Listen to the latest from the world of science, with Benjamin Thompson and Shamini Bundell. This week, investigating child mortality rates at a local level, and building genes from non-coding DNA.
In this episode:
00:43 A regional view of childhood mortality
Researchers map countries’ progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Developmental Goals. Research Article: Burstein et al.; World View: Data on child deaths are a call for justice; Editorial: Protect the census
07:22 Research Highlights
Astronomers identify a second visitor from beyond the solar system, and extreme snowfall stifles animal breeding in Greenland. Research Highlight: The comet that came in from interstellar space; Research Highlight: Extreme winter leads to an Arctic reproductive collapse
09:22 Evolving genes from the ground up
Natural selection’s creative way to evolve new genes. News Feature: How evolution builds genes from scratch
15:43 News Chat
A spate of vaping-related deaths in the US, and Japan’s import of the Ebola virus. News: Scientists chase cause of mysterious vaping illness as death toll rises; News: Why Japan imported Ebola ahead of the 2020 Olympics
Age change should be allowed when the following three conditions are met. First, the person is at risk of being discriminated against because of age. Second, the person’s body and mind are in better shape than would be expected based on the person’s chronological age (that is, the person is biologically younger than he is chronologically). Third, the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting.
This week, a method for predicting follow-up earthquakes, and the issues with deep learning systems in AI.
Lifespan, by geneticist David Sinclair and journalist Matthew LaPlante, provides a vision of a not-too-distant future in which living beyond 120 will be commonplace. For Sinclair and LaPlante, the answer lies in understanding and leveraging why we age…
Listen to the latest from the world of science, with Benjamin Thompson and Shamini Bundell. This week, modelling embryonic development, and an analysis of male dominated conferences.
“Remote procedures have the potential to transform how we deliver care when treating the most time-sensitive illnesses such as heart attack and stroke. The success of this study paves the way for large-scale, long-distance telerobotic platforms across the globe, and its publication in Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine demonstrates the transformative nature of telerobotics,” 
Researchers have identified how Salmonella ‘persister’ cells can spread antibiotic resistance genes in mice intestines. 
“What is memory without forgetting?” asks Oliver Hardt, a cognitive psychologist studying the neurobiology of memory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “It’s impossible,” he says. “To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.”
“A healthy diet and lifestyle are generally recognized as good for health, but this study is the first large randomized controlled trial to look at whether lifestyle changes actually influence Alzheimer’s disease-related brain changes,” said Susan Landau, a research neuroscientist at Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and principal investigator of the add-on study.
Boomers Daily 