Posting two interesting pieces of news that are NOT about the coronavirus.

A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell studied how Caloric Restriction, meaning eating 30% fewer calories, slowed down aging-related changes in cell type composition, gene expression, and core transcriptional regulatory networks. The paper titled “Caloric Restriction Reprograms the Single-Cell Transcriptional Landscape of Rattus Norvegicus Aging” provides new information about various cell tissues which comes to confirm previous findings about the benefits of caloric restriction, e.g. “Effects of calorie restriction on cardioprotection and cardiovascular health” (Ahmet et al, 2011).

Two things to note though. Firstly, humans are not rats, so the findings may not apply 100% to us. Secondly and probably the most practical advice: caloric restriction is not easy. It literally means eating less (or at least more vegetables) and we all know how successful dieting is.

One small addition: we’ve noticed that CellPress is piloting a rental service that gives access to all journals for $3.99 for 6 hours or $7.99 for 36 hours. We believe all scientific papers should be easy to access or at least cheaper but, until that happens, this looks like a big step forward compared to the obscene prices that publishers normally charge for a single article.

The second interesting piece of news we’ve found is a list of 17 disinformation techniques allegedly employed by Russia in its fight against “The West”. We’re not necessarily interested in whether Russia actually does that but in the actual techniques themselves and how to combat them because, hey, anyone could use them! Most of these techniques won’t work if you use critical thinking but we’ll get into more details in a future post.