The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy, Funding

Gandhi once said, describing his critics, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

After declaring, essentially out of nowhere, that he had a program to end the disease of aging, renegade biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey knows how the first three steps of Gandhi’s progression feel. Now he’s focused on the fourth.

“I’ve been at Gandhi stage three for maybe a couple of years,” de Grey said. “If you’re trying to make waves, certainly in science, there’s a lot of people who are going to have insufficient vision to bother to understand what you’re trying to say.”

Site – http://www.wired.com

“BLUE BRAIN”: How scientists are simulating a brain, cell for cell

This unprecedented piece of hardware consists of about 10,000 computer chips that act like real nerve cells. To simulate a natural brain, part of the cerebral cortex of young rats was painstakingly replicated in the computer, cell by cell, together with the branched tree-like structure of the synapses.

Site – http://www.spiegel.de

Molecular DNA Switch Found to be the Same for All Life

The molecular machinery that starts the process by which a biological cell divides into two identical daughter cells apparently worked so well early on that evolution has conserved it across the eons in all forms of life on Earth. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have shown that the core machinery for initiating DNA replication is the same for all three domains of life – Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya.

Site – http://www.lbl.gov

Brain can be made to self-repair

Stimulating a protein on the surface of the brain’s stem cells helps rats recover after a stroke, US researchers have found. The discovery suggests that in humans it could be possible to provoke the body’s own stem cells into repairing an injury, rather than laboriously growing and transplanting new cells.

Site – http://www.nature.com

Biology Net News

Biology Net News is a biology-specific news aggregator linking to the most recent copyrighted news and articles on popular websites.

Site – http://www.biologynews.net

Last male of purebred rabbit species dies

The last male purebred Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit has died, leaving just two females in a captive breeding program created to try to save the endangered species from extinction. The tiny rabbits are only found in Douglas County in north-central Washington. None are believed to exist in the wild, which means the two females — Lolo and Bryn — are the only known purebred pygmy rabbits left in existence.

Site – http://www.msnbc.msn.com

The new incredibles: Enhanced humans

People with enhanced senses, superhuman bodies and sharpened minds are already walking among us. Are you ready for your upgrade? It is 2050, and Peter Schwartz is deciding what to do with the rest of his life. He has already had two successful careers and he wants another one before he dies, which he expects to happen in around 50 years. By then he’ll be about 150, which isn’t bad for a baby boomer, but he expects his son, now 60, to live a lot longer than that.

Site – http://www.newscientist.com

Blueprinting the human brain

A 3D computer simulation of 10,000 neurons firing in the human brain produces a terabyte of data–a fraction of what it would take to map the brain’s billions of neurons in algorithms. That’s according to Henry Markham, a scientist working on the Blue Brain project, a collaboration of IBM, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, or EPFL, in Lausanne, Switzerland, and others. The project is an attempt to create a blueprint of the human brain to advance cognition research.

Site – http://news.com.com

In 2021 You’ll Grow a New Heart

The protein-based drug molecules penetrate heart-muscle cells and suppress production of an enzyme called p38 that ordinarily limits tissue growth. With p38 turned off, mature heart-muscle cells de-differentiate, which allows them to multiply rapidly and mature into new heart muscle.

Site – http://www.popsci.com

Wrinkled cell nuclei may make us age

A new study shows that cells from people over the age of 80 tend to have specific problems with the nucleus. The elderly nucleus loses its pert, rounded shape and becomes warped and wrinkled. The National Cancer Institute team suggests that healthy cells always make a trace amount of an aberrant form of lamin A protein, but that young cells can sense and eliminate it. Elderly cells, it seems, cannot. Blocking production of this deviant protein corrected all the problems with the nucleus, suggesting that drugs might slow or stay some symptoms of aging.

Site – http://www.nature.com

‘Word-vision’ brain area confirmed

French neuroscientists have ended a long controversy, confirming a specific area of the human brain plays a causal role in our ability to recognize words. Humans have an uncanny ability to skim through text, instantly recognizing words by their shape — even though writing developed only about 6000 years ago, long after humans evolved. Thus, scientists have hotly debated whether an area of the cortex called the Visual Word Form Area, or VWFA, is a specific and necessary area for recognizing words.

Site – http://www.physorg.com

Watching the brain ’switch off’ self-awareness

Everybody has experienced a sense of “losing oneself” in an activity – being totally absorbed in a task, a movie or sex. Now researchers have caught the brain in the act. Self-awareness, regarded as a key element of being human, is switched off when the brain needs to concentrate hard on a tricky task, found the neurobiologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The team conducted a series of experiments to pinpoint the brain activity associated with introspection and that linked to sensory function. They found that the brain assumes a robotic functionality when it has to concentrate all its efforts on a difficult, timed task – only becoming “human” again when it has the luxury of time.

Site – http://www.newscientist.com