Lifeboat Foundation

Could drinking coffee lead to a longer lifespan?

Many people will swear to the life extending properties of coffee, be it saving them from keeling over from exhausting in the early hours of the morning or saving an annoying co-worker from the unbridled rage of someone who hasn’t yet acquired their caffeine fix. Yes, coffee is without a doubt one of the most powerful (and mostly metaphorical) lifesavers of the modern world. However, recent studies into the effects of drinking coffee on human lifespan have found that it might very well have a significant impact on health and longevity. A study of 170,000 people from the UK found that those who drank between two and four cups of coffee a day were 30% less likely to die from all causes compared to those who did not drink coffee at all. Interestingly, the same study also revealed that taking a small amount of sugar with their coffee had no significant detrimental effects on the health of the coffee drinker. This is not the first study that has made such claims about the health benefits of coffee, in 2019 a team of scientists showed that on average coffee drinkers could be expected to live on average 2 years longer than those who did not consume the beverage.

So why coffee? What is it about this common beverage that is having such a significant impact on the health of those who drink it? The immediate conclusion one might be drawn to is that is has something to do with the caffeine found within the coffee, as this is commonly regarded as the most significant feature (or indeed to some, the entire point) of coffee. It certainly makes us feel more alert, increases our heart rate, and even increases our metabolism. However, this might very well not have anything to do with how coffee is actually helping to extend life. A similar study conducted by Harvard involving 500,000 British coffee drinkers (which linked coffee to a 14% lower risk of death) found that both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee both improved an individual’s longevity, indicated that caffeine may not be what is responsible for the increased lifespan enjoyed by coffee drinkers.

Scientists successfully proved reverse aging techniques in mice by employing proteins that can turn an adult cell into a stem cell. There’s hope for you yet.

Circa 2019 immortality in the human brain 🧠

Brain injuries causing chronic sensory or motor deficit, such as stroke, are among the leading causes of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization; furthermore, they carry heavy social and economic burdens due to decreased quality of life and need of assistance. Given the limited effectiveness of rehabilitation, novel therapeutic strategies are required to enhance functional recovery. Since cell-based approaches have emerged as an intriguing and promising strategy to promote brain repair, many efforts have been made to study the functional integration of neurons derived from pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), or fetal neurons, after grafting into the damaged host tissue. PSCs hold great promises for their clinical applications, such as cellular replacement of damaged neural tissues with autologous neurons. They also offer the possibility to create in vitro models to assess the efficacy of drugs and therapies. Notwithstanding these potential applications, PSC-derived transplanted neurons have to match the precise sub-type, positional and functional identity of the lesioned neural tissue. Thus, the requirement of highly specific and efficient differentiation protocols of PSCs in neurons with appropriate neural identity constitutes the main challenge limiting the clinical use of stem cells in the near future. In this Review, we discuss the recent advances in the derivation of telencephalic (cortical and hippocampal) neurons from PSCs, assessing specificity and efficiency of the differentiation protocols, with particular emphasis on the genetic and molecular characterization of PSC-derived neurons. Second, we address the remaining challenges for cellular replacement therapies in cortical brain injuries, focusing on electrophysiological properties, functional integration and therapeutic effects of the transplanted neurons.

Brain injuries represent a large variety of disabling pathologies. They may originate from different causes and affect distinct brain locations, leading to an enormous multiplicity of various symptoms ranging from cognitive deficits to sensorimotor disabilities. They can also result in secondary disturbances, such as epileptic foci, which occur within the lesioned and perilesional tissues (Herman, 2002). Indeed, frequently a secondary functional damage can take place in a region distant from the first insult (e.g., the hippocampus after traumatic brain injury), providing an explanation for cognitive and memory deficits arising after a brain lesion (Girgis et al., 2016). Brain injuries can have traumatic or non-traumatic etiologies, including focal brain lesions, anoxia, tumors, aneurysms, vascular malformations, encephalitis, meningitis and stroke (Teasell et al., 2007). In particular, stroke covers a vast majority of acquired brain lesions.

A team of scientists at a company called 3DBio Therapeutics have successfully transplanted a 3D printed ear made from the patient’s own cells, The New York Times reports.

It appears to be a first in the field of tissue engineering, according to experts, and could be the harbinger of a new era of regenerative medicine.

“It’s definitely a big deal,” Carnegie Mellon biomedical engineering researcher Adam Feinberg, who was not involved in the project, told the NYT. “It shows this technology is not an ‘if’ anymore, but a ‘when.’”.

Supplementing your diet with the sea organisms Ascidiacea, also known as sea squirts, reverses some of the main signs of aging, according to a new study using an animal model.

While the Fountain of Youth, the mythical spring that restores youth to anyone who bathes in it or drinks its waters, is clearly fantasy, scientists are hard at work looking for ways to combat aging. Some of these scientists just had a breakthrough: they discovered that supplementing a diet with sea squirts, reverses some of the main signs of aging. While more research is needed to verify the effect in humans, as the study was conducted using mice, the findings are very promising.

If you’ve ever glanced in the mirror and seen greying hair and wrinkles, or if you’ve forgotten the name of a close friend, you may desire a medication that might halt or even reverse the effects of aging.

Deep RNA sequencing of 164 blood samples collected from long-lived families was performed to investigate the expression patterns of circular RNAs (circRNAs). Unlike that observed in previous studies, circRNA expression in long-lived elderly individuals (98.3 ± 3.4 year) did not exhibit an age-accumulating pattern. Based on weighted circRNA co-expression network analysis, we found that longevous elders specifically gained eight but lost seven conserved circRNA-circRNA co-expression modules (c-CCMs) compared with normal elder controls (spouses of offspring of long-lived individuals, age = 59.3 ± 5.8 year). Further analysis showed that these modules were associated with healthy aging-related pathways. These results together suggest an important role of circRNAs in regulating human lifespan extension.

Andrew Lincoln, your boss?

Vanessa YelenaYour boss is deathist cringe. Let’s see if it stays that way when he’s getting old…

Continue reading “How I make beautiful GRAPHS and PLOTS using LaTeX” »

This just came out, a day or so ago.

Can the aging process be reversed — or even halted, altogether? If we manage to decode this final mystery of our human biology, we might soon be able to eradicate age-related illnesses like cancer, dementia and heart problems.

Continue reading “More life — Decoding the secret of aging | DW Documentary” »