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The Independent
5 days ago
- Health
- The Independent
Drug combination found to extend lifespan by 30 per cent
A combination of two cancer drugs significantly boosts lifespan in mice, according to a new study that may lead to better strategies for longevity. The drugs rapamycin and trametinib given together as a combination can increase mice lifespan by up to 30 per cent, say researchers, including from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing. Trametinib alone can extend lifespan by 5 to 10 per cent and rapamycin by 15–20 per cent, according to the study published in the journal Nature Ageing. Researchers say the drug combination has several other positive effects on mice health in old age, including less chronic inflammation in tissues and a delayed onset of cancer. Previous studies showed potent anti-ageing effects of rapamycin in several animals. Trametinib wasn't known to extend lifespan in mice but previous research in flies indicated it might. In humans, the two drugs have been used for cancer treatment. While both drugs act on the same chemical network in the body, their combination appears to achieve novel effects that are likely not attributable to just an increase in dosage. Gene activity analysis of mice tissues shows the combination influences genes differently than is achieved by administering the drugs individually. The analysis reveals specific gene activity changes that are only caused by the combination of the two drugs. In further studies, researchers hope to determine the optimal dose and route of administration of trametinib to maximise its life-prolonging effects while minimising unwanted side effects. 'Trametinib, especially in combination with rapamycin, is a good candidate to be tested in clinical trials as a geroprotector,' Sebastian Grönke, a co-author of the study, says. 'We hope that our results will be taken up by others and tested in humans. Our focus is on optimising the use of trametinib in animal models.' While the exact same kind of effect may not be possible in humans, researchers hope the drugs can help people stay healthy and disease-free for longer in life. "Further research in humans in years to come will help us to elucidate how these drugs may be useful to people and who might be able to benefit,' British geneticist Dame Linda Partridge said in a statement. Scientists hope the drug combination may be developed into a promising strategy for combating age-related diseases and promoting longevity.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Anti-Aging Cocktail Extends Mouse Lifespan by About 30 Percent
Scientists in Europe have tested an anti-aging drug cocktail in mice and found that it extended the animals' lifespans by around 30 percent. The mice stayed healthier for longer too, with less chronic inflammation and delayed cancer onset. The two drugs are rapamycin and trametinib, which are both used to treat different types of cancer. Rapamycin is also often used to prevent organ rejection, and has shown promise in extending lifespans in animal tests. Trametinib, meanwhile, has been shown to extend the lifespan of fruit flies, but whether that worked in larger animals remained to be seen. So for a new study, a research team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Germany investigated how both drugs, on their own and together, could extend lifespan in mice. True to its reputation, rapamycin alone was found to extend the lifespan of mice by 17 to 18 percent. Trametinib wasn't too bad either, boosting longevity by 7 to 16 percent. But when their powers combined, treated mice saw a significant lifespan extension of around 26 to 35 percent. The extra time added to the animals' lifespans weren't merely offset by frailty and illness, though. The combo treatment delayed the growth of liver and spleen tumors in the mice, and reduced age-related inflammation in the brain, kidney, spleen, and muscle. The animals seemed to be more active at advanced ages compared to control mice, with reduced body weight and a slower decline in heart function. As intriguing as the results are, we shouldn't expect to be able to pop some pills and live to 130. Instead, the most promising aspect for human applications might be in improving the quality of our twilight years. "While we do not expect a similar extension to human lifespans as we found in mice, we hope that the drugs we're investigating could help people to stay healthy and disease-free for longer late in life," says geneticist Linda Partridge, co-senior author of the study. "Further research in humans in years to come will help us to elucidate how these drugs may be useful to people, and who might be able to benefit." To test the drugs, the researchers fed hundreds of mice regular doses of rapamycin, trametinib, or both from six months of age, and measured their survival for the rest of their lives. While benefits were seen from either drug alone, the best outcomes came from the combined treatment. Median lifespans were increased by 34.9 percent in female mice and 27.4 percent in males, while maximum lifespans increased by 32.4 percent in females and 26.1 percent in males. The team says that the benefits of the drug combo don't seem to be simply down to a higher dose. Although both drugs act on the same signaling pathway – known as the Ras/Insulin/TOR network – they target different points. When the researchers analyzed gene expression, they found certain changes only occur when both drugs are given. Importantly, no extra side effects were seen from combining the drugs, outside of those already known for each alone. Human trials for the drug combo could begin relatively soon. Both drugs are already approved for use in humans in the US and European Union, with anti-aging benefits hinted at in previous studies. Rapamycin, for example, seemed to extend the fertility of perimenopausal women by up to five years in one recent study. The research was published in the journal Nature Aging. Sudden Death Among Professional Bodybuilders Raises Health Concerns Microbe From Man's Wound Able to Feed on Hospital Plastic Exposure to Daylight Boosts The Immune System, Study Suggests
South China Morning Post
27-05-2025
- Health
- South China Morning Post
German scientist wins Hong Kong's Shaw Prize for pioneering 3D imaging work
A German molecular biologist has won Hong Kong's prestigious Shaw Prize this year for his development of a cutting-edge imaging technology that helps scientists understand how viruses attack the human body and come up with new treatments. Professor Wolfgang Baumeister, director emeritus and scientific member of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany, was on Tuesday named one of the winners of the Shaw Prize, dubbed the 'Nobel Prize of the East'. Baumeister was awarded the 2025 Shaw Prize in life science and medicine for his pioneering development and use of cryogenic electron tomography, or cryo-ET, an imaging technique that enabled 3D visualisation of biological samples such as proteins. 'In general, there are three areas that benefit most from this cutting-edge technology: virology; cancer treatment and diagnostics; and study in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's,' said Shaw Prize Council member Professor Justin Wu Che-yuen, the associate dean of health systems at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's medical faculty. He said the technology helped scientists understand how viruses attacked the human body and to develop new treatments, such as vaccines. In terms of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, the technology revealed how abnormal proteins accumulated in cells, how the proteins interacted with other cellular components and how they responded to current treatments. This understanding could lead to new early detection strategies and therapeutics, Wu said.
WIRED
25-05-2025
- Science
- WIRED
The Quest to Prove the Existence of a New Type of Quantum Particle
May 25, 2025 7:00 AM A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles—a new category of quantum particle—could be created in exotic materials. Illustration: Kristina Armitage/ Quanta Magazine The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zhiyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working on a weird mathematical problem. After he found an exotic solution, he started to wonder if the math could be interpreted physically. Eventually, he realized that it seemed to describe a new type of particle: one that's neither a matter particle nor a force-carrying particle. It appeared to be something else altogether. Wang was eager to develop the accidental discovery into a full theory of this third kind of particle. He brought the idea to Kaden Hazzard, his academic adviser. 'I said, I'm not sure I believe this can be true,' Hazzard recalled, 'but if you really think it is, you should put all your time on this and drop everything else you're working on.' This January, Wang, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, and Hazzard published their refined result in the journal Nature. They say that a third class of particles, called paraparticles, can indeed exist, and that these particles could produce strange new materials. When the paper appeared, Markus Müller, a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, was already contending with the notion of paraparticles for a different reason. According to quantum mechanics, an object or observer can be in multiple locations at once. Müller was thinking about how you can, on paper, switch between the perspectives of observers in these coexisting 'branches' of reality. He realized that this came with new constraints on the possibility of paraparticles, and his team described their results in a preprint in February that's now under review for publication in a journal. The close timing of the two papers was a coincidence. But taken together, the work is reopening the case of a physics mystery that was believed to be solved decades ago. A basic question is being reevaluated: What kinds of particles does our world allow? Hidden Worlds All known elementary particles fall into one of two categories, and the two behave almost as opposites. There are the particles that make up matter, called fermions, and the particles that impart the fundamental forces, called bosons. The defining characteristic of fermions is that if you switch the positions of two fermions, their quantum state gains a minus sign. The presence of that measly minus sign has enormous ramifications. It means that no two fermions can be in the same place at the same time. When packed together, fermions cannot be compressed past a certain point. This feature prevents matter from collapsing in on itself—it's why the electrons in every atom exist in 'shells.' Without this minus sign, we couldn't exist. Zhiyuan Wang, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany. Photograph: University Bosons have no such restriction. Groups of bosons will happily all do exactly the same thing. Any number of particles of light, for instance, can be in the same place. This is what makes it possible to build lasers, which emit many identical light particles. This ability comes down to the fact that when two bosons swap places, their quantum state stays the same. It's not obvious that fermions and bosons should be the only two options. That's in part due to a fundamental feature of quantum theory: To calculate the probability of measuring a particle in any particular state, you have to take the mathematical description of that state and multiply it by itself. This procedure can erase distinctions. A minus sign, for example, will disappear. If given the number 4, a Jeopardy! contestant would have no way to know if the question was 'What is 2 squared?' or 'What is negative 2 squared?'—both possibilities are mathematically valid. It's because of this feature that fermions, despite gaining a minus sign when swapped around, all look the same when measured—the minus sign disappears when quantum states are squared. This indistinguishability is a crucial property of elementary particles; no experiment can tell two of a kind apart. The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli formulated his 'exclusion principle' in 1925, when he was 25 years old. It says that two indistinguishable fermions can never have identical quantum states. Photograph: Dukas/Getty Images But a minus sign may not be the only thing that disappears. In theory, quantum particles can also have hidden internal states, mathematical structures not seen in direct measurements, which also go away when squared. A third, more general category of particle, known as a paraparticle, could arise from this internal state changing in a myriad of ways while the particles swap places. While quantum theory seems to allow it, physicists have had difficulty finding a mathematical description of a paraparticle that works. In the 1950s, the physicist Herbert Green made a few attempts, but further inspection revealed that these paraparticle models were really just mathematical combinations of typical bosons and fermions. In the 1970s, the mystery of why no one could find a proper model of paraparticles seemed to be solved. A collection of theorems called DHR theory, after the mathematical physicists Sergio Doplicher, Rudolf Haag, and John Roberts, proved that if certain assumptions are true, only bosons and fermions are physically possible. One assumption is 'locality,' the rule that objects can only be affected by things in their vicinity. ('If I poke my table, I better not affect the moon instantaneously,' as Hazzard put it.) The DHR proof also assumed that space is (at least) three-dimensional. The results discouraged new ventures into paraparticles for decades, with one exception. In the early 1980s, the physicist Frank Wilczek came up with a theory of particles called anyons that can't be described as either bosons or fermions. To get around the DHR theorems, anyons come with a big catch: They can only exist in two dimensions. Physicists now widely study anyons for their potential in quantum computing. Even confined to two dimensions, they could manifest on a flat surface of a material, or in a 2D array of qubits in a quantum computer. But paraparticles in three dimensions that could form a solid still seemed impossible. That is, until now. Shifting Sights While developing their model, Wang and Hazzard noticed that the assumptions behind DHR theory went beyond typical concerns of locality. 'I think people overinterpreted what limitations or constraints were actually imposed by these theorems,' Hazzard said. Paraparticles, they realized, may be theoretically possible after all. In their model, in addition to the usual properties of a particle like charge and spin, groups of paraparticles share extra hidden properties. As with the minus sign that gets squared away during a measurement, you can't directly measure these hidden properties, but they change how the particles behave. Kaden Hazzard, a physicist at Rice University. Photograph: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University When you swap two paraparticles, these hidden properties change in tandem. As an analogy, imagine that these properties are colors. Start with two paraparticles, one that's internally red and another that's internally blue. When they swap places, rather than keeping these colors, they both change in corresponding ways, as prescribed by the mathematics of the particular model. Perhaps the swap leaves them green and yellow. This quickly turns into a complex game, where paraparticles affect each other in unseen ways as they move around. Meanwhile, Müller was also busy rethinking the DHR theorems. 'It's not always super transparent what they mean, because it's in a very complicated mathematical framework,' he said. His team took a new approach to the paraparticle question. The researchers considered the fact that quantum systems can exist in multiple possible states at once—what's called a superposition. They imagined switching between the perspectives of observers who exist in these superposed states, each of whom describes their branch of reality slightly differently. If two particles are truly indistinguishable, they figured, then it won't matter if the particles are swapped in one branch of the superposition and not in the other. 'Maybe if the particles are close by, I swap them, but if they are far away I do nothing,' Müller said. 'And if they're in a superposition of both, then I do the swapping in one branch, and nothing in the other branch.' Whether observers across branches label the two particles in the same way should make no difference. This stricter definition of indistinguishability in the context of superpositions imposes new restrictions on the kinds of particles that can exist. When these assumptions hold, the researchers found that paraparticles are impossible. For a particle to be truly indistinguishable by measurement, as physicists expect elementary particles to be, it must be either a boson or fermion. Although Wang and Hazzard published their paper first, it's as though they saw Müller's constraints coming. Their paraparticles are possible because their model rejects Müller's starting assumption: The particles are not indistinguishable in the full sense required in the context of quantum superpositions. This comes with a consequence. While swapping two paraparticles has no effect on one person's measurements, two observers, by sharing their data with each other, can determine whether the paraparticles have been swapped. That's because swapping paraparticles can change how two people's measurements relate to each other. In this sense, they could tell the two paraparticles apart. This means there's a potential for new states of matter. Where bosons can pack an endless number of particles into the same state, and fermions can't share a state at all, paraparticles end up somewhere in the middle. They are able to pack just a few particles into the same state, before getting crowded and forcing others into new states. Exactly how many can be crammed together depends on the details of the paraparticle—the theoretical framework allows for endless options. 'I find their paper really fascinating, and there's absolutely no contradiction with what we do,' Müller said. The Road to Reality If paraparticles exist, they'll most likely be emergent particles, called quasiparticles, that show up as energetic vibrations in certain quantum materials. 'We might get new models of exotic phases, which were difficult to understand before, that you can now solve easily using paraparticles,' said Meng Cheng, a physicist at Yale University who was not involved in the research. Bryce Gadway, an experimental physicist at Pennsylvania State University who sometimes collaborates with Hazzard, is optimistic that paraparticles will be realized in the lab in the next few years. These experiments would use Rydberg atoms, which are energized atoms with electrons that roam very far from their nuclei. This separation of the positive and negative charge makes Rydberg atoms especially sensitive to electric fields. You can build quantum computers out of interacting Rydberg atoms. They are also the perfect candidates for creating paraparticles. 'For a certain kind of Rydberg quantum simulator, this is kind of just what they would do naturally,' Gadway said about creating paraparticles. 'You just prepare them and watch them evolve.' But for now, the third kingdom of particles remains wholly theoretical. 'Paraparticles might become important,' said Wilczek, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist and inventor of anyons. 'But at present they're basically a theoretical curiosity.' Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Arab News
24-05-2025
- Science
- Arab News
Earliest use of harmal plant discovered in Saudi Arabia's Tabuk
RIYADH: A study published in the journal Communications Biology has revealed the earliest known use of the harmal plant (peganum harmala) — dating back about 2,700 years to the Iron Age — is based on findings from the ancient settlement of Qurayyah in Saudi Arabia's Tabuk region, according to the Saudi Heritage Commission. The research was conducted jointly by the Saudi Heritage Commission, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and the University of Vienna in Austria. It examined the therapeutic and social aspects of ancient practices in the Arabian Peninsula. Using liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry, researchers analyzed organic residues inside pottery incense burners and detected alkaloids from the harmal plant, providing evidence of its use in fumigation rituals for therapeutic purposes. The harmal plant, known locally as rue, is recognized for its antibacterial and healing properties. Its use at Qurayyah suggests early medicinal knowledge and traditional practices in the region. This discovery highlights the cultural and therapeutic traditions of the Arabian Peninsula and helps to support the commission's collaboration with international researchers. The study aligns with the Saudi Ministry of Culture's efforts to promote research that advances the understanding of history and the cultural heritage of the Arabian Peninsula.
