Category Health/Medical

The response we’ve seen in flies to low doses of lithium is very encouraging and our next step is to look at targeting GSK-3 in more complex animals with the aim of eventually developing a drug regime to test in humans.

Fruit flies live 16% longer than average when given low doses of the mood stabiliser lithium, according to a UCL-led study. How lithium stabilises mood is poorly understood but when the scientists investigated how it prolongs the lives of flies, they discovered a new drug target that could slow aging – a molecule called glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3).

“To improve our quality and length of life we must delay the onset of age-related diseases by extending the healthiest period of our lives...

All the movies, images, emails and other digital data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10,000 gigabytes) can be stored in the faint pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube. Credit: Tara Brown Photography/ University of Washington

A new technique developed by Uni of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube. The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies.

In one experiment the team successfully encoded digital data from 4 image files into the n...

Chronic, low-grade inflammation caused by high fat diets contributes to obesity and type 2 diabetes and other inflammation-related disorders like cardiovascular disease, stroke and rheumatoid arthritis. Prof David Earnest, Ph.D. and his team have shown that consumption of saturated fats at certain times may “jet lag” internal clocks, as well as the resulting inflammation.

Earnest’s previous work suggested that a high-fat diet alters how our body clocks keep time, particularly in immune cells that mediate inflammation. Earlier findings show that a high fat diet slows down the clocks in immune cells such that they no longer “tell” accurate time. Now, he and his team, including Robert S. Chapkin, Ph.D...

The green signal in these images of an injured zebrafish heart and a fin indicate the activity of a gene that enhances tissue regeneration. Credit: Junsu Kang, Duke University

Limb or organ regrowth may be hidden in our genes. If you trace our evolutionary tree way back to its roots – long before the shedding of gills or the development of opposable thumbs – you will likely find a common ancestor with the amazing ability to regenerate lost body parts. Lucky descendants of this creature, including today’s salamanders or zebrafish, can still perform the feat, but humans lost much of their regenerative power over millions of years of evolution.

A Duke study has discovered the presence of regulatory sequences in zebrafish, a favored model of regeneration research...