27th April 2019, 1 min read

Science and Technology links (April 27th 2019)

1. Women who use oral contraceptives have a harder time recognizing emotions of others.
2. Worldwide, livestock has ten times the mass of wild animals and nearly twice the mass of human beings. Fishes have more than ten times the mass of human beings.
3. Using software, we can map brain activity to speech so that listeners can easily identify words (source: Nature).
4. Aging is associated with a reduction in tissue NAD levels. In turn, this is believed to be associated with physical decline. It is not entirely clear what makes the NAD level decline, but it seems that it might be caused by the accumulation of senescent cells. As we age, we tend to accumulate these non-functional and slightly harmful “dead” cells called “senescent cells”. We now have drugs called senolytics that can remove some of these senescent cells, with at least one ongoing clinical trial.