Researchers studying ageing disagree on just about everything — including what ageing is, whether it is a disease and when it starts — according to a survey of about 100 scientists working in the field.

[Gladyshev] decided to survey participants at an international conference on ageing in Newry, Maine, in 2022, to better understand the views of those researching the topic. Respondents included early-career researchers, established scientists and industry professionals. The results are described in PNAS Nexus today.

Most researchers are clear in their own minds about what ageing is — but their perspectives don’t align with those of others, says Gladyshev. “People joke in the field that there are more theories than people.” Despite this, Gladyshev says he was surprised by the scale of the problem.

Particular interesting to me since I've met Dr. Gladyshev in-person and have discussed this very problem with him...

The DOI link is broken, so here is the actual cited paper (open access):

Gladyshev VA et al. Disagreement on foundational principles of biological aging. PNAS Nexus (2024). https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/12/pgae499/7913315

This is definitely a bit of a stupid question... but methinks this happens to a good number of immigrants. Asking because there is a bit of a funny philosophical debate here:

• Technically the second language is not "native" by virtue of you not growing up with it
• But you speak it better than your native language, so skill-wise it is "native"

So do you have "native" language skills, or would you consider yourself simply highly "fluent" at the second language?

By "skilled immigrants" I mean people with advance degrees (PhD, MD, ...) holding all types of highly technical and managerial positions.

Asking this because skilled immigrants, at least in theory:

1. knows, and has first-hand experience of how much bullshit one has to go through to immigrate,
2. has enough bargaining power to move to another immigration-friendly country,
3. let's just say that the upcoming US policies don't seem to be friendly to any immigrants at all...

But then US tech and research are supported largely by the same skilled immigrants. So I'm curious how that is supposed to play out...

Sorry this is a bit of a strange question.

P.S.: I'm... not asking for a friend. I've been constantly worried for the past two weeks; I try not to rush to conclusions, so the fact that I'm still worried concerns me. Double quotation marks because in the US it's literally the same government agency that manages all immigrants no matter how they got in the country (highly skilled worker, family of citizen, asylum, literally just crossed the border, ...)

Description: a black cat with its front legs stretched out and criss-crossed on top of each other.

A shared meal, a kiss on the cheek: these social acts bring people together — and bring their microbiomes together, too. The more people interact, the more similar the make-up of their gut microorganisms is, even if individuals don’t live in the same household, a study shows.

The study also found that a person’s microbiome is shaped not only by their social contacts but also by the social contacts’ connections. The work is one of several studies that raise the possibility that health conditions can be shaped by the transmission of the microbiome between individuals, not just by diet and other environmental factors that affect gut flora.

What if we shared our microbiomes under the moonlight

Associated research article (open access): Beghini, F., Pullman, J., Alexander, M. et al. Gut microbiome strain-sharing within isolated village social networks. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08222-1

Another relevant research article cited by the news (also open access): Valles-Colomer, M., Blanco-Míguez, A., Manghi, P. et al. The person-to-person transmission landscape of the gut and oral microbiomes. Nature 614, 125–135 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05620-1

The nonprofit's scientist co-founder was one of the organizers of a conference I attended, so that's how I learned! From their website:

Darwin’s Ark was founded by two passionate pet lovers—a geneticist and an engineer—who noticed a glaring gap in scientific research. Many people had pets, but surprisingly little research focused on their health and wellbeing.

This sparked the creation of Darwin’s Ark, a nonprofit organization that combines the perspectives of pet parents with the expertise of professional scientists to expand the scale and scope of pet research.

Since then, Darwin’s Ark has helped thousands of pet owners contribute to the scientific understanding of their furry companions. We value pet owners’ insights—you know your animals best—and we believe in the transformative power of community science to drive discovery.

They just launched a new project, Darwin's Cats. And they are seeking out cat owners to submit data on their cats. I believe they also do genetic testing too and the data goes to researchers, instead of some shady startup company

AlphaFold3 is open at last. Six months after Google DeepMind controversially withheld code from a paper describing the protein-structure prediction model, scientists can now download the software code and use the artificial intelligence (AI) tool for non-commercial applications, the London-based company announced on 11 November.

When AlphaFold3 was first published the code wasn't publicly available (which is pretty bad for computational research), so this is good news that they finally released the code repository.

The GitHub repository: https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphafold3

Note that to request access one needs to sign a form & has to represent a non-commercial entity. If you receive access then allegedly you can easily run AlphaFold3 via docker

As the title goes... Per community rules, I'd appreciate it if we keep politics out of this discussion

When a dog shakes water off its fur, the action is not just a random flurry of movements — nor a deliberate effort to drench anyone standing nearby.

This instinctive reflex is shared by many furry mammals including mice, cats, squirrels, lions, tigers and bears. The move helps animals to remove water, insects or other irritants from hard-to-reach places. But underlying the shakes is a complex — and previously mysterious — neurological mechanism.

Now, researchers have identified the neural circuit that triggers characteristic ‘wet dog’ shaking behaviour in mice — which involves a specific class of touch receptors, and neurons that connect the spinal cord to the brain. Their findings were published in Science on 7 November.

“The touch system is so complex and rich that [it] can distinguish a water droplet from a crawling insect from the gentle touch of a loved one,” says Kara Marshall, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “It’s really remarkable to be able to link a very specific subset of touch receptors to this familiar and understandable behaviour.”

Research article was featured on the cover of this issue of Science, with a glorious picture of a brown bear doing the "wet dog shake" (https://www.science.org/toc/science/current)

Research article: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq8834

Please let me know if there is paywall

Brought to you by PubTator 3.0: an AI-powered literature resource for unlocking biomedical knowledge

(This is actually tooth loss but it was annotated as "/LOSS" in the data. Also this is not a paper on tooth loss)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/pubtator3/publication/30090999?text=@DISEASE_Tooth_Loss

Feeding a baby born by caesarean section milk containing a tiny bit of their mother’s poo introduces beneficial microbes to their gut, according to a clinical trial. The approach might one day help to prevent diseases during childhood and later in life.

Some studies show that babies born by c-section, rather than vaginal birth, have a higher risk of asthma, inflammation of the digestive system and other diseases associated with a dysfunctional immune system... Experiments have attempted to compensate for that by swabbing babies born by c-section with microbes from their mother’s vagina or giving them these microbes orally, a practice known as ‘vaginal seeding’. But this technique has had limited success, because vaginal microbes, scientists have learnt, cannot effectively colonize infants’ guts...

Helve and his colleagues have been pioneers in testing whether faecal transplants can instead improve the health of a baby’s microbiome. In their latest trial, which recruited women scheduled for a c-section at the Helsinki University Hospital, the researchers mixed a fluid containing 3.5 milligrams of a mother’s poo into milk and gave the concoction to the corresponding baby. They did this for 15 babies during their first feed. Another 16 babies received a placebo.

An important next step in the field, Shao says, would be to pinpoint the specific maternal gut microbes that are most likely to transmit to and colonize their babies’ guts. Shao asks: “If these species do exist across human populations, wouldn’t it be more effective and safer” to give newborns a laboratory-made transplant that’s guaranteed to be pathogen-free?

"This is the shit"

But seriously don't try this at home. Fecal matters can contain pathogens, in fact 54 of the 90 women screened were excluded because of detected pathogens. If this goes well maybe ppl can make some type of lab-made probiotics for C-section babies or stuff

The abstract presented at IDWeek 2024: https://idweek2024.eventscribe.net/index.asp?presTarget=2886841