Category Biology/Biotechnology

Caffeine may flip an ancient cellular switch linked to slower aging

Caffeine May Slow Cellular Aging
Caffeine could have surprising effects on cellular aging by activating AMPK, a system that helps cells manage energy and stress. Credit: Shutterstock

Caffeine may help cells age more slowly by switching on a powerful energy and stress-response system. Scientists found that caffeine activates an ancient cellular energy system involved in stress resistance, DNA repair, and growth. The discovery could help explain caffeine’s links to healthier aging and may point toward new ways to target the same pathway.

Your morning coffee may be doing more than helping you wake up.

Research from Queen Mary University of London suggests that caffeine can activate an ancient cellular energy system involved in growth, stress resistance, and DNA repair...

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Brain aging may be detected decades before symptoms appear, with links to gut health

brain gut
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A new UCLA study has found a connection between how quickly the brain ages and the bacteria and chemical byproducts found in the gut, offering a clue to what drives brain aging long before symptoms appear.

Researchers have long used brain scans to estimate a person’s “brain age,” a measure that can differ from someone’s actual age in years. When a brain looks older than expected on a scan, prior research has linked it to poorer memory, thinking skills and mood. However, most of these studies involved older adults or people with existing brain diseases. Whether this gap between brain age and chronological age means anything in younger, generally healthy people has been unclear.

In a new study published in the journal eBioMedicine, UCLA Health rese...

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Scientists discover a strange new form of ice that could help explain the interiors of Neptune and Uranus

Neptune
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Scientists have discovered that there is ice deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus and want to find out what form it takes and how it behaves. They cannot dig for it and transport it all the way back to Earth, so they do the next best thing: recreate those extreme conditions in the lab.

That’s exactly what a team of scientists led by Alexis Forestier from the CEA, France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, did. What they discovered could help us better understand the strange magnetic fields and deep interior layers of these distant worlds.

The weird world of hot ice
On those planets, ice is not like the frozen cubes you put into a cold drink...

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Stress hormone timing creates a different kind of obesity, study suggests

histology of liver tissue
Liver tissue from mice after 60 days of treatment. From left to right: control, glucocorticoid-rhythm flattening, and high-fat diet. The top row shows H&E-stained liver tissue, while red staining in the bottom row marks fat in the liver. Mice with flattened glucocorticoid rhythms on a standard diet displayed minimal liver fat compared with mice fed a high-fat diet, despite similar obesity. Scale bar, 100 µm. Credit: Teruel Lab

Obesity caused by disrupted stress-hormone rhythms is metabolically very different from obesity caused by a high-fat diet, according to a new preclinical study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators...

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