Telomere-Lengthening Procedure Turns Clock Back Years In Human Cells 183
Zothecula writes Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a new procedure to increase the length of human telomeres. This increases the number of times cells are able to divide, essentially making the cells many years younger. This not only has useful applications for laboratory work, but may point the way to treating various age-related disorders – or even muscular dystrophy.
entropy decreases? (Score:2)
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Er no. Definitely not a closed system.
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Sarcasm is just a lie with an attitude problem, isn't it!
Maxwell's LIttle Angel (Score:4, Informative)
Even as a sardine is just a bird with an altitude problem.
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Is that why sardines on a plane taste like chicken?
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doesn't do a thing for DNA mutations (Score:2)
so the slowly-sickening cells live longer. a new boon to geriatric medicine, a new torpedo in the side of Medicare and Social Security.
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so the slowly-sickening cells live longer. a new boon to geriatric medicine, a new torpedo in the side of Medicare and Social Security.
No. This could allow cells copy themselves without replication errors for more generations. This is not "preserving" cells that are growing sicker; the existing cell is copying itself, and having a longer telomere means the succeeding generations are protected longer from errors. From one of the first links I googled (http://www.tasciences.com/what-is-a-telomere/):
"Many scientific studies have shown a strong connection between short telomeres and cellular aging."
Start with Stem cells and.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Guess cancer is still an issue but what I wonder is if one can combine this with more food and physical work and hence look good AND be fresh / not burn off quickly at the same time?
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Oh you mean pollution the leading cause of cancer. Still a really major problems as many of the pollutants build up in your body guaranteeing death no matter how much money you have for medical services and a really nasty one at that. Rather amusing that the corporate executives will be killing themselves and their families because there is no escaping the kinds of pollution that build up within the human body, in the air, in the water, in the soil and in the food.
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Nah. I was thinking errors occurring in the copying of genes or whatever. For whatever reason really.
I don't know how the free radicals work and I don't really know to what extent the body make more sells / replace them quicker if you work out and eat more (but I know about the ideas that eating less will help the cells repair damage instead.)
So that was what I was thinking of.
Recently I saw some statement that 60-something percent of the cancer cases wasn't because of something you had done but that doesn'
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The last 115 year old that died had 2 stem cells supplying more than 80% of her red blood cells.
Citation needed.
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Meh, they need to invent a way to reverse ageing. I'm already post a prime, I don't want to be stuck like this for the rest of my much extended life!
Seriously, how annoying will it be when they invest booster spice and all the people under 30 can live that way forever?
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Meh, they need to invent a way to reverse ageing. I'm already post a prime, I don't want to be stuck like this for the rest of my much extended life!
Seriously, how annoying will it be when they invest booster spice and all the people under 30 can live that way forever?
One step at a time. My guess is that any age halting method would probably have some improvement for those post prime but even
if it all it does is halt your aging at your current age that buys you more time until they can actually figure out how to reverse the aging process.
At this point in life with death starting to loom on the horizon, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably opt to go into the medical
field and research aging. With a finite lifespan, a complete career change is no longer a go
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Isn't that what they've done? "This increases the number of times cells are able to divide, essentially making the cells many years younger." Sure, it might take a while for your body to heal the damage, and it might require further medical help in extreme cases, but the core cause has been fixed.
Or until an accident or illness kills you.
How two thirty year olds make a zero year old... (Score:3)
Step One: 30 yo man buys 30 yo woman dinner.
Step Two: ?
Step Three: Baby
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Then please explain how two thirty year olds can make a zero year old baby?
Through a lot of steps that greatly reduce the chance that critically damaged DNA will be passed on. To start with, the two thirty year olds need to be healthy enough in a number of ways to actually produce a baby (maybe that's "to end with" rather than "to start with" since it's really the last step of the previous iteration. Anyway, both sexes have to produce gametes, and there are processes to weed out bad gametes at the time of production (before their own birth for females, or within a matter of days b
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You jest, but this is why we have children instead of just living forever.
An organism that fails to reproduce fails to evolve as fast as competitors. Earth is dominated by fast-evolving, gene-shuffling, sex-having life-forms - not Methuselahs.
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Well now, for the individual cancer would likely be preferable to death, would it not? Another reason for a genetic lifetime limit could be that, without it, you have the potential for individuals to live forever, hampering the evolution of the species by repeatedly reintroducing obsolete DNA into the gene pool. Over time those species with a built-in age limiter will experience more net genetic drift, allowing them to adapt more quickly to changing conditions.
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Well now, for the individual cancer would likely be preferable to death, would it not?
The reason we have cancer is because our cellular machinery is sometimes defective, and without technology, we have no way to fix it.
Now that we're developing technology to fix problems with ourselves at the cellular and even genetic levels, we should be able to solve cancer.
Remember too, we were evolved to survive, as a species, in an environment without technology and hospitals and medicine, where we just lived in caves
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>The problem with this is that a species doesn't necessarily need to evolve; it only needs to if its environment changes substantially and it can't continue to survive as-is (or gets out-competed) by another species or by a mutated version of its own.
Not much of a problem - care to offer even one environment that doesn't change continuously, as well as being full of other organisms competing for limited resources?
As for sharks - their basic form hasn't changed substantially, but that doesn't mean they ha
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Well, I was referring to the reason such a clock evolved at all. In general most biological features have (or once had) a valuable function to enhance gene-line survival.
As for self-modification - frankly it worries me. We're notoriously bad about even figuring out what would actually make us happy in our own lives, often struggling ever harder in exactly the wrong direction. The thought of us taking conscious control over the direction our species evolves in seems like a recipe for disaster, especially s
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Mutation is a normal result of human reproduction and a vital driver of evolution. You just don't want it to get so far out of hand that new babies aren't viable. Of course somewhere in our reproductive process those telomeres also have to get longer again. No idea how that works. Might be important, I guess.
cancer (Score:1)
Won't allowing cells to divide like they are in a baby highly increase the risk of cancer?
Re:cancer (Score:5, Informative)
There are already ways to extend the telomeres, that is something telomerase accomplishes, but this is a new procedure.
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The cell dos not die, it just can not successful split anymore, so well, it dies at its final splitting.
Re:cancer (Score:4, Informative)
Although application of this RNA initially causes telomeres to lengthen, within 48 hours they once again begin to shorten as cells divide. This is a good thing, however, as cells that divide endlessly could pose a increased cancer risk if used in humans.
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Re:cancer (Score:4, Informative)
My question is will it reverse aging? Can you rejuvenate?
This is only one aspect of aging. Here is a list of several others. [wikipedia.org] All of them probably need to be addressed to reverse aging (and probably other things we don't know about).
Re:cancer (Score:5, Interesting)
What we would ideally need to achieve elimination of cellular aging is the ability to sequence a person's entire DNA when they are young. And later digitally replicate an exact copy of the originals and print new undifferentiated cells to replace old ones, so the telomeres are longer, and also.... there are no mutations.
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The problem there would be that the epigenome, developed through one's life, would also get reverted. Your body might not recognize the reboot cells as its own.
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What we would ideally need to achieve elimination of cellular aging is the ability to sequence a person's entire DNA when they are young. And later digitally replicate an exact copy of the originals and print new undifferentiated cells to replace old ones, so the telomeres are longer, and also.... there are no mutations.
I was under the impression you could get a whole genome sequencing for <$2000 these days, they're aiming to get it under $1000 but if they could do something useful with it throughout your whole life it's $25/year over an 80 year lifespan. And if you do this over a sample, aren't most the cells in my body likely to be damaged in different places, so a vote of simple majority would get it right?
However, so far I've heard of very little genetic theraphy or other tangible ways to do something with this info
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What we would ideally need to achieve elimination of cellular aging is the ability to sequence a person's entire DNA when they are young. And later digitally replicate an exact copy of the originals and print
new undifferentiated cells to replace old ones, so the telomeres are longer, and also.... there are no mutations.
Decent strategy but a DNA map of you in your youth shouldn't be necessary. The mutations only really cause problems at the cell level.
If you take a few thousand/million samples from different parts of the body then you should be able to look at the averages and determine
what the starting cell DNA was as different cells shouldn't have the same mutations so you should be able to average out any mutations.
Once you have the good dna and can replicate it then doing as small as a 1% cell replacement per month s
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If people could live forever, nothing would ever change. We would be stuck with the likes of Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin throughout all of eternity. The world would become a living hell until the human race was itself completely wiped off the face of the planet.
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If people could live forever, nothing would ever change. We would be stuck with the likes of Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin throughout all of eternity.
That's not true.... Hitler/Stalin did not die of old age; if people really did live forever, then Hitler/Stalin would not have been able to kill anyone, by the way.
Everyone dies eventually. Even if we can eliminate aging and death by old age. There are plenty of other ways to die. Statistically speaking, one of those other ways is going to happen eve
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My question is will it reverse aging? Can you rejuvenate?
This is only one aspect of aging. Here is a list of several others. [wikipedia.org] All of them probably need to be addressed to reverse aging (and probably other things we don't know about).
He lists seven, but there are actually eight aspects to aging - the last being not having a picture of yourself in the attic. [wikipedia.org] Surely Dr. Grey should know this.
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You don't get it, is unlikely that the treatment by itself will cause uncontrolled division, but the fact remains that the cells are still "old" and have accumulated defects with every replication, so even more replications in the same cells equates with increased cancer risk. The telomeres are simply a countdown to self destruction as a countermeasure of said risk, but as long as the root cause is not tackled the best you can hope is a few more years of pain and suffering.
The cell is going to die (and you with it). I will take an increased chance of cancer over the 100% risk of dying once you are out of telomeres.
I might wait and opt to not get my telemeres increased until I'm 80 or so if the risk of cancer was high but if I'm 99 then I have alot to gain
and not much to lose in getting a life extending treatment.
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Re:cancer (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah thats the Hayflick limit which is designed to stop that.
Theres actually a damn good reason why cells are designed to stop reproducing after a certain limit. In fact one of cancers strategies is to artificially prevent telemere shortening to try and circumvent the hayflick limit.
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And yet there are stem cells in the body that can naturally express telomerase, so overcome the limit.
But it sure does seem to not be a defect or problem that there is a limit.
Easy to see how messing with this in healthy people would be likely to cause more harm than good, especially if they can't be extremely selective about which cells they apply this to.
Over time cell division inherently degrades the genetic material, because the error correction in the copying mechanism used in Mitosis is not good
Re:cancer (Score:4, Insightful)
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Interesting if true, do you have a source for this info?
Re:cancer (Score:5, Interesting)
Not offhand in any good laymen's literature I know of. But the process is described in a bunch of molecular biology textbooks I don't have access to at the moment. When chromosomes are not protected with telomere caps on the ends, the cellular machinery is likely to mistakenly treat them as DNA double strand breaks. What happens in such situations is that proteins involved in DNA repair will try to join the "naked" end to the nearest other piece of DNA, even if it belongs to another healthy chromosome. Fused chromosomes are always bad news for cellular health. The problem is amplified in what is called a breakage-fusion-bridge (b/f/b) cycle as cells try to continue dividing with abnormal chromosomes that now doesn't separate as they should.
The presence of healthy telomeres suppresses this process. Even if your chromosomes get messed up through the infrequent snags that still happens occasionally, a damaged chromosome that is able to restore the presence of telomeres at the end by one means or another (there are several) will stop undergoing b/f/b cycles. Mind you, the chromosome is still damaged to some degree, but it doesn't get worse.
sorry. butterfingers resulted in a premature post (Score:2)
Mind you, the chromosome is still damaged to some degree, but it doesn't get worse.
Cancer cells are observed to maintain viability this way - even though they are diseased and abnormal cells, they maintain just enough chromosomal health by activating the necessary telomere maintenance process to continue dividing without incurring even greater genomic damage.
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Interesting approach (Score:5, Interesting)
Making the treatment directly with mRNA sidestep a lot of dangers of promoting cell replication, the immune system would not have any foreign proteins to recognize and so multiple doses are feasible, the RNA is degraded over time so the replication goes back to normal instead of keeping forever in an artificial state and it was demonstrated that the cells grow "old" again after the treatment.
Still, it feels like its going to be much more a lab tool than a anti-aging treatment for a few more decades, RNA treatment is very tricky to do in vivo and even the most promising candidates for treatment (vaccines and so on) only produce very limited success, unless some revolutionary vector is invented in the near future it will pass a lot of years before this can be safe and efficient enough to be commercialized.
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Still, it feels like its going to be much more a lab tool than a anti-aging treatment for a few more decades, RNA treatment is very tricky to do in vivo and even the most promising candidates for treatment (vaccines and so on) only produce very limited success, unless some revolutionary vector is invented in the near future it will pass a lot of years before this can be safe and efficient enough to be commercialized.
I'll give you two decades. Three, tops. Get going, I literally don't have forever to wait for this.
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The timing of these techs is really going to put me as the ~2050 headline "ArsonSmith 85ish, Last man to have to die of natural causes" Who am I kidding, If I make it to 2040 It'll be from some marvelous breakthrough.
I have a bad feeling about this... (Score:2)
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It already is to some degree [sciencebasedmedicine.org]
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-Anonymous Coward
some first hand insights (Score:5, Informative)
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Interesting, thank you.
He sounds a bit, well, enthusiastic about all of this. He is really looking at this from the rejuvenation end rather than straight molecular biology which pricks up my suspicion meter. Nonetheless, he does make it clear that this procedure (if it really works, if it can be used in a therapeutic sense) is only going to be one small part of a rejuvenation 'package' and there is a long ways to go before this is advertised on late night TV.
Good read.
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He also seems to think we're going to live forever in a computer cloud (hello Pauley's ROM construct). I think he might have ingested too much acrylamide as a grad student.
For the TL;DR folks (Score:3)
From the Reddit AMA by JohnRamus (the lead author):
Asked to describe a bit of background and where he thinks this research fits in with the rest of the field:
People have been extending telomeres in human cells since at least 1998, and there are many methods of extending telomeres, including delivery of TERT DNA, delivery of small molecule activators of TERT, and other methods. However, before our method, there was no method to extend telomeres that meets all of several criteria that we think are probably of value in a potential therapy: a method that extends telomeres rapidly, but by only a finite amount after which the normal protective anti-cancer telomere shortening mechanism remains intact, without causing an immune response, and without risk of insertional mutagenesis.
The innovations brought by our study:
Our method meets the above criteria for a potentially useful therapy. Specifically, we found that by delivering mRNA modified to reduce its immunogenicity and encoding TERT to human fibroblasts, telomerase activity was transiently (24-48h) increased, telomeres were lengthened (~0.9kb over a few days), proliferative capacity of the cells increased in a dose-dependent manner, telomeres resumed shortening, and the cells eventually stopped dividing and expressed markers of senescence to the same degree as untreated cells.
Expensive (Score:1)
Re:Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that this will be one of the most expensive treatments ever.
There is no particular reason to believe this will be expensive. It is just some RNA, which can be inexpensively replicated. Even if it is patented, it is likely that someone else can some up with a similar technique, making it a competitive market, and driving down prices.
If you really want to be a pessimist, you should instead focus on how this is going to bankrupt Social Security. People are going to retire at 65, and then collect benefits for the next 55 years.
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Re:Expensive (Score:4, Informative)
I hate to go all Negative-Nellie on you here, but let me give you a counter-example. There is a drug marketed under the name "Xyrem" that is used to treat very difficult cases of narcolepsy, which is no laughing matter if you know someone with the disease (which I do) or have it yourself (which I don't). This drug used to be cheaply available over the counter, but in more recent times, it has fallen under patent protection and costs up to $12,000 per month, with the price regularly increasing. You read that right: an over the counter drug became an obscenely expensive patent medicine. When I learned this story, I learned the lesson that money buys public policy in the USA.
You can tell yourself that the fedgov and megacorps can't keep something from us, but in practice, they can make it very difficult and dangerous to obtain outside of the authorized channels when there is enough money involved. Enforcement of laws against marijuana, cocaine, ecstacy, and even meth are nothing compared to this obscenity.
In short, I do believe that the establishment has the power to keep this from us no matter how bad we want it.
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"Xylem" sounds like a trade name. Was it called something else before it was patent-captured, or was it actually always patented, but the price went up after it was introduced?
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Some people swear by it. Some people say it helps some, but isn't worth the hassle and cost. Some people have dangerous reactions to it.
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Before the fedgov got involved, it was freely available. The companies that have owned the patent have done NOTHING ZERO ZIP
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Getting RNA into people in any sort of controlled method hasn't yet happened. And it won't be easy.
Of course it's going to be expensive. Do you think they want everyone to live forever?
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If this works really well, then war and/or genocide will be the only way to keep population down. The alternative to death from the old age is much more uglier.
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I don't know, it seems to me it may be less determinate - people of all ages die, not just the old.
I'm sure that, over several dozen generations, warfare would be somewhat more refined to be less catastrophically destructive. It will be fought other ways. Today, half the world's at war, and it doesn't result in most of the remainder even being aware of it.
Re:Expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
People are going to retire at 65, and then collect benefits for the next 55 years.
If aging can be postponed, then so can retirement. Also, perhaps work will become more pleasant without the pressure of having to rush and save up for retirement.
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If aging can be postponed, then so can retirement.
When the number of voters 65+ exceeds the number of voters 18-64, how are you going to raise the retirement age? We already have people living to much older than SS was designed for, and we have not had the political will to fix it.
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Overall, it is hard for me to accept your point that longer,
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Longer mortgage is not going to change the situation, at least not much. Let's say I can pay $2k/month, then I can take 30 years mortgage with 3% interest rate to buy $500k house. Then I'll have to pay $260k of interest to the bank during these 30 years.
Now suddenly I can live much
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assuming some level of rational financial decisions
Assuming income is the same in both situations, if I am not earning higher than 3% on my investments, then why am I not paying off my mortgage with my surplus monthly net cashflow (which is higher in the second scenario)? If I am earning higher than 3% on my investments then I am earning a spread and making easy money, like a bank (I am earning a higher interest rate than I am being charged).
Twice the mortgage period length gives me twice as long an opportunity to take advantage of advant
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Ok, let's do the math again: $500k house, 3%, 60 years, $1.5k monthly payment. Thus I have suprlus $500 per month to pay off the debt. Well, now I have to pay $390k of interest during 52 years. STILL much worse than paying $260 of interest during 30 years, while paying the SAME $2k per mo
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A. You are forced to pay monthly principle payments of $1000
B. You are forced to pay monthly principle payments of $500 but can also prepay another $500, if you want (depending on alternative investment opportunities).
Option B. allows me to choose between both options, every month. If I choose option A, I am stuck with option A every month. Consequently, a rational person would choose the longest mortgage period possible because they could artif
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Not always. You have to consider not only monthly payment alone, but interest rate, property price and length of mortgage as well. Extending mortgage length beyond certain limit makes no sense, because it won't reduce monthly payment any more. In previous messages I gave you an example where extra 30 years brought only 1/4 reduction
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1) We were keeping all other factors constant and only changing mortgage period.
2) In this scenario, mortgage period only impacts monthly payments of principle.
3) Prepayments are payments of principle above and beyond what is determined by the mortgage period.
4) Accordingly, you want your required principle payments as low as possible because you can also prepay to turn your mortgage p
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I suspect that this will be one of the most expensive treatments ever.
Treating aging directly should be cheaper in the long run than treating all age-related diseases separately, which is what we're doing now.
Aging? (Score:3)
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Have you got a citation for "number one killer of humans"?
How many people as a % actual die due to old age and not cardiac diseases, cancer and car crashes?
While I do think it would be great to have actual anti ageing, is it actually a major cause of death?
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True.
The same is said of AIDS. People don't die of AIDS, they die because their immune system is so compromised that the flu kills them or something else.
I agree that there are things that kill you easier when you are older than when younger, but there are a lot of things totally unrelated to age that are already killing us, things like an unhealthy lifestyle leading to obesity and diabetes. You'll probably agree that there are very few fat old people (like _really_ old).
While there's a lower risk of heart
Forever young (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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The ads this year suck big time. Half the time I can't tell what they're trying to sell, if anything.
We had a drinking game. Whoever figured out the commercial first won. Everyone else had to take a drink. Great fun was had by all.
Much like AIDS ... (Score:2)
People die of cancer. stroke, heart attack, emphysema. and countless other disease, but aging isn't one of them.
With AIDS the HIV virus gradually destroys the immune system. Then some infection isn't successfully fought off. The immediate "cause of death" is the infection. But the underlying cause of death is the destruction of the immune system by HIV.
Similarly, with aging, a host of systems gradually fail, through a number of mechanisms, of which telomere-shortening is the underlying cause of most. Ev
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Video? What video?
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Running ghostery in tandem with adblock using easylist (+ any local lists of your preferred language/region) will typically block any and all pests of this kind.
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If you post on hosts where they apply, why are you posting about hosts on a telomere article? Who is offtopic?
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HOSTS does not protect against DNS amplification attacks. It doesn't really matter what the victim is using for name resolution - they will still be the victim of the DDoS attack. That is, unless you're somehow downloading the entire Internet's DNS records and turning off DNS entirely. Which doesn't really factor into the bandwidth savings you mentioned.
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As omnichad indicated, hosts files will not help you prevent DNS amplification attacks as the requests are not coming from your network.
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/a... [us-cert.gov]
You should probably remove that from your list of things hosts files do, a host file cannot block traffic originating on the internet, only your own name resolution traffic. If you would like to test it out, I am sure the Lizard Squad would be more than willing to test it for you.
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You said
7.) Protect vs. DNS amplification attacks
No, hosts files to not prevent DNS amplification attacks. These attacks do not depend whatsoever on the configuration of your computer. These attacks are performed from outside your network. Here's how it works:
1. I send a packet to a DNS server on the internet, lets say 8.8.8.8, this packet requests a large amount of data, like a request for the whole DNS database. This packet also has spoofed your address as the requesting address.
2. You receive large amount of data.
3. You have just been taken
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