• Reviewing the Mechanisms of Muscle Atrophy

    Updated: 2012-12-31 15:45:53
    Muscle mass and strength diminish with age, and researchers are making steady progress into understanding exactly why this is the case. Rejuvenation biotechnologies of the sort proposed in the SENS plan should reverse this decline, but most researchers are looking more narrowly at intervening in secondary mechanisms - patching the problem rather than attacking aging at its roots. Skeletal muscle is a plastic organ that is maintained by multiple pathways regulating cell and protein turnover. During muscle atrophy, proteolytic systems are activated, and contractile proteins and organelles are removed, resulting in the shrinkage of muscle fibers. Excessive loss of muscle...

  • Early Growth Rate and Aging

    Updated: 2012-12-31 15:45:53
    From earlier this month, something to think about in the context of reliability theory and life span: Manipulating growth rates in stickleback fish can extend their lifespan by nearly a third or reduce it by 15 percent. [Researchers] altered the growth rate of 240 fish by exposing them to brief cold or warm spells, which put them behind or ahead their normal growth schedule. Once the environmental temperature was returned to normal, the fish got back on track by accelerating or slowing their growth accordingly. However, the change in growth rate also affected their rate of ageing. While the normal...

  • The Emergence of Biogerontology as a Discipline

    Updated: 2012-12-28 20:12:56
    Here is a review paper that looks back at the recent history of biogerontology as a field of study, noting the struggle with long-held perceptions of fraud associated with the intersection of aging and medicine: Through archival analysis this article traces the emergence, maintenance, and enhancement of biogerontology as a scientific discipline in the United States. At first, biogerontologists' attempts to control human aging were regarded as a questionable pursuit due to: perceptions that their efforts were associated with the long history of charlatanic, anti-aging medical practices; the idea that anti-aging is a "forbidden science" ethically and scientifically; and the...

  • $100,000 grants for 20 entrepreneurs under 20 years to develop their dreams

    Updated: 2012-12-21 00:07:42
    Apply by December 31 for one of 20 $100,000 grants offered by the Thiel Foundation to those under 20 to develop their entrepreneurial dreams.

  • A pathography of aging

    Updated: 2012-12-14 19:25:28
    Institute for Evidence Based Cryonics Home About Organization What is cryonics Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics Depressed Metabolism Blog Mailing Lists Sitemap A pathography of aging 14. December 2012 Comments Off Categories : Arts Living Health Written by : Aschwin de Wolf on December 14, 2012. In her book Reconstructing Illness : Studies in Pathography Anne Hunsaker Hawkins proposes that the modern pathography is replacing the accounts of religious conversion that were popular in earlier eras . What is a pathography One definition that I found is the study of the life of an individual or the history of a community with regard to the influence of a particular disease or psychological disorder . Reconstructing Illness is an extensive study of this genre , how individuals deal with a

  • Optimal bond loads in designing molecular machines

    Updated: 2012-12-12 00:14:51
    A study of a biological molecular machine has shown that the machine functions most effectively when it uses chemical bonds just barely strong enough to survive the power stroke of the machine.

  • New strides in understanding mechanochemical reactions

    Updated: 2012-12-03 03:59:29
    New time-resolved, high-energy Xray studies of mechanochemical (ball milling) reactions take another step toward reducing the gap between current and future machine-phase chemistry.

  • Nanotechnology milestone: general method for designing stable proteins

    Updated: 2012-11-21 20:13:44
    Five proteins were designed from scratch and found to fold into stable proteins as designed, proving the ability to provide ideal, robust building blocks for artificial protein structures.

  • More complex circuits for synthetic biology lead toward engineered cells

    Updated: 2012-11-06 18:08:01
    One possible pathway from current technology to advanced nanotechnology that will comprise atomically precise manufacturing implemented by atomically precise machinery is through adaptation and extension of the complex molecular machine systems evolved by biology. Synthetic biology, which engineers new biological systems and function not evolved in nature, is an intermediate stage along this path. An [...]

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