—Jessica Hamzelou
Earlier this week, my editor forwarded me a video of the leaders of Russia and China speaking about immortality. “Nowadays at 70 years outdated you might be nonetheless a toddler,” China’s Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying.
“With the developments of biotechnology, human organs will be repeatedly transplanted, and other people can stay youthful and youthful, and even obtain immortality,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin, additionally 72, is reported to have replied.
In actuality, rounds of organ transplantation surgical procedure aren’t probably to assist anybody radically lengthen their lifespan anytime quickly. And it’s a simplistic means to consider getting older—a course of so difficult that researchers can’t agree on what causes it, why it happens, and even the right way to outline it, not to mention “deal with” it. Learn the total story.
This text first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Know-how Evaluation’s weekly biotech e-newsletter. To obtain it in your inbox each Thursday, and skim articles like this primary, enroll right here.
India is utilizing robots to wash sewer pipes so people now not must
When Jitender was a toddler in New Delhi, each his mother and father labored as guide scavengers—a job that concerned clearing the town’s sewers by hand. Now, he’s amongst nearly 200 contractors concerned within the Delhi authorities’s effort to shift from this guide course of to safer mechanical strategies.
Though it has been outlawed since 1993, guide scavenging—the observe of extracting human excreta from bogs, sewers, or septic tanks—remains to be practiced broadly in India. And never solely is the job undignified, however it may be extraordinarily harmful.
Now, a number of corporations have emerged to supply alternate options at a variety of technical complexity. Learn the total story.
