Science News

[Guybrush]

Yo, brainiacs!

I thought it might be fun to have a thread dedicated to Science News 👓

I'll start off with this piece of news:

https://www.sciencealert.com/in-a-first-scientists-fully-wipe-a-cells-memory-before-turning-it-into-a-stem-cell

We've been able to f.ex. turn adult skin cells back into stem cells, but there's been a practical problem with epigenetic factors. Hormones and other external cues can have a lingering regulatory effect on a cell's expression and this may transfer to its lineage. It's been a hindrance in the usage of such stemcells.

Now this barrier seems to have been successfully eliminated and they've managed to make a cell forget its epigenetic coding.

This was published in Nature which is the hottest mag for these sorta things, so the quality control should be good.

I'm excited for what this could mean for the future of stemcell-related treatments 🙂

What else is going on?

[grindy]

Might come in useful.

[Guybrush]

@grindy Seems like that video might be interesting for journalists or students studying journalism. I know someone who's doing a uni course on science reporting for journalists, so I thought of her when I saw this.

Anyways, science news is indeed often lacking in some aspect (as is most news). It is compounded by scientific illiteracy among many journalists.

But I don't think problems in science reporting means we can't have a fun, informative thread

[grindy]

Sure, I wasn't shitting on the thread! I'm very interested in science and I think it's good to be aware of some shortcomings of science news to not be swayed by hypes and misrepresentation.

[Guybrush]

I read an article on early findings from an ambitious study on alzheimer's which is currently underway at one of Norway's most prestigious universities.

At this early phase, the study has transferred blood plasma from men who have just exercised to rats with simulated alzheimer's.

Some preliminary findings:

It turned out that trained blood prevented the brain cells from shrinking in size. In addition, the researchers saw that the proportion of healthy brain cells was higher.

- The most important finding we see is the new formation of brain cells. This is the reason why we started this study, says Wisløff to NRK.

You can read a google translation of the norwegian news article here: https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/trondelag/rotter-med-alzheimer-sykdom-fikk-nye-hjerneceller-etter-a-ha-fatt-blod-fra-trente-menn-1.16530238?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

[Nimbly9]

David Sinclair is going to overturn a lot of what we think about aging. I guess the real question is how long until people will be utilizing it.

The 'Benjamin Button' effect: Scientists can reverse aging in mice. The goal is to do the same for humans

[Guybrush]

David Sinclair is going to overturn a lot of what we think about aging. I guess the real question is how long until people will be utilizing it.

The 'Benjamin Button' effect: Scientists can reverse aging in mice. The goal is to do the same for humans

That's quite interesting. Making an educated guess, there may be some challenges one should tackle parallell to this. If a cell's DNA is damaged somehow, then resetting it still won't fix the damaged DNA. As an example, many male somatic cells simply lose their Y chromosome, something that has health implications for men. So some therapy to make us more robust against this sort of damage as we age and/or to repair the damages done to our DNA would go nicely with a reset.

There's probably ways around this. Back when I was a biology undergraduate, we already figured we'd some day grab a DNA repair enzyme from a cockroach or a tardigrade and put that into humans in order to eradicate most cancers and make stemcell therapies (which often seemed to come with a risk of cancer in the transplanted stemcells) safer.

[Guybrush]

NASA reports that they may have found early potential signs of life on an exoplanet, K2-18B, which orbits a dwarf star some 120 light-years away.

https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/2023/webb-discovers-methane-carbon-dioxide-in-atmosphere-of-k2-18b

From the horse's mouth:

The abundance of methane and carbon dioxide, and shortage of ammonia, support the hypothesis that there may be a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere in K2-18 b. These initial Webb observations also provided a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, this is only produced by life. The bulk of the DMS in Earth's atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments.

The inference of DMS is less robust and requires further validation. "Upcoming Webb observations should be able to confirm if DMS is indeed present in the atmosphere of K2-18 b at significant levels," explained Madhusudhan.

I would not be surprised if we found life on other planets. Rather, I'd be surprised if we didn't find it.

Looking forward to reading more about this once results are verified (or not).

[grindy]

This seems interesting and promising, although there'll probably be some issues not known or mentioned yet.

[Marie Monday]

David Sinclair is going to overturn a lot of what we think about aging. I guess the real question is how long until people will be utilizing it.

The 'Benjamin Button' effect: Scientists can reverse aging in mice. The goal is to do the same for humans

I haven't had time to read the link but that's probably impressive. I always wonder why this branch of research is pursued at all though. Assuming that the goal is to prolong the human life, why would we want to? Surely the only thing that really matters is relative lifespan compared to the people around you, and the world is overpopulated already

[grindy]

I haven't had time to read the link but that's probably impressive. I always wonder why this branch of research is pursued at all though. Assuming that the goal is to prolong the human life, why would we want to? Surely the only thing that really matters is relative lifespan compared to the people around you, and the world is overpopulated already

You don't want our narcissistic, sociopathic politicians and billionaires to live forever? How selfish of you.

[Nimbly9]

Everyone would benefit from such a development. And it would set the stage for mankind (including the rich) to break out from humanity's typically short-sighted approach to problem solving, since people would look ahead and think "Well, I might actually be here 100 years from now.  Maybe I should do something about the whole clean energy thing and all the climate stuff". 

Knowing that you'll actually have to live in the world long-term and not checking out from it after 50 or so years into decrepit old age might change a few minds.

[Marie Monday]

I think your optimism is naive. And anyway, we could also have said that about the current times, ages ago when average lifespan was like 50 years. People will act just as short-sightedly if they live longer, except that then 'short' will mean longer in an absolute sense, but not relative to a human lifespan

[Nimbly9]

Ridiculous. Everything ties back to people's fear of death and the fact we really don't live that long in the grand scheme of things.  Your brain isn't even fully developed til age 25 or so.  So you can subtract that right there. Then you get maybe 30 years or so after that where your body is in arguably good physical condition, followed by a fairly steep and drastic deterioration, disease, Alzheimer's, the works.  And many people don't even get that far due to other factors.

From my POV, that's the truth of things, and giving people a much longer life seems pretty fair.  The world is a big place with lots to do and most of us never get to even go past the tip of the iceberg because there's simply not enough time where we are hale and healthy in order to do so.

If you don't see what a bad deal mankind has gotten literally until this point, I dunno what else to tell you.  But I guess it doesn't matter if you like it or not because its going to happen anyway.  And I'm cool with it.

[Marie Monday]

Everything you just said can be said just the same if you substitute 30 years with 50, or 100, or any other number. I'm not strongly against it happening, I just see no point