Clipmarks | wildcat's health, medicine collection

Live Longer: The One Anti-Aging Trick That Works

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:28:07 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Calorie restriction

While the quest for the proverbial Fountain of Youth is endless and typically fruitless, one method known to extend the human lifespan by up to five years has quietly become accepted among leading researchers.

The formula is simple: Eat less. It could add years to your life, several experts now say. And done in moderation, it could at least help you live a more healthy life.

The only question is: Will the average person do it?

While little short of a nip-and-tuck will make you look younger, calorie restriction, as it is called, is as close to a real Fountain of Youth as any known technique comes. Even scientists who are cautious about anti-aging hype say it works, both by cutting risks for some diseases and by allowing all body cells, somehow, to hang in there longer.

The numbers

Here's a rough rule of thumb that many experts generally agree on now: Eat 15 percent less starting at age 25 and you might add 4.5 years to your life

Tags: calorie restriction, diet, longevity

Herbal remedy reduces obesity and heart disease?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:50:11 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

With unprecedented levels of obesity across the Western world, and incidence of associated heart disease, cancer and diabetes rising, there is a major drive to find new treatments. Scientists from Germany have recently discovered that extracts of a traditional herbal remedy derived from Tabebuia impetiginosa can act to delay the absorption of dietary fat in animal models.

They believe that the extract could be incorporated into a food supplement which may not only reduce obesity, but also lessen the risk of development of type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease. Dr Nils Roos from the Max Rubner Institute will present the results on Monday 7th July at the Society for Experimental Biology's Annual Meeting in Marseille.

Dr Roos and his team have shown that Tabebuia extract can reduce levels of triglycerides, a breakdown product of fat, in rats after they have been fed a fatty meal. "This result shows the extract may have a potential use in treating obesity," he observes.

Tags: health, obesity, diabetes, herbal remedy, heart disease

Stem Cells 2.0: Scientists Make Revolutionary Advance

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:07:19 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

A while back scientists were making revolutionary breakthroughs in stem cell research. Unfortunately they fell foul of interpretations of thousand year old texts in foreign languages, and a government with the scientific understanding of a squashed grape said "Sorry, our kind and loving God requires that people continue to suffer from Parkinson's, anemia, and various other horrible ailments." Luckily, scientists are awesome and did the obvious thing - make ANOTHER revolutionary breakthrough to get around the problem.

The previous problem with stem cells was that they came from aborted or otherwise unviable fetuses. Note that these fetuses had been terminated anyway, and the only issue now was whether it was more moral to chuck the goo in a bin and burn it, or use it to help cure the sick. The ethical answer, apparently, isn't what you think.

This issue can now be sidestepped with the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS) from any kind of tissue

Tags: stem cells, breakthrough, medicine

Looking for the Fountain of Youth? Cut your calories

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:46:52 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Want to slow the signs of aging and live longer? New Saint Louis University research suggests cutting back on calories could be a promising strategy.

Calorie restriction has long been shown to slow the aging process in rats and mice. While scientists do not know how calorie restriction affects the aging process in rodents, one popular hypothesis is that it slows aging by decreasing a thyroid hormone, triiodothyronine (T3), which then slows metabolism and tissue aging.

A new study in the June 2008 issue of Rejuvenation Research, found that calorie restriction – cutting approximately 300 to 500 calories per day – had a similar biological effect in humans and, therefore, may slow the aging process.

"Our research provides evidence that calorie restriction does work in humans like it has been shown to work in animals. The next step is to determine if this in fact slows age-related tissue deterioration. The only way to be certain, though, is to do a long-term study."

Tags: longevity, calorie restriction

'Mind's eye' influences visual perception

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:14:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: ..even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another..

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the "mind's eye"—directly impacts our visual perception.

"We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception," says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. "This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on."

"You might think you need to imagine something 10 times or 100 times before it has an impact,"

Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right."

"These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself,"

Tags: 'mind's eye', visual perception, brain, imagination

Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:31:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

Some people have a mutation that makes them amazingly resistant to HIV -- and now, scientists may have found a way to give that immunity to anyone.

Viruses enter cells and take them over, but to get inside, they need a handhold. HIV pulls itself in by grabbing onto a protein called CCR5, which decorates the surface of T-cells, which are one of the two major types of white blood cells and play an important role in helping the body fight infections. Back in the 1990's, researchers took interest in a handful of promiscuous gay men who were able to engage in sexual relations with their HIV-positive partners with impunity. Most of them had a mutation that kept their cells from producing normal CCR5 protein.

Armed with that knowledge, scientists have developed several tactics to block the production of CCR5 or perturb its shape so that the HIV virus can't grab onto it during the first step of its hijacking attempt

Tags: dna, hiv, immunity, viruses

Red wine may mitigate red meat’s dangers

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:15:55 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.world-science.net

What happens when red wine meets red meat? If that happens in the stomach, wine’s healthful chemicals may thwart formation of harmful substances released during digestion of fat in the meat, scientists report.

Researchers attribute the documented benefits of moderate wine consumption—including protection against cancer and heart disease—to its high levels of polyphenols, compounds also found in fruits and vegetables.

Polyphenols are powerful antioxidants, substances that suppress destructive chemical reactions promoted by oxygen.

But the body doesn’t absorb polyphenols easily; scientists have puzzled over how and where they exert their benefits.

The stomach acts as a “bioreactor” that facilitates the beneficial effects, the researchers wrote. The polyphenols work not only to prevent generation of toxic compounds, but also to inhibit their entry to the blood stream, they added.

Tags: red wine, red meat

Your brain lies to you

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:28:19 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

Clip Source: www.iht.com

False beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories - and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer's hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man's curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned

Tags: brain, misleading, false beliefs

IBM-Swiss scientists to create artifical human brain by 2015

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:13:30 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: memebox.com

Director Henry Markram of the IBM-Swiss Blue Brain project believes that his team of up to 125 researchers is on target to create the world’s first artificial brain by as early as 2015.

In June 2005, IBM and the Swiss Brain Mind Institute announced a plan to create a digital 3D replica of the human brain. Named after the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, the Blue Brain Project has started modeling, in precise detail, the cellular infrastructure of the cerebral neocortex.

Although Markram expects his creation may eventually learn to speak, he is not holding his breath waiting for consciousness to rise from its brain. What he is after is something far more useful than a talking machine. By creating a better understanding of how human brains perform, doctors will learn more about why our brains fail.

Disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and dementia are the price we pay for having complicated brains.

Tags: artificial, brain, human, health, medicine, computing

The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy, Funding

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:58:41 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: This weekend, his organization, The Methuselah Foundation, is sponsoring its first U.S. conference on the emerging interdisciplinary field that de Grey has helped kick start. (Its first day, Friday, will be free and open to the public.) The conference, Aging: The Disease - The Cure - The Implications, held at UCLA, is an indication of how far de Grey has come in mainstreaming his ideas.

Clip Source: www.wired.com

Aubrey de Grey's years of perseverance have literally started to pay off, funding his research to fight aging.
Courtesy of Bruce Klein

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."

Tags: aubrey de grey, aging

Want to Enhance Your Brain Power?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:37:38 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.technologyreview.com

Research hints that electrically stimulating the brain can speed learning.

A little brain boost is something we could all use now and then. A new option may be on the horizon. Researchers at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Bethesda, MD, are studying how applying gentle electrical current to the scalp can improve learning.

Previous small-scale studies have suggested that a stream of current can improve motor function, verbal fluency, and even language learning. To explore how effective such stimulation can be as a learning tool, Eric Wassermann, a neuroscientist at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, is using an approach known as transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), in which an electrical current is passed directly to the brain through the scalp and skull

researchers found that direct current stimulation could improve memory in participants asked to learn and then recall a list of 12 words

Tags: brain, memory, enhancement, boost, science

New stem cells can make heart muscle

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:26:21 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.cosmosmagazine.com

PARIS: A new group of stem cells that can give rise to heart muscle cells, known as cardiomyocytes, have been discovered by researchers in the United States.

The stem cells are located in the outermost layer of the heart and could one day play a critical role in regenerating injured heart tissue, the researchers say.

"In heart failure, you lose cardiomyocytes, so the only way to reverse heart failure is to make more of these cells," said William Pu, the study's lead researcher and a pediatric cardiologist at Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

The new findings come on the heels of two earlier breakthroughs.

In 2006 scientists identified another cardiac stem cell - marked by the expression of a gene called Nkx2-5 - with the potential to become either heart muscle or cells lining blood vessels in the organ's left-sided chambers.

Tags: stem cells, heart

Wall Love

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:23:56 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: bizarre...bizarre

Clip Source: www.bizarremag.com

Bricktease - meet the woman who married the Berlin Wall. Bizarre investigates the curious world of people who fall in love with objects.

Like millions of sweethearts across the globe, Wall Winther has found true love. Her husband, in his prime, was a stalwart of immense stature, a domineering presence who was feared throughout his homeland and infamous the world over. Events haven’t been too kind to his physical state, but the couple’s love remains strong. You might think Wall Winther is lucky to be attached to such a celebrity, but it’s unlikely the couple will be gracing the cover of Hello! any time soon. That’s because Wall Winther’s other half is the Berlin Wall.

Wall Winther (whose original name was Eija-Riita Eklaf) is an Objectum-Sexual, or OS for short. Most OSes harbour their passions in private, terrified of rejection by society

But they can still form meaningful relationships, even if their partners might be considered unconventional.

Tags: wall love, bizarre

New discovery proves 'selfish gene' exists

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:45:47 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.eurekalert.org

A new discovery by a scientist from The University of Western Ontario provides conclusive evidence which supports decades-old evolutionary doctrines long accepted as fact.

Since renowned British biologist Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion") introduced the concept of the 'selfish gene' in 1976, scientists the world over have hailed the theory as a natural extension to the work of Charles Darwin.

In studying genomes, the word 'selfish' does not refer to the human-describing adjective of self-centered behavior but rather to the blind tendency of genes wanting to continue their existence into the next generation. Ironically, this 'selfish' tendency can appear anything but selfish when the gene does move ahead for selfless and even self-sacrificing reasons.

"This basically provides a validation for a huge body of socio-biology," says Thompson, who adds the completion of Honey Bee Genome Project in 2006 was crucial to this discovery.

Tags: selfish gene, genetics, bees, genomes

Gamma Rays: The Incredible, Hulking Reality

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:22:59 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Gamma rays are blamed for making Bruce Banner the Incredible Hulk. But what are gamma rays and what can they really do?

Gamma rays are the highest energy form of light. The rainbow of visible light that we are most familiar with is just part of a far broader spectrum of light, the electromagnetic spectrum. Past the red end of the rainbow, where wavelengths get longer, are infrared rays, microwaves and radio waves, while beyond violet lie the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet rays, X-rays and, finally, gamma rays.

A gamma ray packs at least 10,000 times more energy than a visible light ray. Unlike the Incredible Hulk, gamma rays are not green — lying as they do beyond the visible spectrum, gamma rays have no color at all that we can describe.

Death rays

Exactly how Bruce Banner survives his transformation is unclear.

Tags: gamma rays, the incredible hulk