Brain DNA Methylation Increases Approaching Adulthood
DNA methylation (attachment of methyl groups into the DNA backbone) is a means of gene regulation widely used in genomes of humans and other species. DNA methylation becomes more extensive in prefrontal cortex brain neurons as adolescent humans approach adulthood. Researchers have discovered that people's frontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for the conduct and the acquisition of new information) experiences a significant change from birth to the end of adolescence. The epigenome is transformed. The study analyzes the epigenome of newborns, teenagers aged 16, and adults aged 25 and 50 in the United States and ...
Source: FuturePundit - July 20, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Unmanned Sailboats And Robotic Shipping
Check out this Wired article Unmanned Sailboats Test the Waters of Vehicle Autonomy about college students competing to develop autonomous sailboats. Cool stuff. Sounds like fun. Sounds far easier than self-drivable cars that have to deal with a far more complex land environment. The bit about the far more complex land environment triggers some thoughts. First, it makes sense that airplanes had auto-pilots decades before self-driving cars. 30,000 feet in the air presents a far less complex environment of obstacles to avoid than ground level. But oceans also present far fewer obstacles. Granted, oceans pound ships with inte...
Source: FuturePundit - July 16, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Nutrient Starvation Protein Could Be Cancer Cell Target
Life is like a big game of Russian Roulette where our DNA gets mutated every day and the right combination of mutations could drive a cell to start dividing like mad. Months later a doctor delivers bad news about your scheduled check-out from the Life Hotel. You never know when cancer might strike. The revolver is spinning and the trigger is being pulled every second. So that's why I take an especially large interest in cancer research. Some British researchers think maybe they've found an Achilles Heel in cancer cells: the protein eEF2K. Chris Proud, Professor of Cellular Regulation in Biological Sciences at the Universit...
Source: FuturePundit - July 14, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
American Chestnut Trees Poised For Return
Starting in 1900 a blight fungus spread through all American Chestnut forests, wiping out almost all American chestnuts by 1940. A New York Times article reports on two groups that have developed American chestnut strains that have resistance to the blight. One strain was made by crossing with a Chinese chestnut and another was made by genetic engineering. I am especially hoping the genetically engineered strain succeeds because it has the smallest genetic difference with regular American chestnut. But likely either would be a boon. Over 100 years ago chestnut represented about 25% of the trees in the American east. A revi...
Source: FuturePundit - July 14, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Heavy Smokers, Drinkers Brain Age 36% Faster
The combination of smoking and heavy drinking takes its toll in the form of 36% faster brain aging. Smoking and heavier alcohol consumption often co-occur, and their combined effect on cognition may be larger than the sum of their individual effects. The research team assessed 6,473 adults (4,635 men and 1,838 women) aged between 45 and 69 years old over a 10-year period. The adults were part of the Whitehall II cohort study of British civil servants. All the participants were asked about their cigarette and alcohol consumption, and their cognitive function (including verbal and mathematical reasoning, short-term verbal me...
Source: FuturePundit - July 13, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Peak Copper Pushed Further Out
Which minerals and forms of energy will limit economic growth and when will each do so? Oil prices are now high enough to retard economic growth. Will oil become a bigger limit in the future? When will other energy sources (notably electricity in batteries) become major substitutes for oil? Do we only need to worry about oil in the next 30 years? Some Australian academics think copper won't run out in 30 years. New research shows that existing copper resources can sustain increasing world-wide demand for at least a century, meaning social and environmental concerns could be the most important restrictions on future copper ...
Source: FuturePundit - July 6, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Implications For Sequencing 700,000 Year Old Horse DNA
The successful sequencing of DNA from a 700,000 year old fossil dug up in Canada's Yukon Territory has some geneticists claiming they can go all the way back 1 million years and reconstruct ancient DNA. How cool is that? What's key here: frozen places that have been frozen for a very long time are big refrigerators that preserve DNA. A dig into the frozen soil of Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territory, Greenland, or northern Siberia is a trip back into genetic time. Any species which went extinct in the last million years in far northern zones can probably be brought back to life in the 2020s or 2030s. If any of the animals th...
Source: FuturePundit - July 3, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Junk Sections Of Human DNA Not Really Junk After All
Most DNA in human chromosomes is not transcribed and translated into proteins. So the thinking in some circles has been that this DNA was just basically parasitic junk along for the ride. Since that view never made sense to me I'm happy to report that lots of the "junk" DNA regions get transcribed to make RNA molecules. Given the discoveries in recent years on small pieces of RNA as regulatory molecules it looks like large chunks of the genome code for complex regulatory mechanisms. A new UC San Francisco study highlights the potential importance of the vast majority of human DNA that lies outside of genes within the cell....
Source: FuturePundit - July 1, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Artificial Light Cutting Melatonin-Driven Sleep
We are staying up too late because our computer monitors, TVs, and room lights are boosting wakefulness by suppressing melatonin. Before the widespread use of electric light, people probably experienced that second wind in the mid-afternoon, keeping them going until night fell. But light exposure after sunset signals 'daytime' to the SCN, shifting the clock later, postponing the second wind and delaying the onset of melatonin secretion. LEDs are rich in short wavelength light in the frequency rate that suppresses melatonin production. Lack of sleep boosts appetite. I bet this is a substantial contributor to the rise in obe...
Source: FuturePundit - June 21, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
More Telomerase Activity In Depressed People
Telomere caps on chromosomes shorten every time a cell divides and short telomeres interfere with cell division. However, in some conditions cellls turn on an enzyme, telomerase, that lengthens telomeres. Higher telomerase activity in depressed people might be an attempt by the body to boost neurogenesis against depression. Now a research team led by Owen Wolkowitz, MD, professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco, has found that within cells of the immune system, activity of an enzyme called telomerase is greater, on average, in untreated individuals with major depression. The preliminary findings from his latest, ongoing ...
Source: FuturePundit - June 16, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Scientists Evolve A Virus So It Can Deliver Gene Therapy
Technology review headline: Virus That Evolved in the Lab Delivers Gene Therapy into the Retina. Works for mice. The scientists are now trying to make it work as well for monkeys. From millions of random mutations, scientists identify a virus that could make gene therapy for inherited retinal diseases safer and more effective. Viruses operate by injecting their DNA into a cell to program the cell to replicate their DNA. The ability to their shells to inject their DNA into cells make them obvious candidates to repurpose as delivery vehicles for gene therapy into cells. Viruses for gene therapy have been tried many times wit...
Source: FuturePundit - June 15, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Consider How Long You Might Live After Retirement
You might live a long time even before considering the approaching biotech revolution. 10% of 65 year olds today will reach 95 years old. I think this is an overly conservative estimate. It is time to rethink career trajectories. And with rising life expectancies, many people will have a lot of time: the average 65-year-old woman today can be expected to live to 86, a man to 84. One out of 10 people who are 65 today will live past 95, according to projections from the Social Security Administration. For that 1 in 10 of 65 year olds who will live 30+ years that takes them to 2043. Imagine how radically the world will change...
Source: FuturePundit - June 14, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Humans 100k Years From Now: Big Eyes And Big Heads?
Humans in 100,000 years? "Nickolay Lamm and Alan Kwan think future humans will sport bigger heads, bigger eyes and improved night vision." 100,000 years is the wrong time scale. As soon as we know what a substantial fraction of all the genetic variants do people will will doing embryo selection guided by genetic testing. I expect this to take off in under 10 years because genetic testing has become so cheap and genetic researchers have begun to find markers for IQ differences. Throw in markers for eye color, hair color, facial shape, dental attributes, skin tone, and other attributes and prospective parents who can afford ...
Source: FuturePundit - June 9, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Retirement, Money, And Rejuvenation Therapies
Low bond yields make retirement a dicey proposition. Consider again the 65-year-old couple who are starting to draw down $1 million in savings this year: if they withdrew 3 percent, or $30,000, a year, rather than that standard rate of 4 percent, inflation-adjusted, there is still a one-in-three chance that they will outlive their money, under current market conditions. Warning: this sort of projection is based on a business as usual (BAU) rate of progress in biomedical science. We are headed for a disruptive phase in development of biotechnology where we can begin to repair and replace aged tissue. Early stage rejuvenatio...
Source: FuturePundit - June 8, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Body Reshaping To Look Like Fictional Characters
How about plastic surgery to look like an elf, look like Superman, get star shapes on your forehead, become more tiger-like, or get pointy Spock Vulcan ears.. Recent advances in ear reshaping to get more pointed ears bodes well for elf lovers and Vulcan lovers. Or how about eye implants to see into ultraviolet? I see an angle here for a circus: bring out people who can much more realistically play assorted fictional characters.... (Source: FuturePundit)
Source: FuturePundit - June 8, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
