Plastic surgery, exercise and anti-wrinkle creams may help combat the ravages of time. But what if you could block the proteins that make you age in the first place? In the January issue of Scientific American, David Stipp writes about mammalian TOR, or mTOR, a protein that researchers think might hold the key to developing anti-aging pharmaceuticals.
When you're young, mTOR helps regulate cell growth, but after maturity is reached, its continued activity can cause negative effects: too much protein synthesis, unwanted proliferation of certain cell types and declines in cell function. According to Stipp, there's already a drug, rapamycin, that has shown the ability to slow mTOR's activity in mammals. Unfortunately, it has serious side effects in humans.
Some mosquitoes pack a coolant
Most blood-sucking insects urinate while they feed so they can avoid filling up on fluid and get more nutrients out of their meal.
But some species of mosquito also do what is called pre-urination - they excrete drops of freshly ingested blood without extracting any of the nourishing blood cells.
The behavior has always confused scientists because "blood is a very precious resource," said Claudio R. Lazzari, an entomologist at Francois Rabelais University in Tours, France. New research, conducted by Lazzari and colleagues and published in the journal Current Biology, shows that the pre-urine may keep the cold-blooded mosquitoes from overheating while they take their blood meal, which can be up to 104 degrees. New York Times
Dew tell: A physics lesson in the grass
Dewdrops form on the tips of grass blades - and this appears to be in defiance of gravity: Shouldn't the drops fall toward the bottom? A study in the American Chemical Society journal Langmuir explains the physics behind this peculiar phenomenon.
The author, Martin E.R. Shanahan, a scientist at the University of Bordeaux in France, suggests a blade of grass is like a cone, with a narrow top and a wide bottom.
Taking a cone, he modeled the behavior of two types of dewdrops: a thin film of water and a thicker, spherical drop. In each case, he found the dewdrop is able to lower its energy state by moving to the pointy tip of the leaf. New York Times
Strange dance of the dung beetle
After dung beetles collect the substance that gives them their name, they do a little dance, swinging around in one direction, and then sometimes the other.
That dance is not one of joy, however. A new study in the journal PLoS One reports that dancing helps the beetles move away from a dung pile as quickly as possible.
To avoid other beetles that might want to steal their haul, the insects need to move on a direct course. Emily Baird, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden, and her colleagues studied dung beetles in South Africa.
In their rotations, the scientists say, the beetles are somehow taking a compass reading from the sky. (How they do this is still not clear.)
New York Times
