Longevity science

Bottling up emotions is thought to harm both mind and body, but a new study suggests that doing the opposite may be no better.

In a study of nearly 4,000 heart attack patients, those who recalled having flown into a rage during the previous year were more than twice as likely to have had their heart attack within two hours of that episode, compared to other times during the year.

Activating an enzyme known to play a role in the anti-aging benefits of calorie restriction delays the loss of brain cells and preserves cognitive function in mice, according to a study published in the May 22 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

The findings could one day guide researchers to discover drug alternatives that slow the progress of age-associated impairments in the brain.

Antibacterial soap has been around for 40 years. But research now shows that the active ingredient in the soap, triclosan, alters hormonal balance in animals, is possibly harmful to the immune system, and possibly contributes to the rise of antibiotic resistant germs.
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Triclosan, which kills both bacteria and fungus, is found in about 75 percent of antibacterial products. In addition to soaps, it’s found in deodorants and toothpaste and mouthwashes where it helps prevent gingivitis, and it’s infused in various household products such as garbage bags, kitchen utensils, furniture, clothing, toys, and some cosmetics.

When a nerve in the peripheral nervous system is torn or severed, it can take a long time to regenerate – if it does so at all. Depending on the location of the injury, it can leave the affected part of the patient’s body numb and/or paralyzed for years, or even for the rest of their life. Now, however, scientists from Israel’s Tel Aviv University have created a gel and an implant that they claim could vastly aid in the healing of damaged nerves.

The implant is a tiny pliable biodegradable tube, that is placed around the two cut ends of the nerve. It serves to line them up with one another and hold them together end-to-end, plus its inner surface is coated with the gel.

Computer chips and silicon micromachines are ready for your body. It’s time to decide how you’ll take them: implantable, ingestible, or intimate contact. Every flavor now exists. Some have FDA approval and some are seeking it. Others are moving quickly out of the research lab stage. With the round one Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize entries due in one year, we’re soon to see a heavy dose of sensors tied to the mobile wireless health revolution.

With these sensors comes a heavy dose of information about your health, data about what medication you are taking and when you took it. The sensors are available to protect your health, but choosing how to use them and how to protect the privacy of your data will be a matter of personal responsibility.

Anyone wanting to live longer and cut their risk of suffering from heart disease might want to consider getting a pet.

The American Heart Association (AHA) issued a scientific statement on Thursday saying owning a pet may help to decrease a person's risk of suffering from heart disease and is linked with lower levels of obesity, blood pressure and cholesterol.

Just like other parts of the body, the retina needs oxygen in order to survive. If it doesn’t receive enough – should its blood supply be restricted, for instance – permanent blindness can result.

The sooner that doctors know if a patient’s retina is receiving insufficient oxygen, the better the chances that they can take action in time. Soon, they may be able to use tiny injectable robots to get them the information they need.

A newly developed network of nanoscale particles can maintain normal blood sugar levels for more than a week by releasing insulin when blood-sugar levels rise.

This system could help type I diabetics replace insulin injections and monitoring.

While prosthetic limbs continue to improve, tactile feedback is one feature that many are keen to incorporate into the prosthetics but it remains a very difficult technology to develop. But now scientists have developed a new device so packed with sensors it is about as sensitive as human skin. Just as Moore’s Law continues to benefit the integrated circuit, packing ever more sensors into a smaller area will allow such devices to one day be built into everything we touch.

Some areas of our skin, like the lips and fingertips, are more sensitive to the touch because of a greater density of receptors that translate mechanical force into neuronal signals. The sensory device built by scientists at Georgia Tech is a new kind of transistor that converts mechanical force into electricity. The force bends nanoscale wires made of zinc oxide. When the wires bend back, zinc and oxide ions create an electrical potential that is converted to electrical current of a few millivolts. Converting mechanical energy to electrical energy is known as the piezoelectric effect.

Researchers at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital is working on developing human organs by building body cells layer by layer using a 3D printer.

The team has used the 3D printer to make body cells, including muscle cells, nervous systems cells and cartilage. Professor Mark Cook, director of neurosciences at St Vincent's Hospital, said 3D body part printing was like 'bubble jet printers'.

For years now, scientists across the globe have strived to find a method that gives robots an accurate sense of touch, and with good reason. A robot with an improved ability to feel would be better equipped to identify objects, judge its movements with greater care, and perform more tasks overall. In the latest step towards that goal, researchers at Georgia Tech have crafted a new type of touch-reactive material that's sensitive enough to read fingerprints and could provide robots with a sense of touch that resembles our own.

But processed has its upside (easy and cheap), while produce and grains have their downside (prep-heavy and expensive).

Right?

Not so, says Allison Sosna, a local chef and founder of MicroGreens, a group dedicated to teaching families — in particular children — how to prepare healthful meals on a teeny budget (as little as $3.50 per meal for a family of four).

Salamanders’ immune systems are key to their remarkable ability to regrow limbs, and could also underpin their ability to regenerate spinal cords, brain tissue and even parts of their hearts, scientists have found.

As smart as they are, doctors can’t compete with the volume of knowledge that a robot can retain. In an effort to join the best of both worlds – human experience with robotic data – a number of companies are developing telemedicine robots that not only allow doctors to reach out to patients miles or continents away, but can offer immediate information and advice that draws from volumes of medical research and case studies.

In January the FDA approved the telepresence platform RP-Vita, developed by iRobot and InTouch Health. Now seven hospitals across North America have enlisted the services of RP-Vita, bringing us one step closer to robotics-augmented healthcare.

Britain launched a research program on Monday that should eventually allow all cancer patients to have access to the kind of genetic analysis that led Hollywood star Angelina Jolie to decide to undergo a double mastectomy.

The project, involving the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London, the U.S. gene sequencing firm Illumina, geneticists and cancer doctors, aims to find a way to allow more cancer genes be tested in more people.

No matter what sort of wondrous implantable medical devices are created, they’re not going to do anyone much good if the recipient's body simply rejects them. With that in mind, scientists at the University of Washington have developed a synthetic biomaterial that they claim is “exceptional” at keeping implanted materials from being attacked by the immune system.

University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.

The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

(Reuters) - Patent expirations on big-name drugs such as Lipitor and Plavix has resulted in modestly less spending on medicines in the United States for the first time in at least 55 years, according to...

Patient-specific bone substitutes from skin cells for repair of large bone defects are now possible, thanks to research by a team of New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute scientists.

The study represents a major advance in personalized reconstructive treatments for patients with bone defects resulting from disease or trauma. It promises to lead to customizable, three-dimensional bone grafts on-demand, matched to fit the exact needs and immune profile of a patient.

Scientists from the University of Iowa are now claiming that by playing a specific video game, test subjects aged 50 and over were able to stop and even reverse the trend.

In fact, those that played a particular game showed as much as seven year's worth of cognitive improvement when retested one year after the study.

Epilepsy seizures can range from something as subtle as a passing localized numbness to something as noticeable and potentially dangerous as wild involuntary thrashing. While some people experience symptoms before a seizure that indicate one is about to occur, others have no warning at all.

A new device designed to be implanted between the skull and the brain surface has been found to accurately predict epilepsy seizures in humans and can indicate the risk of a seizure occurring in the coming hours.

Scientists discover how to slow down aging in mice and increase longevity
Blocking a specific protein complex in the hypothalamus and injecting a hormone slow aging and cognitive decline

Their discovery of a specific age-related signaling pathway opens up new strategies for combating diseases of old age and extending lifespan.

One of the things that makes heart disease so problematic is the fact that after a heart attack occurs, the scar tissue that replaces the damaged heart tissue isn’t capable of expanding and contracting – it doesn’t “beat,” in other words. This leaves the heart permanently weakened. Now, however, scientists from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have developed artificial heart tissue that may ultimately provide a solution to that problem.

At the base of the material is a rubbery gel known as MeTro. It’s made from tropoelastin, which is the protein that gives human tissues their elasticity.