Recent Episodes
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Humans have Hibernation Genes
When animals hibernate, their heart rate and metabolism slow to a crawl and they can sleep for months without food or water and wake up fresh and alert with no muscle loss or organ damage. Extraordinary changes occur in hibernation: body temperatures drop, fat stores preserve the body, and biological aging stalls. It's possible humans carry genes to make something like hibernation possible.
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How about a Good Side Effect
A covid vaccine will alleviate your symptoms if you get the virus, but scientists found a surprising new benefit that's life changing. In people with skin and lung cancer, the vaccine upped their survival times when paired with a cancer treatment that doesn't work as well alone.
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Do you really Want to Know
Would you want to know as much as 20 years ahead whether you'd develop something like pancreatic cancer? We may soon be confronted with this question. Researchers have built an AI that predicts a person's risks for more than 1,000 diseases up to two decades before symptoms appear.
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New Hope for those with Macular Degeneration
There's a new prosthetic being tested that restored sight to people with AMD, age-related macular degeneration. AMD affects people over age 50 and is a leading cause of vision loss in older adults.
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PMDs and Advancing Medicine
Our bodies are useful in other ways after we die. Medical students and researchers need human bodies for dissection and basic research. Scientists have now created a new way for our deceased selves to be helpful. It's called PMD which stands for "physiology maintained deceased"; when there is no brain function and the bodies are kept alive artificially through ventilation and assisted circulation for a limited time.
