Check out this summary of results on aging in nematodes. The layman’s summary is this:
Aging is thought to be due to accumulated damage. As we age our bodies get lots of microscopic injuries and accumulated cellular damage. Over time it adds up and our bodies break down and we die. This is the prevailing hypothsis because it’s easy to see the mechanism for how it came to evolve.
An alternate hypothesis is that our genes dictate that we age and die, and it’s programmed into us. So rather than breaking down, aging is the result of changes in metabolic regulation.
This study finds evidence supporting the latter model, which is pretty interesting. To summarize their experiment they used gene-chips to exhaustively search for genes that change their expression level in old worms, and linked many of them to a single regulatory protein (transcription factor). Then they tried to put stresses on young worms to see if they could increase the level of this transcription factor, effectively making the worm age faster. They were not able to, which indicates that the transcription factor levels are not a function of stress. Of course, this is only true if they were using the “right” stresses on the worms.
In any case, I’m always excited to see work done that supports any sort of programmed-senescence model, because it points toward the possibility of regulating aging by only tweaking a few things.
A group of oceanographic scientists are in the process of publishing results indicating that the ocean has stripes. They used successive levels of data filtering to remove large scale variations like currents and waves and temperature gradients, and they were left with these bands of very small variation in temperature and velocity.
An interesting observation here is that they repeated their approach on the output from a Japanese computer running the “Earth Simulator” and found very similar stripes in the output from that model.
Maybe I’m just overly skeptical, but it seems to me that if you run a bunch of data filtering and end up with a bunch of surprisingly fine-scale features you have to wonder if it’s an artifact of the analysis. And the fact that they found the same features in the model output, when presumably the model wasn’t programmed to have this behavior, seems to indicate that the stripes are coming from the data filtering and are not real phenomena. Otherwise that seems to say that the Earth Simulator model is so accurate that it was predicting previously unimagined phenomena in the ocean, which would be pretty remarkable in itself.
For the record: I’m not an expert in oceanography, I’ve just got some experience modeling physical systems. They may be right, and there may be tons of stripes overlaid on the ocean. I’m sure their first thought was that it was an artifact, and it must have checked out after reviewing the analysis. It just seems a little fishy.
I came across this in summary for at Ars.
You may have seen the stories going around the net today about a scientist who’s discovered how to burn salt water, and that the DOE is going to investigate this as an alternative source of energy. Let me explain why this is stupid.
Dr. Roy said the salt water isn’t burning per se, despite appearances. The radio frequency actually weakens bonds holding together the constituents of salt water — sodium chloride, hydrogen and oxygen — and releases the hydrogen, which, once ignited, burns continuously when exposed to the RF energy field. Mr. Kanzius said an independent source measured the flame’s temperature, which exceeds 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, reflecting an enormous energy output.
Let me break this down for you, serious science style:
Continue reading ‘Burning salt water will not fuel your car’
A pretty cool development here for fans of gene therapy. The essence of gene therapy is that if a person is born with a defective copy of some gene you can insert a good copy into a critical set of cells in that person and restore the broken functionality. In this case the researchers injected therapeutic viruses into 12 patients brains and saw therapeutic benefits for parkinsons sufferers.
The reason you use viruses for gene therapy is that a virus has evolved to attach to a cell and inject it’s own genes to force the cell to make copies of the virus. It’s possible to gut the virus and insert your own genes of interest, so when the virus infects a cell, all it does is inject your genes. There’s no replication, no spreading viruses, etc. Gene therapy has had a pretty rocky history though, and not a lot of medical success.
Continue reading ‘Gene therapy for parkinsons has successful phase 1 trial’
I came across a short piece in the New York Times recently that’s worth pointing out. It’s about a particular startup in the Bay Area that’s focused on using metabolic engineering to produce anti-malarial drugs and the next item on their agenda is fuel.
For the layperson, metabolic engineering is a step beyond genetic engineering. Metabolic engineering involves creating a new network of complementary reaction pathways within a cell, essentially creating whole new ways of making biological products. In a big picture sense, metabolic engineering treats the cell as a factory, and adds or optimizes structures within the cell for some design purpose.
Continue reading ‘Metabolic engineering as path to medicine and energy’
There was an interesting article in the New York Times regarding the surprisingly large impact that the farm bill has on many aspects of life in the US and abroad. A pithy excerpt:
Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots? Continue reading ‘Why does a twinkie cost less than a carrot?’
Regarding the mysterious bee die-off
Since October 2006, 35 per cent or more of the United States’ population of the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) – billions of individual bees – simply flew from their hive homes and disappeared.
It’s an interesting situation, and not to trivialize it but it sounds like paraphrasing Douglas Adams. “So Long and Thanks for All the Pollen.”