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Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

quantamagazine.org

151–160 of 173 posts

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#151
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on this observation I posed this question on /r/AskMen some time ago. "Would you be castrated to live 15 years longer?" - overwhelmingly the answer was no.

If I could have fake balls like, they let me keep my ballsack and I get a couple marbles in there, I’d take that deal.

Your voice would change though I think that would be more of an issue to most guys.

But it may reverse baldness? My guess is it may stop the progression but not reverse it, not regrow lost hair.

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#152

What I'm curious about is how if we are just two cells at one point in our life. Do all the human behaviours and inherent knowledge get transferred. Where is that information kept. Even, uncontacted sentinel island tribes still behave very much like a human. I asked ChatGPT ... "the rough estimate for the data storage capacity of the human genome in bytes is approximately 6 billion bits .... or equivalently, 750 mega…

Is it possible to cite a better source than ChatGpt? We have no idea if that's nonsense.

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm primed to agree as I like running, and running appears to increase mitochondrial function and density. It also appears to have some anti aging effects, which would track.

But runners also tend to look more aged, don't they?

Probably not if they take care to protect their skin from sun damage

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#154
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So take a copy when you’re 21 and store it, re-load it every 10 years?

That’s the basic idea, the problem is how do you reload it? You would need a mechanism that changes the DNA for every one of the trillions of cells in the body.

Yeah, thats a good question but i mean, feels like just a matter of time until someone figures that part out. If we can make GTA V load in under 2mins, we can solve human aging...

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#155
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when we reproduce, do we make copies of ourselves? You have been blessed not to grow up with a narcissist or vicarious striver as a parent. Technically, cars are a means of transportation for people. However, an honest assessment of the American transit system might lead one to believe that the safety and comfort of cars (or the automotive industry and ecosystem) are more important than the people they're supposed t…

Vicarious striver sounds like you have a psychological diagnosis in mind, but I can't find anything on it?

A parent who pushes their child to carry out their own unfulfilled ambitions. The archetypical college athlete who "coulda gone pro" dumping tons of time, energy, and money into their kid's travel team, or the tiger parent for whom anything less than an A is the end of the world because how else are you going to become a doctor?

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#156
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aging is loss of information, you can't reverse that. You can prevent it though We don't understand aging well enough to say this with any confidence.

This is not true. We understand aging enough to confidently say that loss of epigenetic information is correlated to aging. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36638792/

> loss of epigenetic information is correlated to aging

Very different from saying “aging is loss of information.”

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#157

What I'm curious about is how if we are just two cells at one point in our life. Do all the human behaviours and inherent knowledge get transferred. Where is that information kept. Even, uncontacted sentinel island tribes still behave very much like a human. I asked ChatGPT ... "the rough estimate for the data storage capacity of the human genome in bytes is approximately 6 billion bits .... or equivalently, 750 mega…

Is it possible to cite a better source than ChatGpt? We have no idea if that's nonsense.

It did the math. I just didn't post it. Not sure if this is how DNA stories information.

"The storage capacity of DNA is typically expressed in bits or bytes, as DNA can be used as a medium for data storage. Each base pair can represent 2 bits of data (since there are four possible combinations: AT, TA, CG, GC). Therefore, the human genome, with 3 billion base pairs, can theoretically store about 6 billion bits of data.

To convert this into bytes, you divide the number of bits by 8 (since 8 bits make up 1 byte). So, the rough estimate for the data storage capacity of the human genome in bytes is approximately 6

billion bits 8 = 750

million bytes 8 6billion bits

=750million bytes, or equivalently, 750 megabytes."

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But runners also tend to look more aged, don't they?

Probably not if they take care to protect their skin from sun damage

>> Probably not if they take care to protect their skin from sun damage

Hah, thanks. I never made that connection.

Re: Cells across the body talk to each other about aging

#159
post #129
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The survival of the individual is indeed not what natural selection is selecting for. Otherwise phenomena like eusocial insects with sterile workers would not make sense. What is actually selected for, is genes that somehow promote more copies of themselves. This is the main takeaway from the book "the selfish gene". However, the example of ants and bees shows that this doesn't exactly promote long lifespan in the st…

The survival of the individual is exactly what is being selected for. The influence of an individual gene is not distinguishable from those that are packaged with it. So what is selected for over any single cycle is sets of sets of genes conveying advantage. Taking half of your genes from each parent could only select whole useful chromosomes from each parent (but is far better than nothing); In order for genes to be…

> The survival of the individual is exactly what is being selected for. The influence of an individual gene is not distinguishable from those that are packaged with it.

Here is a counterexample where a gene or set of genes jumped ship and untethered itself from the individual they were originally embedded in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

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