The Rhyothemis princeps Brain Externalization Project

Modern Healthspan released a video on an article that reports that shikimic acid reduced markers of  UV light induced cellular senescence in cultured dermal fibroblasts, increased SIRT1 activity and restored proteostasis . As MH suggests in the video, these findings could have much broader implications. Video: https://youtu.be/m_qaZSsFiT8 Research article:  Martinez-Gutierrez et al. (2021) https://www.aging-us.com/article/203010/text "SA reverted misfolded protein accumulation upon senescence, an effect that was abrogated by EX-527. Consistently, SA induced an increase in the levels of the chaperone BiP, resulting in a downregulation of unfolded protein response (UPR) signaling and UPR-dependent autophagy, avoiding their abnormal hyperactivation during senescence. SA did not directly activate SIRT1 in vitro, suggesting that SIRT1 is a downstream effector of SA signaling specifically in the response to cellular senescence. Our study not only uncovers a shikimic acid/SIRT1 signa...

 Lemon balm ( Melissa officinalis ) was found to improve sleep in a fly model of Alzheimer's disease. Screening of sleep assisting drug candidates with a Drosophila model (2020) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7390450/   "Overall, female flies were more vulnerable to DD stimulation considering total sleep time, but not in the sleep frequency. Therefore, female flies were chosen for the following drug screening study. ... the administration of melatonin shortened sleep latency but did not increase the total sleep time during sleep deprivation ( Fig 4A, 4B and 4F ), indicating that melatonin may only induce flies to sleep faster but not longer. Such results are consistent with human clinical trials that have reported that the prescription of melatonin helps induce sleep but does not enhance total sleep time [ 4 ]. Moreover, the activity index shows no change after melatonin treatment ( Fig 4G ), suggesting that melatonin has a limited effect on activity during wake...

The eat 'five a day' (referring to servings of fruits and vegetables) recommendation of the World Health Organization and many national health agencies has new support based on findings by Wang et al. (2021) from the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.   - link to open access article: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.120.048996 The study found a reduction in all-cause mortality as well as reductions in mortality due to respiratory diseases, cardiovascular disease and cancer. The thresholds for reductions in mortality were achieved at two servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables per day. No additional benefit was seen for over five servings. Sadly, there was no significant reduction found for neurodegenerative diseases (but see the Michley et al. (2017, open access) study on Parkinson disease re: fresh vs. canned/frozen). Wang et al. (2021) Above is Figure 1 from Wang et al. (2021); it is quite small and th...