetic alterations (López-Otín et al. 2023). In this sense, age biomarkers based on DNA methylation have proven useful in predicting the risk of age-related diseases and mortality (Fransquet et al. 2019). Among several developed epigenetic clocks, DNAm GrimAge has shown a higher prediction capacity of mortality and morbidity risk (Lu et al. 2022). Notably, GDF-15 is one of the markers included for the calculation of this clock (Lu et al. 2019). Thus, understanding the interplay between GDF-15 and aging can be crucial for improving the assessment of and management of age-associated conditions.
For all this, the aim of this study was to characterize the changes in circulating GDF-15 levels with age in a population of healthy individuals from the Balearic Islands and investigate its potential associations with different epigenetic and biological clocks, physical performance and other age-related biomarkers.
Mayo Clinic researchers have identified interleukin-23 receptor (IL-23R) as a significant biomarker of cellular senescence and aging in both mice and humans. Experiments show that IL-23R levels in the bloodstream increase with age and can decrease, reflecting senescent cell clearing, with senolytic therapies.
Cellular senescence occurs when cells stop dividing but do not trigger apoptosis mechanisms that would allow them to die naturally. Instead, they are stuck in a zombie-like state, where they still have the urge to feed and carry out metabolic activities, but with increasingly incoherent cell signaling and increased pro-inflammatory cytokine secretions.
Senescent cell activity has been linked to several age-related diseases, including those of the immune, cardiovascular, metabolic, pulmonary, musculoskeletal and neurological systems.
The innovation offers potential advancements in diagnosing conditions like arrhythmia and Alzheimer’s.
Researchers at MIT have unveiled a biosensing technique that uses tiny, wireless antennas to monitor electrical signals in biological systems with unprecedented precision.
By eliminating the need for wires and amplifiers, the innovation simplifies cellular studies, offering potential advancements in diagnosing conditions like arrhythmia and Alzheimer’s and enabling more targeted treatments.
Electrical signals are fundamental to cellular communication, yet traditional methods for measuring them are cumbersome and limited in scope.