GoKawiilKiller T cells might help people to live to extraordinarily old ages. Plus, the longest-lived brain organoids so far and how mass genome-screening programmes for newborns might work.
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
Credit: Jessie C. Tanner
Female Cope’s gray treefrogs (Dryophytes chrysoscelis) struggle to pick the best mates when presented with too much choice. Typically, female treefrogs choose male suitors with the longest calls. When researchers played these longer ‘target’ calls alongside several shorter ‘distractor’ calls, the female frogs faced ‘choice overload’: they took longer to decide on a mate and picked the target call with less accuracy.
Nautilus | 4 min read
Reference: iScience paper
People who live to 110 years and older have large populations of a rare type of immune cell that can kill cancer. These killer T cells might help people to live to extraordinarily long ages by fighting off cancer — although this has yet to be proved. “Most of immune ageing research has focused on decline,” says biologist Kosuke Hashimoto, who co-authored the research. “Our study suggests that even at extreme old age, the immune system may still selectively adapt.”
Nature | 7 min read
Reference: Cell Reports paper
Researchers at Pasqal, a quantum-computing start-up company in Paris, have developed an artificial-intelligence tool that can turn an English-language prompt into quantum-computing code and then autonomously run it on a quantum computer, although it sometimes needs human intervention. Its makers say it can open doors to a field in which programming has notoriously required sophisticated skills.
... continue reading