The team used two techniques to block VCAM1: One of them genetically deleted the protein from the mice’s brains. Another injected an antibody that binds to it to stop anything else attaching. Both methods prevented signs of brain aging in young mice infused with old plasma and reversed existing markers in elderly mice brains. The researchers then gave the mice learning and memory tests. In one, which involves remembering which of several holes is safe to drop through, treated elderly mice performed as well as youngsters once fully trained. “The aged mice looked like they were young again in terms of their ability to learn and remember,” Dubal says. “It’s remarkable.”
This has been an unusually wet winter, even in southern California. We got quite a bit of rain here early Sunday morning, with more showers expected in the next couple days and this weekend (Memorial Day!). The new growth, including in the burn areas up the coast north of Malibue, is tremendous. It’s still green, and will be into June or July, but it’s going to make a lot of fuel when the rains stop in late summer and fall. If every winter was like this one, we would no longer be living in a desert. That’s the kind of climate change I could definitely get behind. But we’d still be stuck with our crazy voters and government.
As I noted on Twitter the other day, they seem to view us as large non-hostile cats, who occasionally provide them with sustenance and clean their litter boxes.
Just as when you’re pulling nickel out of the ground in Sudbury, when you use ocean water you’re mining asteroids. As I noted in my latest essay, the more we learn about the solar system, the more we discover that, as opposed to being what we long thought was “the water planet,” earth is a comparative desert. The water is mostly extraterrestrial.
To expand on Krafft Ehricke’s famous statement, if God had wanted us to become space faring, he’d have given us a moon. With water on it.