A group of scientists has devised a plan to safeguard Earth’s species in a cryogenic biorepository on the moon.
Intended to save species in the event of a disaster on Earth, the plan makes use of craters that are permanently in shadow and therefore cold enough to allow cryogenic preservation of biological material without using electricity or liquid nitrogen, according to research from a group led by scientists at the Smithsonian, published last week.
The paper, published in the journal BioScience, draws on the successful cryopreservation of skin samples from a fish, and outlines a method for creating a biorepository that would keep samples of other species safe.
The ability to accurately quantify biological age could help monitor and control healthy aging. Epigenetic clocks have emerged as promising tools for estimating biological age, yet so far, most of these clocks have been developed from heterogeneous bulk tissues, and are thus composites of two aging processes, one reflecting the change of cell-type composition with age and another reflecting the aging of individual cell-types. There is thus a need to dissect and quantify these two components of epigenetic clocks, and to develop epigenetic clocks that can yield biological age estimates at cell-type resolution. Here we demonstrate that in blood and brain, approximately 35% of an epigenetic clock’s accuracy is driven by underlying shifts in lymphocyte and neuronal subsets, respectively. Using brain and liver tissue as prototypes, we build and validate neuron and hepatocyte specific DNA methylation clocks, and demonstrate that these cell-type specific clocks yield improved estimates of chronological age in the corresponding cell and tissue-types. We find that neuron and glia specific clocks display biological age acceleration in Alzheimer’s Disease with the effect being strongest for glia in the temporal lobe. The hepatocyte clock is found accelerated in liver under various pathological conditions. In contrast, non-cell-type specific clocks do not display biological age-acceleration, or only do so more marginally. In summary, this work highlights the importance of dissecting epigenetic clocks and quantifying biological age at cell-type resolution.
The authors have declared no competing interest.
The Illumina DNA methylation datasets analyzed here are all freely available from GEO (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo).
There’s only one alliterative phrase i like more than ‘the sheekey science show’, and that’s ‘anti-aging antibodies’. now, as it happens, one thing i spent a lot of time working on this year is antibodies. Antibody, make me feel this way. now while i cannot tell you yet what i was/am doing, i can tell you about two recent science stories that exploit antibodies to extend mouse lifespan. Firstly, i will bring your attention to this paper — immunotherapy targeting isoDGR-protein damage extends lifespan and then we’ll look at this paper that came out last month — Inhibition of IL-11 signalling extends mammalian healthspan.
Use code coolworlds at https://incogni.com/coolworlds to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. The idea of Dyson Spheres was a radical proposal by the physicist Freeman Dyson, an enormous shell of material enveloping a star. Dyson’s idea may be over half a century old, but interest in looking for such objects has only grown in the decades since. But how would such structures work? Are they physically even possible? And what might someone use them for? Today, we dive into the physics of Dyson spheres. Written & presented by Prof. David Kipping. Edited by Jorge Casas. Special thanks to Jason Wright for fact checking. → Support our research: https://www.coolworldslab.com/support → Get merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cool-wor… Check out our podcast: / @coolworldspodcast THANK-YOU to T. Widdowson, D. Smith, L. Sanborn, C. Bottaccini, D. Daughaday, S. Brownlee, E. West, T. Zajonc, A. De Vaal, M. Elliott, B. Daniluk, S. Vystoropskyi, S. Lee, Z. Danielson, C. Fitzgerald, C. Souter, M. Gillette, T. Jeffcoat, J. Rockett, D. Murphree, M. Sanford, T. Donkin, A. Schoen, K. Dabrowski, R. Ramezankhani, J. Armstrong, S. Marks, B. Smith, J. Kruger, S. Applegate, E. Zahnle, N. Gebben, J. Bergman, C. Macdonald, M. Hedlund, P. Kaup, W. Evans, N. Corwin, K. Howard, L. Deacon, G. Metts, R. Provost, G. Fullwood, N. De Haan, R. Williams, E. Garland, R. Lovely, A. Cornejo, D. Compos, F. Demopoulos, G. Bylinsky, J. Werner, S. Thayer, T. Edris, F. Blood, M. O’Brien, D. Lee, J. Sargent, M. Czirr, F. Krotzer, I. Williams, J. Sattler, B. Reese, O. Shabtay, X. Yao, S. Saverys, A. Nimmerjahn, C. Seay, D. Johnson, L. Cunningham, M. Morrow, M. Campbell, B. Devermont, Y. Muheim, A. Stark, C. Caminero, P. Borisoff, A. Donovan & H. Schiff. REFERENCES ► Wright, J. 2020, “Dyson Spheres”, Serbian Astronomical Journal, 200, 1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16734 ► Dyson, F. 1960, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation”, Science, 131, 1667: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/196… ► Dyson, F. 1960, Science, 132,250 ► NASA IRB JWST Report 2018: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploa… ► Papagiannis, M. D. 1985, “SETI — a look into the future.”, The search for extraterrestrial life: recent development, 543: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/198… ► Scoggins, M. & Kipping, D. 2023, “Lazarus stars: numerical investigations of stellar evolution with star-lifting as a life extension strategy”, MNRAS, 523, 3251: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02338 MUSIC Licensed by SoundStripe.com (SS) [shorturl.at/ptBHI], Artlist.io, via CC Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…) or with permission from the artist. 0:34 Tamuz Dekel — Quiet Pull 3:05 We Dream of Eden — Discovery 4:23 Hill — World of Wonder [https://open.spotify.com/track/7kYX7G… ] 6:28 Chris Zabriskie — Music from Neptune Flux 4 8:59 Hill — Arctic Warmth 11:54 Hill — Northern Borders 15:13 Hill — Fragile 17:45 Indive — Trace Correction CHAPTERS 0:00 Prologue 0:39 Inception 3:11 Incogni 4:27 Mechanical Stability 8:31 Gravitational Stability 11:08 Stellar Feedback 13:42 Computational Limits 16:23 Rings and Swarms 17:45 Outro and Credits #DysonSphere #Astronomy #CoolWorlds