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Circular RNAs (circRNAs) increase in the brain with age across various animal systems. To elucidate the reasons behind this phenomenon, we profile circRNAs from fly heads at six time points throughout their lifespan. Our results reveal a linear increase in circRNA levels with age, independent of changes in mRNA levels, overall transcription, intron retention, or host gene splicing, demonstrating that the age-related accumulation is due to high stability rather than increased biogenesis. This...

Without enforcement mechanisms, the Biological Weapons Convention risks leaving the world “completely unprepared”

High juvenile susceptibility drives infectious disease epidemics across kingdoms, yet the evolutionary mechanisms that maintain this susceptibility are unclear. We tested the hypothesis that juvenile susceptibility is maintained by high costs of resistance by quantifying the genetic correlation between host fitness and age-specific innate resistance to a fungal pathogen in a wild plant. We separately measured the resistance of 45 genetic families of the wild plant, Silene latifolia, to its...

BACKGROUND: Engaging in regular cognitive activity has been associated with cognitive function, yet the field of aging research has limited choices of cognitive activity programs to implement in clinical trials. As the field of aging research works to operationalize healthy habits, the potential role of improvisational theater (improv) to improve the lives of older adults has emerged. Given the limitations of existing cognitive training programs and the promise of improv, we sought to establish...

INTRODUCTION: With global aging, dementia prevalence rises. While long-chain saturated fatty acids show anti-cognitive decline potential, serum tricosanoic acid (C23:0)'s role in brain regions and cognition remains unclear.

Background: Aging is characterized by the progressive decline of physiological functions and is associated with an increasing risk for developing multiple age-related diseases. UDP-glucuronosyltransferase (UGT)1A enzymes detoxify a variety of endo- and xenobiotic reactive metabolites, thereby acting as indirect antioxidants. A common genetic UGT1A haplotype was shown to affect redox balance in humanized transgenic (htg) UGT1A mice. Since oxidative stress is a main activator of cellular...

Over the past few decades, extensive basic, translational and clinical research has been devoted to deciphering the physiological and pathogenic roles of extracellular vesicles (EVs) in the nervous system. The presence of brain cell-derived EVs in the blood, carrying diverse cargoes, has enabled the development of predictive, diagnostic, prognostic, disease-monitoring and treatment-response biomarkers for various neurological disorders. In this Review, we consider how EV biomarkers can bring us...

The possibility of reversing the adverse impacts of aging could significantly reduce age-related diseases and improve quality of life in older populations. Here we report that the sexual lineage of the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea exhibits physiological decline within 18 months of birth, including altered tissue architecture, impaired fertility and motility, and increased oxidative stress. Single-cell profiling of young and older planarian heads uncovered loss of neurons and muscle, increase...

Functional connectivity of the human brain changes through life. Here, we assemble task-free functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging data from 33,250 individuals at 32 weeks of postmenstrual age to 80 years from 132 global sites. We report critical inflection points in the nonlinear growth curves of the global mean and variance of the connectome, peaking in the late fourth and late third decades of life, respectively. After constructing a fine-grained, lifespan-wide suite of...

Science, Volume 388, Issue 6742, April 2025.

Science, Volume 388, Issue 6742, April 2025.

Science, Volume 388, Issue 6742, April 2025.