The Ed's Up #122

Clearing the Body's Retired Cells Slows Aging and Extends Life

Throughout our lives, our cells accumulate damage in their DNA, which could potentially turn them into tumors. Some successfully fix the damage, while others self-destruct. The third option is to retire—to stop growing or dividing, and enter a state called senescence. These senescent cells accumulate as we get older, and they have been implicated in the health problems that accompany the aging process. By clearing these senescent cells from mice, Darren Baker and Jan van Deursen at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine managed to slow the deterioration of kidneys, hearts, and fat tissue. The animals lived healthier and, in some cases, they lived longer. (Image: Mark Binch)
 

The Weird Thing About Cat Legs

The cat has other plans. We see its tiger-striped face peer through the hole and then disappear. We wait. Nothing. “It probably knows we're here,” says John Hutchinson, one of the expectant researchers. We move to the side so as not to be seen, leaning our heads around the wall of the cage like characters in a cartoon. We are, I realize, trying to out-stealth a cat. It's going about as well as you'd expect. (Image: Reuters)
 

Butterflies Forty Million Years Before Butterflies

There’s a group of fossils insects that look really quite a lot like butterflies. They had broad wings with scales and pigmented eyespots. Their mouthparts were long probing straws. They likely fed from plants and pollinated them in return. They’re as butterfly-esque as it’s possible to be. Except these creatures were flying around between 40 and 85 million years before the first butterflies existed. (Image: James DiLoreto)
 

More good reads

• Beautifully written piece on how body clocks affect our medicines, by Jessa Gamble
• How to See a Famine Before It Starts: a really interesting Robinson Meyer piece on an oddly low-tech forecasting system
• Very good explainer on the past, present, and future of Zika by Julie Beck; a list of questions that need to be answered, by Helen Branswell; and a list of conspiracy theories, by Tara Smith
• Twitter Nerd-Fight Reveals a Long, Bizarre Scientific Feud. Great story from Matt Simon
• An interview with me on my career and science writing
• An often beautiful piece about veterans and parrots helping each other through PTSD, by Charles Seibert. Some weirdness in the quotes (social neurons? all vertebrates have compassion?) but the story’s great.
• Professor Who Helped Expose Water Crisis in Flint Says Public Science Is Broken
• Helen Shen writes about the next generation of flexible robots
• Welcome back to Rose Eveleth’s wonderful podcast about the future, now called Flash Forward.  
• Mammoth wasn't served at the 1951 Explorers' Club dinner. Nor was ground sloth. A wonderful detective story, by Eric Boodman