—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 “Nowadays at 70 years outdated you might be nonetheless a toddler,” China’s Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying.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 might be repeatedly transplanted, and other people can reside 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 doubtless to assist anybody radically lengthen their lifespan anytime quickly. And it’s a simplistic means to consider growing older—a course of so sophisticated that researchers can’t agree on what causes it, why it happens, and even the best way to outline it, not to mention “deal with” it. Learn the complete story.
This text first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Know-how Assessment’s weekly biotech publication. To obtain it in your inbox each Thursday, and browse articles like this primary, enroll right here.
India is utilizing robots to wash sewer pipes so people not should
When Jitender was a toddler in New Delhi, each his mother and father labored as handbook scavengers—a job that concerned clearing town’s sewers by hand. Now, he’s amongst nearly 200 contractors concerned within the Delhi authorities’s effort to shift from this handbook course of to safer mechanical strategies.
Though it has been outlawed since 1993, handbook scavenging—the follow of extracting human excreta from bogs, sewers, or septic tanks—continues to be practiced extensively 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 complete story.