How well can we currently extend life?

In preparing for a discussion of the stress resistance of age-1 mutants in C. elegans, Ayyadevera et al (2008) review the literature to answer this question. The biggest changes in lifespan from a single gene mutation are in the range of 3-fold for C. elegans hermaphrodites, slightly less than 2-fold in Drospholia, and between 1.3-1.5 [...]

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SYNC book notes

I got the recommendation for this book from Chris Chatman’s book list, and reading Steven Strogatz’s book was very much a pleasure. My nit-picks are that I wish it had had more actual math equations and fewer analogies, but those flaws are outweighed by the breadth of topics he covers. Here are some of my [...]

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Mortality priming modulates children preferences

What reason do we have to fight through struggles when we know that we will one day die? Terror management theory (TMT) posits that when people experience existential angst they will mitigate this angst in a number of predictable ways. Wisman and Goldenberg (2005) examine the evidence for one surprising prediction for TMT: when primed [...]

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Topography of carbon nanotubes confers better adhesive properties

Sorkin et al recently used rat cortical cells and locust cells in order to examine how these neurons interact with carbon nanotube (CNT) island surfaces. As with other studies, they found that the CNT is a good substrate for neuronal growth and that the neurons tend to migrate to the edge of these CNT islands [...]

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Mechanism of new memory formation triggered during sleep

Science Daily reports: Essentially, once the brain is triggered to reorganize its neural networks in wakefulness (by visual deprivation, for instance), intra- and intercellular communication pathways engage, setting a series of enzymes into action within the reorganizing neurons during sleep. To start the process, NMDAR is primed to open its ion channel after the neuron [...]

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Three theories to explain aging

1) Organisms age for the good of the survival of the species. This is largely based on observations of animals like salmon, who swim uphill to fertilize eggs and then die. This theory doesn’t hold up formally, falling victim to the tragedy of group selectionism. 2) Rate-of-living. This is the idea that you have a [...]

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Two pathways towards enhanced adult neurogenesis

Tashiro et al (2007) describe how mice exposed to an “enriched environment”, meaning larger cages with tunnels and running wheels, can have higher levels of neurogenesis than those without that exposure. That finding in itself is not new, but their team found that mice exposed to the enriched environment for just one week showed an [...]

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Knema laurina abrogates inflammatory neuronal damage and promotes neurogenesis

Hake et al visited tribes near the Malaysian rain forest and selected 50 medicinal plants in coordination with the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. They conducted cellular assays on each of these and chose the plant Knema laurina as having the most anti-inflammatory potential as well as the least neurotoxity for further analysis. The results were pretty [...]

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Traversing the blood brain barrier with endocytosed monocytes

Crossing the blood brain barrier (BBB) is difficult, because the tight peripheral endothelia only allows molecules that are both lipid soluble and smaller than 400 daltons. Use this converter to find out how tiny of a molecular mass that is, and you will begin to recognize the difficulties. Microencapsulating neuropharmaceuticals in immunoliposomes that are already [...]

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Describing the chemistry of the glutamate-glutamine cycle

One of the major roles of astrocytes, currently a “hot topic” in neuroscience, is to regulate the glutamate-glutamine cycle in the synapse. The current view is that glutamate is taken up by the astrocytes, converted to glutamine via glutaminase, and released back into the extracellular fluid, where it undergoes reuptake by the presynaptic cell. The [...]

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