, 2 min read
Science and Technology links (October 26th 2019)
- People who were the oldest in the classes in school tend to be more confident and to take more risks.
- At the University of Montreal, about 32% of the students are male and 68% are female.
- Did blind orchestra auditions really benefit women?
- Wealthy people are happier, but the effect is small.
- Among Uber consumers, 60% never tip and only 1% always tip.
- How do you know how far away a given object is? A theory is that we rely on our familiarity of the object: you know how big a car can be, so if you see a tiny car, you know that it must be far away. However, it turns out that we are not better at estimating distances when we are familiar with the objects.
- What does it take to become a professor in a good university? In psychology, you need to have written about 16 papers, half of which as the first author; and most of the new hires have completed a postdoc or started from a job at a lesser institution.
- The end of our chromosomes are terminated by repeated sequences called telomeres. These sequences do not contribute directly to your genetic code. Instead they are used when the cells divide to hold the chromosome while it is being copied. With each cell division, the telomeres get shorter. Eventually your cells can no longer divide, unless they use a trick to elongate the telomeres (e.g., telomerase). Thus telomeres act as a clock in aging. It is also sometimes believed that telomeres act to protect us against cancer because a single cell can’t reproduce endlessly, unless it manages somehow to elongate its telomeres. So what happens when you create mice with longer-than-usual telomeres? They live longer, they are fitter and they do not have higher cancer rates:
(…) we demonstrate here that it is possible to generate mice that have telomeres which are much longer than those of the natural species (…) These mice show a younger phenotype as indicated by improved mitochondrial function, improved metabolic parameters, decreased cancer, and increased longevity. These results also suggest that there is not a negative selection for individuals with longer telomeres than normal in species, and therefore, one can envision that natural selection processes which favor individuals with longer telomeres within a given species, could potentially increase species longevity.
Source: Nature.
It seems credible that we could engineer other longer-lived species by manipulating the telomere lengths.