Lifeboat Foundation

Sea urchins are remarkable organisms. They can quickly regrow damaged spines and feet. Some species also live to extraordinary old ages and—even more remarkably—do so with no signs of poor health, such as a decline in regenerative capacity or an increase in age-related mortality. These ocean Methuselahs even reproduce as if they were still youngsters.

MDI Biological Laboratory Associate Professor James A. Coffman, Ph.D., is studying the regenerative capacity of sea urchins in hopes that a deeper understanding of the process of regeneration, which governs the regeneration of aging tissues as well as lost or damaged body parts, will lead to a deeper understanding of the aging process in humans, with whom sea urchins share a close genetic relationship.

In a paper recently published in Aging Cell, a leading journal in the field of aging biology, with Andrea G. Bodnar, Ph.D., of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Studies, the scientists shed new light on the aging process in sea urchins, raising the prospect that the physical decline that typically accompanies aging is not inevitable.

Continue reading “Is aging inevitable? Not necessarily for sea urchins” »

The oldest space dust yet found on Earth suggests that the ancient atmosphere of Earth had significantly more oxygen than previously thought, a new study finds.

Although oxygen gas currently makes up about one-fifth of Earth’s air, there was at least 100,000 times less oxygen in the primordial atmosphere, researchers say. Oxygen easily reacts with other molecules, which means it readily gets bound to other elements and pulled from the atmosphere.

Previous research suggests that significant levels of oxygen gas started permanently building up in the atmosphere with the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred about 2.4 billion years ago. This event was most likely caused by cyanobacteria — microbes that, like plants, photosynthesize and release oxygen. [Infographic: Earth’s Atmosphere Top to Bottom].

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According to established scientific knowledge, complex cells (called eukaryotic cells) can’t survive without mitochondria — tiny organelles that control respiration and power movement and growth. You can think of them as tiny batteries converting energy so that cells can go about their business, but they perform other key jobs, too. They are, as the common adage goes, the powerhouse of the cell.

Now, scientists working in Canada and the Czech Republic have made a surprising discovery: a eukaryotic cell without these mitochondrial batteries. It’s an unprecedented find that’s likely to change our thinking about how some types of cells can exist and grow. In other words, life is more flexible than we thought.

“[Mitochondria] were considered to be absolutely indispensable components of the eukaryotic cell and the hallmark of the eukaryotic cell,” team leader, Anna Karnkowska from the University of British Columbia told Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR.

Continue reading “Newly discovered microbe does something textbooks say is impossible: it lives without mitochondria” »

Fox 29 — Good Day Philadelphia

http://www.fox29.com/140735577-video

NBC TV 10

Continue reading “Bringing The Dead Back To Life — Reanima Project / Bioquark Inc. Media Coverage” »

We knew this was going to happen. Just still neat to read about it.

(Phys.org) —NASA is planning to launch a milestone experiment involving growing plants on the moon. The target date is 2015, when the agency will deposit plants on the moon’s surface. The initiative is being driven by the Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team. They intend to use coffee-can sized containers designed to protect the plants against harsh elements of the climate, and will also provide cameras, sensors, and electronics in order to relay information about how the plants fare back to earth. NASA’s plan is “to develop a very simple sealed growth chamber that can support germination over a five to-ten day period in a spacecraft on the Moon.”

What will NASA try to grow? The containers will attempt to grow turnip, basil and Arabidopsis The latter is used often in plant research; Simon Gilroy, University of Wisconsin-Madison botany professor, has referred to the Arabidopsis as “the lab rat of plant biology.” Will the life forms survive the lunar surface? NASA’s plan is to find some answers when this “self-contained habitat,” which will have a mass of about 1 kg and would be a payload on a commercial lunar lander, is on the moon, How it gets there is another interesting side of the story, because NASA is taking advantage of a parallel event to save costs significantly.

Continue reading “Can plants grow on the moon? NASA plans test in 2015” »

“Daniel Chao, a Stanford-trained neuroscientist, and Brett Wingeier, a biomedical engineer, founded Halo Neuroscience in 2013. … Halo Sport uses electrodes to stimulate the brain’s motor cortex, which controls planning and voluntary movements. Energized motor neurons send stronger signals to athletes’ muscles, which Chao says allows them to reap greater rewards from every rep.”

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A study of the embryonic nervous system of the fruit fly throws light on how two neuronal cell lineages that develop at different times and in different places in the ventral nerve cord of the embryo can ultimately result in very similar neuronal subtypes. The study, publishing in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on 5th May, is a collaboration between research teams in Madrid (Spain) and Linköping (Sweden).

In the paper, Hugo Gabilondo, Johannes Stratmann and their colleagues report that a crucial terminal selector gene, col, is activated by different sets of spatio-temporal selector genes in the two different neuronal cell lineages. In dAp neurons, which are present throughout the thorax and abdominal segments, col is activated directly by the action of the early temporal genes Kruppel (Kr) and pdm, and the GATA transcription factor gene grain (grn). By contrast, in Tv1 neurons, which are specific to the thoracic segments, col is activated by the late temporal gene cas, together with several other genes that feed forward onto the terminal selector gene cascade downstream of col. The result is expression of the neuropeptide Nplp1 in both dAp and Tv1 neurons.

The developing nervous system generates many different neuronal cell types; understanding this process of cell fate specification remains a major challenge for biologists. Complex cascades of regulatory genes are known to be involved, starting with spatial and temporal selector genes and finishing with terminal selector genes, all of which act in various combinations to dictate the ultimate neuronal cell type. A particular neuronal cell type often arises in several parts of the nervous system and at different stages of development, however, suggesting that different spatio-temporal cues can converge on the same terminal selectors to generate a similar cell fate. This study reports evidence of this phenomenon in an example from the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Continue reading “Gene cascade specifies two distinct neuron sets expressing Nplp1” »

They are worth 6 billion dollars.

They are calling him the Elon Musk of biology. But will we see an end to aging soon?

Continue reading “The End of Aging? Soon It Might Be a Prescription Away” »

Scientists have sustained human embryos in a petri dish for 13 days, shattering the previous record of nine days. The breakthrough will allow researchers to study early fetal development in unprecedented detail, and brings us one step closer to viable “artificial wombs.” But it’s adding fuel to an already heated ethical debate.

Two separate papers published this week, one in Nature and one in Nature Cell Biology, have reported culturing human embryos for nearly two weeks, going well beyond previous efforts. There’s no reason to believe that the embryos couldn’t have survived beyond the two-week mark, but the experiment had to be halted to adhere to the internationally agreed 14-day limit on human embryo research.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-build-an-artificial-womb-476464703

Continue reading “Artificial Wombs Just Got One Step Closer to Reality” »