Category Health/Medical

How Old are you, Biologically? AI can tell your ‘True’ Age by looking at your Chest

The upper images are the chest radiographs of patients from 21 to 40 years old and from 81 to 100 years old chronologically and the lower images are a visualization of the AI’s focus (both after averaging). Red indicates the points most useful for age determination.

Credit: Yasuhito Mitsuyama, Osaka Metropolitan University

AI-powered model using chest Xrays helps develop biomarkers for aging. Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed an AI model that accurately estimates a patient’s age, using chest radiographs of healthy individuals collected from multiple facilities...

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Blood Factor Can Turn Back Time in the Aging Brain

Blood factor can turn back time in the aging brain
Systemic PF4 enhances adult hippocampal neurogenesis in vivo. a Experimental design of PF4 injection paradigm in young mice. b, c Intravenous (i.v.) PF4 injections for 1 week did not affect neural precursor cell proliferation in the subgranular zone (SGZ; n = 10 mice in saline group; n = 9 mice in PF4 group; counts of one hemisphere), but increased the number of doublecortin+ (DCX+) cells (n = 15 mice per group; counts of one hemisphere). d Experimental design of the double-labeling paradigm with CldU and IdU. e Acute administration of PF4 did not affect neural precursor cell proliferation, including the recruitment of cells from quiescence (n = 20 mice per group). f Running paradigm of PF4 knockout (KO) mice. g Representative images of Ki67+ cells in the S...
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Older Adults who play Digital Puzzle Games have the Same Memory Abilities as People in their 20s, a new study has shown.

Age plays a part in the type of digital games that are best to stimulate memory

The study, from the University of York, also found that adults aged 60 and over who play digital puzzle games had a greater ability to ignore irrelevant distractions, but older adults who played strategy games did not show the same improvements in memory or concentration.

It is known that as humans age, their mental abilities tend to decrease, particularly the ability to remember a number of things at a single time — known as working memory. Working memory is thought to peak between the ages of 20 and 30 before slowly declining as a person gets older.

Previous research, however, has shown that the way we hold information in the brain changes as we get older, and so the York team looked at whether the ...

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Surprise COVID Discovery Helps Explain How Coronaviruses Jump Species

DNA-tethering and fusion of SARS-CoV-2 pseudoviruses and virus-like particles (VLP). The experiment design is schematized in panel (a), where DNA-functionalized viral particles are added to a microfluidic flow cell and allowed to bind to protein-free liposomes functionalized with complementary DNA. After unbound particles are washed away, fusion is initiated by addition of a soluble protease and monitored via lipid mixing, detected as fluorescence dequenching of Texas Red dye in the VLP or pseudoviral envelope. Representative images of a 10.1 × 9.6 μm sub-micrograph before and after lipid mixing are shown in panel (b) with a fusing particle outlined in magenta. The corresponding fluorescence intensity trace is plotted in panel (c).

Unexpected new insights into how COVID-19 infects ce...

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