Lifeboat Foundation

Eventually all petroleum-based material in food packaging will have to be replaced with bio-based material. Research done at Karlstad University shows that a mixture of starch and other polymers forms an equally effective protective barrier.

“Food packaging has to protect and extend the shelf life of food, and should also work during transport,” says Asif Javed, doctor in Chemical Engineering at Karlstad University. “To meet these demands, a protective barrier is needed in paper-based packing such as those used for juice or dairy.”

Today we are going to take a look at the emerging theory that inflammaging, a chronic, age-related background of inflammation, is caused by alterations to the populations of intestinal microbes.

What is inflammaging?

Inflammaging is a term coined to describe the chronic, smoldering background of inflammation that accompanies the aging process. It is constant, low-grade inflammation that interferes with stem cell mobility, cellular communication, and the immune system’s ability to operate correctly.

Some patients who undergo the eye surgery report a variety of side effects. They may persist for years, studies show.

Because diabetics often have both nerve damage and poor circulation, they will often not notice when they receive skin wounds, which proceed to heal very slowly. Those wounds can thus become chronic, sometimes even leading to amputations. A new regenerative bandage, however, could help keep this from happening.

Led by Prof. Guillermo Ameer, a team from Illinois’ Northwestern University started with a protein known as laminin. Found in the skin and most of the body’s other tissues, it communicates with cells, prompting them to differentiate, migrate and adhere to one another.

The scientists were able to identify a specific segment of the protein, which plays a key role in the wound-healing process. That segment is made up of just 12 amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), and it’s called A5G81. Because A5G81 is so much smaller and simpler than the entire laminin protein, it’s much cheaper and easier to synthesize in the lab.

I was going blind which is not a good thing when you need to see to run a growing nonprofit. Luckily, it is 2018 and technology is advancing at an exponential rate so I had some options. Following is my story which is relevant for many reasons including that we virtually all develop eye problems over time and the state of the art available is constantly changing.

MY STORY

I finally couldn’t read text at normal resolution on my 60″ monitor which is about 4 feet from my face (and normally at 1600×900 resolution to make the text bigger) so it was time to go to the optician again. The optician considerably upgraded my prescription to −17.25 diopters on my left eye and −12.25 diopters on my right eye but warned me that this might not improve my vision much due to the beginning of cataracts in my eyes. So unlike in the past where I bought my glasses from outside the country due to restrictions on being able to purchase thin lenses in the U.S. that were implemented during the Nixon administration, I ordered glasses locally so I could speed up the process.

I was unable to see well with the new glasses so it was time to visit an ophthalmologist that my optician recommended. The ophthalmologist had the following assessment:

Continue reading “I was going blind” »

FDA-approved asthma drug appears to be effective against dementia in mice.

For the first time in an animal model, researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University showed that the tau pathology that accompanies Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed using the asthma drug zileuton [1].

Abstract

Continue reading “Researchers Reverse Cognitive Impairments in Mice with Alzheimer’s” »

NHS hospital bosses are debating a reform involving “widespread adoption of artificial intelligence” and “full automation”.

From diagnosis to recovery, machines could take on a range of jobs, a new report suggests.

Denis Campbell Health policy editor.

Continue reading “The robot will see you now: how AI could revolutionise NHS” »

One of the most commonly asked questions we receive is “How is progress going in aging research?” It is something we are asked so often that we decided to provide the community with a resource that will help them to keep track of progress directly.

To that end, today we have launched our new curated database, The Rejuvenation Roadmap, which will be tracking the progress of the many therapies and projects in the rejuvenation biotechnology field. This database aims to give a quick visual summary of the status of each drug or therapy along with some additional information for people interested in learning more about them.

We believe that an informed community is an effective one, and this was one of our motivations for developing this new database. There are many resources for scientists, such as the superb databases of the Human Ageing Genomic Resources maintained by Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães, which are excellent for researchers. However, we noticed that there was no database that tracked the efforts of the many researchers and projects in the field, and while some people do maintain lists, they are often not public facing, easy to access, or user-friendly.