How a new pill could spell the end of ageing

Not immediately, of course. But one cause of ageing (British spelling) is cells that have aged until they can’t do their job any more:

Senolytics (is) a branch of medicine that targets senescent cells; the various faulty cells that have been identified as instrumental in our eventual demise. These so-called “zombie” cells linger and proliferate as we age, emitting substances that cause inflammation and turn other healthy cells senescent, ultimately leading to tissue damage throughout the body.

Works in mice!:

A team at the Mayo Clinic (…) showed in 2011 that “using a genetic trick to get rid of these senescent cells can significantly improve health and lifespan” in prematurely aged mice. In 2016, the same group achieved similar results in naturally aged mice, releasing an arresting image of two elderly rodents born of the same litter. The one cleared of its senolytic cells seems spry and glossy, while its sibling is shrunken, greying and looks its age.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/sep/02/the-science-of-senolytics-how-a-new-pill-could-spell-the-end-of-ageing

Reasons to be cheerful

A website from David Byrne of The Talking Heads. Categories:

Here’s the start of one article, Cops and Hippies:

It sounds like the plot of some cop-buddy movie: an anarchic hippie social worker (Snoop Dogg or Owen Wilson) is forced to team up with a straight-laced conservative cop (Clint Eastwood, the Rock). Chaos and hilarity ensue. Life lessons are learned. In this case, it actually happened.

It started decades ago in Eugene, Oregon, where police responses to drug- and mental health-related calls were ending badly. So Eugene tried something different: When one of these emergency calls came in, the city dispatched social workers instead of cops. Thirty years later, the strategy has reduced conflicts between police and the public, and made Eugene a national model for harm reduction-oriented policing…

Link: https://reasonstobecheerful.world.

Headline of the week, 2021.02.25

A Capitol rioter texted his ex during the insurrection to call her a ‘moron,’ feds say. She turned him in.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/25/capitol-richard-michetti-girlfriend-moron/

Some of the comments are good, or at least amused me:

“Who’s the moron now?”
“Something something a woman scorned.”
“There should be additional charges of felony stupid.”
“He must be a graduate of the Trump school of wooing women.”
“Having worked in a District Attorney’s office (albeit as a secretary), I assure you that if there was a sentencing enhancement for utter stupidity, jails would never have an empty bed.”
“When I saw the forest of cell phones being used to document what they were doing, I said to myself, ‘Here’s your sign.’”
“That’s known as an ‘own goal’.”
“Nothing says I don’t love you anymore than the FBI showing up at your front door.”
“Not exactly a Mensa convention was it?”
“BRB. Experiencing schadenfreude.”

404 page not found

No no, you got here correctly!

“404” is the HTTP error code that a website sends to you (well, to your browser) if you try to read a page that doesn’t exist. Normally it means that you typed the link incorrectly, or that the page has been renamed or deleted. The website can, however, redirect you to a special page to explain the problem. Some of them are funny:

Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/sljdfsdfh (you can type any garbage at the end):

Why wasn’t this page found?

We asked some leading economists.

Stagflation: The cost of pages rose drastically, while the page production rate slowed down.

General economics: There was no market for it.

Liquidity traps: We injected some extra money into the technology team but there was little or no interest so they simply kept it, thus failing to stimulate the page economy. (etc)

Bernie Sanders: https://berniesanders.com/lajsdklajsdlas.

Analog Devices: https://www.analog.com/en/products/xyzad5423.html.

FloatHub: https://floathub.com/foobar.

And more, with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489668.

Sight restored by turning back the epigenetic clock

In mice, but that’s where things start.

‘Reprogramming’ approach seems to make old cells young again…

An emerging model in the field of ageing is that, over time, cells accumulate epigenetic noise — molecular changes that alter patterns of gene expression, including transcriptional changes and shifts in the patterns of methyl groups on DNA. Collectively, these changes cause cells to lose their identity and so to lose the DNA-, RNA- and protein-expression patterns that once promoted their youthful resilience.

Articles (on the same day!): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03119-1 and https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03403-0.

Making DuckDuckGo your search engine

You can change your default search engine in a browser from one that follows you and records all your searches for sale to the highest bidder, to one that protects your privacy.

First, some articles on protecting your online privacy are at https://spreadprivacy.com/tag/privacy-newsletter. Articles include:

  • Privacy Mythbusting #4: I can’t be identified just by browsing a website. (If only!)
  • Privacy Mythbusting #5: I own my personal information. (Not as much as you think.)
  • Privacy Mythbusting #2: My password keeps me safe. (Not necessarily!)
  • Are Ads Costing You Money?
  • Are Ads Following You?

Instructions on changing your default search engine on a Mac:

Firefox: Firefox ➞ Preferences ➞ Search ➞ Default Search Engine and select DuckDuckGo.

Safari: ➞ Preferences ➞ Search ➞ Search engine and select DuckDuckGo.

Setting your default search engine in other browsers, or browsers under Windows, will be similar but probably a little more complicated. Click this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=default+search+engine+windows to search for instructions.

Fighting bullshit

The Washington Post calls it “BS” in this informative article, but I’m willing to call it bullshit:

BS “involves language, statistical figures, data graphics and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.”…

A right-wing media site, for example, blared in a headline that several thousand DACA beneficiaries (undocumented children shielded from deportation by an Obama-era policy) have committed crimes against U.S. citizens, Bergstrom said. “But it’s an extremely low percentage of DACA recipients,” he pointed out. “Which means they’re being accused of crimes at substantially lower rates — massively lower rates — than American citizens. Of course the article doesn’t say that.”

Another example: there is an excellent (but probably spurious) correlation between pool drownings per year and the number of films that Nicolas Cage appeared in during that year:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/06/24/misinformation-is-everywhere-these-scientists-can-teach-you-fight-bs/

and the course:

https://www.callingbullshit.org/index.html

60 funniest pet tweets of 2020

For example, the dogslide: https://twitter.com/KalhanR/status/1342104105158926337.

Or “Today in Find the Cat:” https://twitter.com/katehinds/status/1269697161329082370. Hint: find part of the cat.

Lots more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/funniest-tweets-cats-dogs-2020_n_5fc80db8c5b602f56798a3cf. Note that clicking on a photo will give you a slightly enlarged version, you may find details that were outside the original photo’s margins.