Monday, 25 March 2013
Donating Your Brain to Science
People who donate their brains to be used in neuroscientific research after they die are making a great contribution to our understanding of normal aging and of aging-related disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Normally, such donations are made anonymously, but for the sake of an exhibition designed to draw attention to this humanitarian gesture, 12 brain donors aged 84 to 100 gave the organizers permission to disclose their identities. (more…)
Mental Disorders | Comments Closed
Monday, 11 March 2013
Free Radicals and Aging: More Complicated Than We Thought
In 2010, Dr. Siegfried Hekimi and his colleagues at McGill University in Montreal received a great deal of media coverage for their research showing that antioxidants, which many people take as food supplements to fight the damaging effects of free radicals, not only do not slow down the aging process but on the contrary might actually accelerate it. Even more unbelievably, when the researchers used Caenorhabditis elegans, a species of small worms, as an animal model and exposed them to an herbicide that is toxic to humans and generates a lot of free radicals, these worms lived 60% longer than worms who were not exposed to it! (more…)
