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People with diabetes reported better quality of life after days when their glucose stayed largely within a healthy range, even when levels fluctuated more than usual. The unexpected finding suggests that pursuing extremely tight glucose control may sometimes come with a hidden lifestyle burden.

A new study suggests coffee may influence mood and brain function by changing the activity of microbes in the gut. Both caffeinated and decaf coffee were linked to lower stress, depression, and impulsivity, while also producing measurable changes in gut bacteria and metabolites. Decaf was associated with better learning and memory, while caffeinated coffee appeared to reduce anxiety and improve attention.

Spaceflight may dramatically change the gut within weeks, causing bacteria to break down more protein as food moves more slowly through the intestines. The shift could help explain astronaut constipation and may have wider effects on health, making it an important concern for future missions to Mars.

A compound the body can make after eating pomegranates, walnuts, and some berries improved measures of heart function by up to 80% in animal models of a difficult-to-treat form of heart failure. Urolithin A helped stiff heart tissue relax and reduced scarring and abnormal enlargement. It also improved relaxation in engineered human heart tissue.

Tau, a neuronal microtubule-associated protein (MAP), organizes the axonal cytoskeleton, and regulates intracellular transport. Tau hyperphosphorylation is linked to neurodegeneration in tauopathies, including Alzheimer's disease. Tau binds microtubules cooperatively to form cohesive envelopes, which are thought to control access to the microtubule lattice and regulate the activity of motor proteins and other MAPs. However, how disease-related perturbations affect tau dynamics and its function...

Bcl-2-associated athanogene 3 (BAG3) is a mediator of chaperone-assisted selective autophagy, and in the brain, is most highly expressed in astrocytes. However, its role in astrocytes remains poorly defined. Given the genetic and pathological links of BAG3 to proteostasis and neurodegenerative diseases, we investigated how BAG3 contributes to astrocyte function and Alzheimer's disease (AD). To define its function and relevance, we used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to confirm BAG3 enrichment in...

Antiretroviral therapy (ART) has significantly increased life expectancy of people living with HIV (PLWH). Nonetheless, despite effective virological control, PLWH are faced with accelerated aging, characterized by higher prevalence of age-related comorbidities than the general population. Persistent inflammation and activation of innate immunity seem to drive this immunosenescent phenotype. The cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS)-stimulator of interferon genes (STING) pathway is increasingly...

Neuronal loss is a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases. Phosphatidylserine (PS), a key "eat me" signal, is exposed on stressed viable neurons, triggering their premature phagocytosis by activated glia. We investigated whether PS masking could serve as a universal strategy to prevent neuronal loss in two distinct Drosophila models of neurodegeneration: an adult-stage-specific knockdown of skpA and a Huntington's disease model initiated during embryogenesis. Both models exhibit neuronal loss,...

The functional decline of the hematopoietic system during aging affects organismal function and contributes to reduced healthspan. Quantifying hematopoietic aging holds great scientific and clinical relevance. Alterations in chromatin architecture are a well-established hallmark of aging that encode rich and informative signatures of the aging process, yet they remain largely unexplored as quantitative markers. Here, we present an interpretable deep learning approach based on convolutional...

Autophagy is widely proposed to decline with age; however, direct evidence across human cell types remains limited. Moreover, it is unclear whether age-associated changes in autophagy-gene transcription are accompanied by corresponding changes in autophagic activity, and whether autophagic activity relates to physiological function during aging. We performed transcriptomic and functional autophagy analyses across subject-matched human cell types from a healthy aging cohort. Autophagy-related...

Scientists resurrected antimicrobial peptides from mammals that lived millions of years ago and found that some were more potent against drug-resistant bacteria than modern human versions. These evolutionary relics could provide new clues for designing treatments as antibiotic resistance becomes an increasingly serious threat.

Strengthening the body’s natural daily rhythms helped mice recover after stroke by improving the brain’s waste-clearing system and reducing lingering inflammation. The approach worked even when treatment began three days after the stroke, suggesting circadian-based therapies could eventually offer a new way to support long-term recovery.

Breakthroughs in genetically altering cephalopods pave way for new studies of perception, brain evolution, and more

New underground labs are being built as war rages on