Topic
Mechanistic accounts of why organisms age, including the decay/wear-and-tear model and programmed-aging alternatives.
Kris Burkewitz's lab finds an ER calcium channel is essential for a mitochondrial mutation to extend worm lifespan. It explains an old aging puzzle in one worm mutant, a long way from showing how metformin, an aging-drug candidate, works in people.
Reality
Lige Leng's team at Xiamen University deleted the protein in young mice and delivered it back into 20-month-old ones, a pairing that separates a driver of aging from a marker. The D-serine arm covered cognition only.
Reality
Old mice fed a membrane lipid from sea squirts learned a water maze faster and grew darker fur, according to a Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool release that reports four kinds of benefit without a sample size or a dose.
Reality
The claim out of Stanford Medicine is that tissue-resident macrophages stop clearing dying neutrophils as animals age. Disabling one receptor on those macrophages spared mice frailty, fat gain and heart trouble.
Reality
The project's blood metabolite patterns separated pet dogs that died sooner from those that died later, and the risky and protective molecules resemble the human ones. That makes dogs a plausible test bed for aging biology, with causation still unproven.
Reality
Junyue Cao read 21 million cells from 14 organs and says aging arrives in discrete stages. If the staging holds, an intervention has a window rather than a dose.
Reality