2013: Science’s biggest breakthroughs

Do you want to live forever?

Cayo Sobral

The life expectancy of humans has been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. Advances in medicine have allowed us to cure previously untreatable diseases while agricultural progress has meant that fewer people die from malnutrition. But while we now live longer than ever, it also means we grow older, and frailer, than ever before. Dreams of eternal youth have remained firmly in the realm of fiction.

Things may be about to change. This past month, a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School and the University of New South Wales managed to reverse certain aspects of ageing in mice. The researchers injected two-year-old mice with a chemical compound called nicotinamide mono nucleotide (NMN) over the course of a week. At the end of the week, the old mice’s muscles resembled those of six-month-old mice. The team likened this to a 60-year-old person having the cells of someone in their early twenties.

Cells are composed of many different sub-units, called organelles, which must communicate efficiently for the cell to function properly. One specific chemical compound, named NAD, is in charge of dealing communication between the cell nucleus and mitochondria, the cell’s ‘energy factory’. As we grow older, NAD levels decline and cell communication starts to break down, accelerating the ageing process.

Cells injected with NMN can transform it into NAD and use it to restore communication between nucleus and mitochondria. After communication is restored, the cell is indistinguishable from younger ones.

This process is not the only known reason for why we grow old but the discovery may revolutionise how we age in the future. The research team hopes to start human trials late this year.

Stem cells? They’re basically all the same…

Emma Mckeown 

This year we’ve seen incredible breakthroughs with stem cell research. By implanting the stem cells of an 8-month-old baby into an unfertilised egg with its own DNA removed, scientists were able to cultivate them and allow them to multiply. Once the samples had grown sufficiently, they were implanted into ‘moulds’, which turned these particular cells into beating heart cells. This research will hopefully be the first of many organs: livers, lungs and kidneys, to name a few.

The major advantage to these organs is that because they grow from the mould of the person receiving a transplant, there is little chance of rejection by the body, allowing the person to live a normal life, without the use of immunosuppressants for the remainder of their life. On top of organ transplants, we may see scientists attempting to bring extinct animals back to life, including the woolly mammoth and the tasmanian tiger. Jurassic Park isn’t looking so science fiction anymore!

The first mind-controlled exoskeleton

Ellie May

Technology this year suggests a promising future for those with paralysing disabilities. In 2013, the first ever mind-controlled exoskeleton was created. The exoskeleton, MindWalker, works through an EEG cap worn on the head of the user measuring electrical pulses in the brain. The cap includes a set of glasses worn by the user, with two diodes attached to the left and right side. The diodes send out pulses of light, and the cap then detects whether the brain is concentrating on the light on the left or the right. If the user concentrates on the left, the exoskeleton starts walking. If the user concentrates on the right, it stops.

Through the use of this technology, people with complete lower leg paralysis can walk around and perform their daily activities with just the use of their mind. Look out for the 2014 World Cup kick off, where it won’t be a footballer taking the first kick. Instead, it will be a teenager, paralysed from the waist down, using one of these exoskeletons to start the game.