Everyday drugs could give extra years of life

Millions of people are taking anti-ageing drugs every day – they just don’t know it. Drugs to slow ageing sound futuristic but they already exist in the form of relatively cheap medicines that have been used for other purposes for decades. Many pharmaceutical companies are joining the research on longevity drugs.

Rapamycin, also called sirolimus, drug characterized primarily by its ability to suppress the immune system, which led to its use in the prevention of transplant rejection. Rapamycin is produced by the soil bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus. The drug’s name comes from Rapa Nui, the indigenous name of Easter Island, where the compound was originally discovered in soil samples in the 1970s.

Everolimus is pronounced e-ve-ro-li-mus. It’s brand name is Afinitor. It is a biological therapy treatment for advanced kidney cancer that has come back either during or after treatment.

for more read here

Now  something I also didn’t knew is that low-dose aspirin and statins are good and are widely taken by healthy people to reduce their risk of heart disease.

Living Cells for data processing

Not all computers are made of silicon. By definition, a computer is anything that processes data, performs calculations, or uses so-called logic gates to turn inputs (for example, 1s and 0s in binary code) into outputs. And now, a small international community of scientists is working to expand the realm of computers to include cells, animals, and other living organisms. Some of their experiments are highly theoretical; others represent the first steps toward usable biological computers. All are attempts to make life perform work now done by chips and circuit boards.

Last year, for example, a computer scientist at the University of the West of England named Andy Adam­atzky and a team of Japanese researchers built logic gates that ran on soldier crabs. First they constructed mazes that replicated the shape of the wires in a computer’s logic gates.

Then they chased two swarms of crabs (inputs) from one end of the gate to the other. When the swarms collided, they combined to form a new swarm (output), which often headed in the direction of the sum of their vectors, demonstrating that a living, somewhat random system can produce useful order.

for more here   . About biocomputers , it’s a extremelly interesting topic . Actually this video demonstrates a biocomputer you have to see this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nizDYGDdfyY