Wednesday, January 31, 2024
The fountain of youth is … a T cell?
The fountain of youth has
eluded explorers for ages. It turns out the magic anti-aging elixir might have
been inside us all along.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL)
Assistant Professor Corina Amor Vegas and colleagues have discovered that T cells can be reprogrammed to
fight aging, so to speak. Given the right set of genetic modifications, these
white blood cells can attack another group of cells known as senescent cells.
These cells are thought to be responsible for many of the diseases we grapple
with later in life.
Senescent cells are those that stop
replicating. As we age, they build up in our bodies, resulting in harmful
inflammation. While several drugs currently exist that can eliminate these
cells, many must be taken repeatedly over time.
As an alternative, Amor Vegas and
colleagues turned to a “living” drug called CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T
cells. They discovered CAR T cells could be manipulated to eliminate senescent
cells in mice. As a result, the mice ended up living healthier lives. They had
lower body weight, improved metabolism and glucose tolerance, and increased
physical activity. All benefits came without any tissue damage or toxicity.
Amor Vegas says:
“If we give it to aged mice, they
rejuvenate. If we give it to young mice, they age slower. No other therapy
right now can do this.”
Perhaps the greatest power of CAR T cells is their longevity. The team found that just one dose at a young
age can have lifelong effects. That single treatment can protect against
conditions that commonly occur later in life, like obesity and diabetes. Amor
Vegas explains:
“T cells have the ability to develop
memory and persist in your body for really long periods, which is very
different from a chemical drug. With CAR T cells, you have the potential of
getting this one treatment, and then that’s it. For chronic pathologies, that’s
a huge advantage. Think about patients who need treatment multiple times per
day versus you get an infusion, and then you’re good to go for multiple years.”
CAR T cells have been used to treat a variety of blood cancers, receiving FDA approval for this purpose in 2017. But Amor Vegas is one of the first scientists to show that CAR T cells’ medical potential goes even further than cancer.
Young mice treated with CAR T cells age slower
and have protection from natural aging-associated conditions like obesity and
diabetes. The cartoon above shows a young mouse, treated with CAR T cells, who
ate a high-fat diet for two months. The charts show that compared to untreated
mice on the same diet, the treated mouse had lower body weight.
Amor Vegas’ lab is now investigating whether CAR T cells let mice live not
only healthier but also longer. If so, society will be one mouse step closer to
the coveted fountain of youth.
Source: https://www.cshl.edu/the-fountain-of-youth-is-a-t-cell/
Journal
article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00560-5
Image: Senescent cells (blue) accumulate as we age. CAR T cells can be programmed to seek them out and destroy them. The image above shows healthy pancreatic tissue samples from an old mouse treated with CAR T cells as a young pup
Source: The fountain of youth is … a T cell? – Scents of Science (myfusimotors.com)
An Explorer Believes He Found Amelia Earhart’s Plane. Experts Aren’t Convinced. - The New York Times
A robotics company captured a sonar image that its chief executive believes shows Earhart’s long-lost plane at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Archaeologists say it’s too early to know.
Tony Romeo,
the chief executive of Deep Sea Vision, shows a sonar image from an expedition
last year that he believes shows Amelia Earhart’s plane at the bottom of the
Pacific Ocean.
It is one of the greatest enduring mysteries in aviation history: the disappearance of Amelia Earhart after she took off from Lae, New Guinea, in a Lockheed 10-E Electra on July 2, 1937.
Earhart was trying to become the first woman to fly around the world. She and a navigator, Fred Noonan, were headed to Howland Island, a tiny coral atoll in the southwestern Pacific, to refuel. But they were never seen again.
For years, many have tried and failed to find the
wreckage of their plane. Now, the head of a marine robotics company believes he
has done it, although some experts remain deeply skeptical.
Tony
Romeo, the chief executive of Deep Sea Vision, says that a sonar image that his
company captured during an expedition last year appears to show a plane resting
about three miles down on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere within a
100-mile radius of Howland Island. He won’t give the precise location.
Mr. Romeo said
his crew found the image on the last day of their expedition, after they had
scanned 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor.
He said he believes it’s Earhart’s plane because the image appears to show the two distinctive fin stabilizers on the back of her aircraft and the dimensions are “very close” to those of her sleek twin-engine Lockheed.
He said his 16-member crew found the image in their data on the last day of their expedition after they had scanned 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor between New Guinea and Howland Island.
“We’d gone 100 days without finding anything,” Mr. Romeo said in an interview this week. “We were kind of at each other’s throats. And, you know, there it is. It pops up on the screen. And you know, you realize at that moment, we were the first ones to have seen Amelia’s plane in something like 86 years. It was an incredible moment.”
Archaeologists who have used similar
technology to search for underwater wrecks said they were far from persuaded
that the image was actually a plane, let alone Earhart’s.
“The image is really exciting in the fact that it obviously shows an aircraft or what looks like an aircraft,” said Megan Lickliter-Mundon, an underwater archaeologist who has searched for sunken airplanes.
But to confirm that it is actually a plane, she said, researchers would have to take additional sonar images from different angles. Then they would have to use a remotely operated vehicle with a video camera to see if the plane has any serial numbers or markings that would identify it as Earhart’s.
After more than 80 years in the ocean, it would be surprising if the plane were as intact as it appears to be in the sonar image, Dr. Lickliter-Mundon said.
Amelia Earhart with
her Lockheed 10-E Electra in March 1937.
Mr. Romeo said the
sonar image appears to show the two distinctive fin stabilizers from the back
of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed.
“But who knows?” she said. “Nothing is definitive until you have more information and a visual.”
Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., said the image, reported by The Wall Street Journal, could be “noise” in the sonar system or a geological feature on the ocean floor.
“There’s no way you could definitively say that’s even an aircraft,” said Dr. Pietruszka, who has searched for World War II-era planes. “To me, at best, you could say you have a promising target that might be an aircraft, and might be Amelia Earhart’s aircraft, at best.”
Piotr Bojakowski, an assistant professor of nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University, said he was “pretty skeptical” that it was Earhart’s long-lost Lockheed. He said it could be the wreck of a plane from World War II.
“There are a lot of air crashes around all those islands,” Dr. Bojakowski said. “Could it be American? Could it be Japanese? Could it be something else? Right now, all we know is it looks like a plane.”
Mr. Romeo said he planned to mount another expedition sometime in the future to take underwater video of the site, which he believes will confirm that it is Earhart’s plane, hopefully with its registration number, NR16020, still visible on the wing.
“I want the world to see it,” he said.
A former Air Force intelligence officer whose father was an airline pilot, Mr. Romeo, 43, said he has been fascinated with Earhart’s story since boyhood.
Mr. Romeo with a model of Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E
Electra.
A pioneering aviator, she was the first woman to make a solo, nonstop flight across the United States, in 1932. She was also the first woman to complete a nonstop, solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, also in 1932. She was a writer, speaker and fashion designer.
To start Deep Sea Vision in 2022, Mr. Romeo said, he sold his real estate investments and bought a $9 million underwater drone capable of scanning the ocean floor. He said the business, based in Charleston, S.C., will search for other wrecks under private contract.
Earhart’s disappearance has inspired similar expeditions over the years, as well as outlandish theories that she was captured by Japanese operatives or returned to the United States and lived under a different name.
Susan Butler, an Earhart biographer, said she believed that Earhart and Mr. Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean off Howland Island.
“The only question is where the plane went down,” she said.
While the search may not be over yet, James Delgado, an underwater archaeologist based in Washington, D.C., said he commended Mr. Romeo for undertaking the expedition.
“I will always be in the corner of anybody that goes out and searches and seeks to find answers,” he said. “At this stage, it’s early. But if it were me, curiosity being what it is, I would want to go back and see what it is with cameras.”
Jan. 30, 2024
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Tuesday, January 30, 2024
NASA Collaborating on European-led Gravitational Wave Observatory in Space - UNIVERSE
The LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission, led by ESA (European Space Agency) with NASA contributions, will detect gravitational waves in space using three spacecraft, separated by more than a million miles, flying in a triangular formation. Lasers fired between the satellites, shown in this artist's concept, will measure how gravitational waves alter their relative distances. AEI/MM/Exozet
The first space-based observatory
designed to detect gravitational waves has passed a major review and will
proceed to the construction of flight hardware. On Jan. 25, ESA (European Space Agency), announced the formal adoption of LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, to its
mission lineup, with launch slated for the mid-2030s. ESA leads the mission,
with NASA serving as a collaborative partner.
“In 2015, the ground-based LIGO observatory cracked open the window into gravitational waves, disturbances that sweep across space-time, the fabric of our universe,” said Mark Clampin, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “LISA will give us a panoramic view, allowing us to observe a broad range of sources both within our galaxy and far, far beyond it. We’re proud to be part of this international effort to open new avenues to explore the secrets of the universe.”
The LISA mission will enable observations of
gravitational waves produced by merging supermassive black holes, seen here in
a computer simulation. Most big galaxies contain central black holes weighing
millions of times the mass of our Sun. When these galaxies collide, eventually
their black holes do too. Download high-resolution
video from NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott
Noble; simulation data, d'Ascoli et al. 2018
NASA will provide several key
components of LISA’s instrument suite along with science and engineering
support. NASA contributions include lasers, telescopes, and devices to reduce
disturbances from electromagnetic charges. LISA will use this equipment as it
measures precise distance changes, caused by gravitational waves, over millions
of miles in space. ESA will provide the spacecraft and oversee the
international team during the development and operation of the mission.
Gravitational waves were predicted
by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity more than a century ago. They are produced by
accelerating masses, such as a pair of orbiting black holes. Because these
waves remove orbital energy, the distance between the objects gradually shrinks
over millions of years, and they ultimately merge.
These ripples in the fabric of
space went undetected until 2015, when LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, measured gravitational
waves from the merger of two black holes. This discovery furthered a new field
of science called “multimessenger astronomy” in which gravitational waves could be used in
conjunction with the other cosmic “messengers” – light and particles – to
observe the universe in new ways.
Along with other ground-based
facilities, LIGO has since observed dozens more black hole mergers, as well as
mergers of neutron stars and neutron star-black hole systems. So far, the black
holes detected through gravitational waves have been relatively small, with
masses of tens to perhaps a hundred times that of our Sun. But scientists think
that mergers of much more massive black holes were common when the universe was
young, and only a space-based observatory could be sensitive to gravitational
waves from them.
“LISA is designed to sense low-frequency gravitational waves that instruments on Earth cannot detect,” said Ira Thorpe, the NASA study scientist for the mission at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These sources encompass tens of thousands of small binary systems in our own galaxy, as well as massive black holes merging as galaxies collided in the early universe.”
Gravitational waves from a simulated population of compact binary systems in our galaxy were used to construct this synthetic map of the entire sky. Such systems contain white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes in tight orbits. Maps like this using real data will be possible once the LISA mission becomes active in the next decade. The center of our Milky Way galaxy lies at the center of this all-sky view, with the galactic plane extending across the middle. Brighter spots indicate sources with stronger gravitational signals and lighter colors indicate those with higher frequencies. Larger colored patches show sources whose positions are less well known. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
LISA will consist of three
spacecraft flying in a vast triangular formation that follows Earth in its
orbit around the Sun. Each arm of the triangle stretches 1.6 million miles (2.5
million kilometers). The spacecraft will track internal test masses affected
only by gravity. At the same time, they’ll continuously fire lasers to measure
their separations to within a span smaller than the size of a helium atom.
Gravitational waves from sources throughout the universe will produce
oscillations in the lengths of the triangle’s arms, and LISA will capture these
changes.
The underlying measurement
technology was successfully demonstrated in space with ESA’s LISA Pathfinder mission, which operated between 2015 and 2017 and also included NASA
participation. The spacecraft demonstrated the exquisite control and precise
laser measurements needed for LISA.
By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Source: NASA Collaborating on European-led Gravitational Wave Observatory in Space - NASA Science
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