Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:00:00 PST Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090508/2303164806/dailydirt-mysteries-aging.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090508/2303164806/dailydirt-mysteries-aging.shtml

Brooke Greenberg is twenty years old, but she has an extremely rare disorder (she's the only person known to have Syndrome X) that hinders her growth so that she appears to be about five years old. Researchers are looking at this girl's DNA to try to figure out if there is a genetic cause and which genes may be behind this unusual aging process. [url]

The German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg is looking at a glycoprotein called Dickkopf-1 (aka Dkk1) which seems to be involved in the cognitive abilities of elderly brains. The function of this molecule isn't entirely clear, but some researchers are trying to understand it in an effort to determine the mechanisms of declining cognitive abilities as people age. [url]

The effects of consuming resveratrol aren't fully understood yet, but when honeybees eat this compound, they eat less and live longer. So there's a possibility that resveratrol plays a role in caloric restriction when it's associated with extending lifespans of various animals. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090508/2303164806 Fri, 21 Sep 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100922/04310911114/dailydirt-uses-wine-besides-drinking-it.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100922/04310911114/dailydirt-uses-wine-besides-drinking-it.shtml

There's a persistent statistic that wine drinkers tend to live longer than teetotalers or people who drink other forms of alcohol. But according to a recent study, those wine drinkers also correlate highly with people who possess healthier habits in general. So wine could merely be the drink of the healthier -- and not some magic elixir for longer life. [url]

Some Australian researchers have developed a process to turn wine into clothing -- and it also works with other forms of alcohol. Bacteria are used to ferment the alcohol into a formable fabric, and the garments retain characteristic odors of their original beverage. So if you really like the smell of beer, there's a perfect shirt for you.... [url]

There's a possible "miracle molecule" in red wine called resveratrol -- and it seems to give older mice some improved mobility. Consuming more red wine might seem like the easy answer for older people to gain mobility improvements, but the study also suggested that a 150lb human would have to drink 700 4-ounce glasses of red wine a day to see an effect. Good luck with that! [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100922/04310911114 Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/13531918251/dailydirt-red-red-wine.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/13531918251/dailydirt-red-red-wine.shtml

A group of Japanese physicists discovered that red wine could induce superconductivity in an iron telluride -- so they tried a bunch of other alcoholic beverages like sake, beer and white wine to try to figure out what was going on. The researchers found that more tartaric acid in red wine correlated well with the superconductive state, but the alcohol also played some role. With just a bit more study, red wine will solve all of our energy problems and allow us to live forever.... [url]

University of Connecticut wine researcher Dr. Dipak K. Das published fake data on the benefits of resveratrol, so there's some doubt that this component of red wine has as many magical health benefits as some have reported. Still, the anecdotal evidence behind the "French Paradox" makes people think red wine has more than a correlation with a lower incidence of heart disease (even if there's no causal relationship). [url]

The 'drunken monkey hypothesis' proposes that humans like alcohol because our primate ancestors were highly dependent on fruits in their diet... and ethanol can be found in overripe fruits. But did those drunken monkeys exhibit superior Kung Fu skills? [url]

You might think that wine experts can tell the difference between an expensive French wine and a much cheaper wine from New Jersey, but you'd be mostly wrong. Wine tasting is hard. Sometimes experts can't even tell the difference between red and white wines -- and the perception of wine can be influenced significantly by the label on the bottle. [url]

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