Given that some athletes will take almost anything to gain a one percent edge in performance, what might they do for a 100 percent improvement? That temptation is made somewhat more real by a report today in a leading journal about a drug that doubles the physical endurance of mice running on treadmills. And it could only be more tempting, because the drug in question has also been reported to extend the lifespan of mice. An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer - five-eights of a mile - on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far. They also have a reduced heart rate and energy-charged muscles, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and his colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France. ‘Resveratrol makes you look like a trained athlete without the training,’ Dr. Auwerx (pronounced OH-wer-ix’) said in an interview. He and his colleagues said the same mechanism seems likely to operate in humans, based on their analysis, in a group […]
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — Our enigmatic, ancient, heavy-browed cousins just got a lot less mysterious. New gene sequencing techniques at a Walnut Creek lab have produced a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome from a bit of a 38,000-year-old leg bone. The ancient DNA is time-worn and fragmented, but a team led by geneticist Eddy Rubin of the Joint Genome Institute managed to salvage 65,000 genetic units and show that more than 99.5 percent of the Neanderthal genome is identical to modern humans. The research appears this week in Science. ‘This provides a whole new window into these long departed ancestors,’ Rubin said. ‘The sequence data will serve as a DNA time machine that will tell us about biology and aspects of Neanderthals that we could never get from their bones and the limited number of associated artifacts.’ Though the sequence is just a tiny fraction of the more than 3 billion units that make up the whole genome, it is enough to tell that modern humans and Neanderthals began to split more than 700,000 years ago and evolved into distinct species about 370,000 years ago. There has been a lot of speculation about whether Neanderthals […]
If you are a middle-aged man and you want to live a long time, all you need is a good lifestyle – some good genes would also help. Make sure you don’t become obese, remember to exercise regularly, keep your blood pressure down, avoid the boozy lifestyle and keep away from foods high in refined sugars, say experts from the Pacific Health Research Institute, Hawaii, USA. You can read about this new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). If you look after yourself in this way your chances of reaching 85, and being healthy at that age, are five times greater than for men who stray off the beaten track. The researchers looked at data on 5,820 Japanese/American males – they had been monitored for four decades. The men were initially monitored in 1965 – at that time they had an average age of 54 and were all healthy. They were followed up in 2005. The scientists found that the following, either in isolation, or in combination, significantly influenced whether the men lived a long life, and also whether their extra years were healthy ones: — obesity — alcohol consumption (3+ […]
NAIROBI — UN chief Kofi Annan demanded that world leaders give climate change the same priority as they did to wars and to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Annan made the appeal as he launched a three-day gathering of environment chiefs, tasked with stepping up action against global warming. In his valedictory speech to the annual meeting, the UN secretary-general painted a sombre tableau about the effects of climate change, especially on impoverished countries that were least to blame for it. And he lacerated the fast-shrinking minority of politicians or scientists who still denied there was any threat as ‘out of step, out of arguments and out of time.’ Climate change imperils agriculture through drought and coastal cities through rising sea levels, poses a health threat by spreading mosquito-born disease and could lead to billion-dollar weather calamities, said Annan. ‘Climate change is also a threat to peace and security,’ he warned. ‘Changing patterns of rainfall, for example, can heighten competition for resources, setting in motion potentially destabilising tensions and migrations, especially in fragile states or volatile regions. ‘There is evidence that some of this already occurring; more could well be in […]
Escalating rates of diabetes among indigenous cultures could make the Maori and Polynesian races ‘extinct’ before the end of the century, an Australian expert warns. Professor Paul Zimmet, director of Monash University’s International Diabetes Institute, said the rising number of diabetes victims among the world’s indigenous communities would decimate entire cultures. ‘Without urgent action there certainly is a real risk of a major wipeout of indigenous communities, if not total extinction, within this century,’ he said. ‘Life expectancy is already low and dropping, and diabetes is hitting them very hard, so the infections, amputations and kidney disease will just wreak more havoc.’ Professor Zimmet labelled rising world diabetes rates – with the disease affecting one in four ‘indigenous’ adults – a tragedy threatening to consume world economies and bankrupt health systems. Extinction was a ‘very real reality’ and Australia’s Aborigines were just as much at risk as Maori and Pacific Island populations, and native people in the United States and Canada, he said. Professor Zimmet will air his claims at a Diabetes in Indigenous People Forum, which opened in Melbourne yesterday. The claims have split experts in New Zealand. Professor Chris Cunningham, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
