XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Monday 21 October 2013

Scientists discover DNA body clock - could help researchers understand ageing process & lead to ways of slowing it down -

Scientists discover DNA body clock - could help researchers understand ageing process & lead to ways of slowing it down - 



A US scientist has discovered an internal body clock based on DNA that measures the biological age of our tissues and organs.

The clock shows that while many healthy tissues age at the same rate as the body as a whole, some of them age much faster or slower. The age of diseased organs varied hugely, with some many tens of years "older" than healthy tissue in the same person, according to the clock.

Researchers say that unravelling the mechanisms behind the clock will help them understand the ageing process and hopefully lead to drugs and other interventions that slow it down.

Therapies that counteract natural ageing are attracting huge interest from scientists because they target the single most important risk factor for scores of incurable diseases that strike in old age.

"Ultimately, it would be very exciting to develop therapy interventions to reset the clock and hopefully keep us young," said Steve Horvath, professor of genetics and biostatistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Horvath looked at the DNA of nearly 8,000 samples of 51 different healthy and cancerous cells and tissues. Specifically, he looked at how methylation, a natural process that chemically modifies DNA, varied with age.

Horvath found that the methylation of 353 DNA markers varied consistently with age and could be used as a biological clock. The clock ticked fastest in the years up to around age 20, then slowed down to a steadier rate. Whether the DNA changes cause ageing or are caused by ageing is an unknown that scientists are now keen to work out.

"Does this relate to something that keeps track of age, or is a consequence of age? I really don't know," Horvath told the Guardian. "The development of grey hair is a marker of ageing, but nobody would say it causes ageing," he said.

The clock has already revealed some intriguing results. Tests on healthy heart tissue showed that its biological age – how worn out it appears to be – was around nine years younger than expected. Female breast tissue aged faster than the rest of the body, on average appearing two years older.

Diseased tissues also aged at different rates, with cancers speeding up the clock by an average of 36 years. Some brain cancer tissues taken from children had a biological age of more than 80 years.

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How stores use your phone’s WiFi to track your shopping habits -

How stores use your phone’s WiFi to track your shopping habits - 



Here are some of the things the owner of a brick-and-mortar store is in a position to learn about his business these days, as Jules Polonetsky, the director of a Washington think tank, told me recently:
The average wait time at the back register is two minutes. Half of your customers have been in your store twice in a week. Ten percent of the people who come in your store never come near a register, meaning they don't buy anything. There are a lot of people not finding what they want. The big promotion on the east side entrance of your store was more successful at bringing people to purchase than the promotion on the west side of your store. Here's the hotspot in your store that draws the most users. The typical user comes in and purchases one thing. Ten percent of your users have been at more than one of your stores.
The list of insights is staggeringly specific, made possible by combining commercial ingenuity with an everyday technology that was never intended to be used this way.
Every smartphone these days comes equipped with a WiFi card. When the card is on and looking for networks to join, it's detectable by local routers. In your home, the router connects to your device, and then voila — you have the Internet on your phone. But in a retail environment, other in-store equipment can pick up your WiFi card, learn your device's unique ID number and use it to keep tabs on that device over time as you move through the store.
This gives offline companies the power to get incredibly specific data about how their customers behave. You could say it's the physical version of what Web-based vendors have spent millions of dollars trying to perfect — the science of behavioral tracking.
Thousands of customer interactions a day are logged and uploaded to the databases of third-party companies that specialize in retail analytics. Estimates vary as to how big this industry is, but according to Polonetsky, nine major players account for the vast majority of tracking activity. Others estimate there could be as many as 40 major and minor firms.
Here's how it works. To distinguish themselves from other nearby devices, all WiFi or Bluetooth-enabled gadgets come with something called a MAC address. It's a unique, 12-digit code that helps routers send data to the right recipient. (MAC addresses have nothing to do with Apple, although Apple products that ship with wireless components come with them.) By logging the MAC address, companies can identify individual devices.
In general, no personally identifiable information can be gathered this way, says Stillman Bradish, co-founder of The Wireless Registry, a D.C.-based start-up that designs ways for consumers to opt out of the tracking. But, he added, as with any type of metadata, it's easily possible to cross-reference it with other forms of public or commercial information. The resulting data slurry can help firms build detailed profiles of consumers, even if the consumers themselves remain anonymous.
Thwarting this tracking yourself can be impractical. One option is simply to turn off your wireless cards whenever you enter a store. But that might still not prevent a retailer from snatching your MAC address while you're walking by the promotion in the window outside. Some retail analytics companies — including New York-based Nomi, which this week raised $10 million in venture capital — offer an opt-out function on their Web sites where you can type in your MAC addresses and state your desire not to be tracked. Doing this for every device you own can be exhausting, however. And some retail analytics companies don't provide the opt-out feature.

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