Category Biology/Biotechnology

Elisabetta Barbi, Francesco Lagona, Marco Marsili, James W. Vaupel, Kenneth W. Wachter. The plateau of human mortality: Demography of longevity pioneers. Science, 2018; 360 (6396): 1459 DOI: 10.1126/science.aat3119

Want to be a supercentenarian? The chances of reaching the ripe old age of 110 are within reach – if you survive the perilous 90s and make it to 105 when death rates level out, according to a study of extremely old Italians led by the University of California, Berkeley, and Sapienza University of Rome.

Researchers tracked the death trajectories of nearly 4,000 residents of Italy who were aged 105 and older between 2009 and 2015. They found that the chances of survival for these longevity warriors plateaued once they made it past 105...

Study reveals atomic structure of tropoelastin, showing what goes wrong in some diseases. The stretchiness that allows living tissues to expand, contract, stretch, and bend throughout a lifetime is the result of a protein molecule called tropoelastin. Remarkably, this molecule can be stretched to 8X its length and always returns back to its original size.

Now, for the first time, researchers have decoded the molecular structure of this complex molecule, as well as the details of what can go wrong with its structure in various genetically driven diseases. Tropoelastin is the precursor molecule of elastin, which along with structures called microfibrils is the key to flexibility of tissues including skin, lungs, and blood vessels...

Squeezing light into nano-size volumes is enabled by surface plasmon resonance, a phenomenon that causes molecules to be trapped near the film, making them available for study under powerful microscopes. Credit: Justus Ndukaife/Vanderbilt University

An award-winning Vanderbilt University researcher used plasmonics to develop a new kind of nanotweezers that can rapidly trap and detect molecules, viruses and DNA – a device transformative for medicine that also has color printing applications. Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Justus Ndukaife and his Purdue University collaborators poked holes in gold film smaller than the wavelength of light...