A team at UCL’s Institute of Healthy Ageing uses RNAi in Drosophila neurons to knock down the Pol III repressor Maf1. This preserves 5S rRNA transcription and protein synthesis during aging, improving neuromuscular and gut function, and extending female lifespan.

Key points

• Neuron-specific RNAi of Maf1 in adult Drosophila boosts Pol III activity and extends female lifespan.
• Maf1 knockdown prevents age-related decline in 5S rRNA expression and restores puromycin-labeled translation in aged brains.
• Improved neuromuscular function, gut barrier integrity, and partial rescue of C9orf72-repeat toxicity demonstrate broad aging benefits.

Why it matters: Sustaining neuronal protein synthesis via targeted Maf1 suppression offers a novel route to healthy aging and potential neuroprotective therapies.

A team from University College London employs a convolutional neural network pretrained on YouTube audio to extract embeddings from minute-long coral reef recordings. They combine unsupervised clustering and supervised random forests to classify habitat types and individual sites, showcasing a scalable passive acoustic monitoring workflow.

Key points

• Pretrained VGGish CNN processes 0.96-sec log-mel spectrograms into 128-D embeddings per one-minute recording.
• Compound index combines eight acoustic metrics across three frequency bands into a 44-D feature vector.
• Trained CNN (T-CNN) fine-tunes VGGish architecture on reef audio for direct classification.
• UMAP reduces embeddings to 2D or 10D for visualization and affinity propagation clustering.
• Random forest classifiers use P-CNN and index embeddings to predict habitat types and site identity with up to 100% accuracy.
• Datasets span three biogeographic locations: Indonesia, Australia, French Polynesia.

Why it matters: By integrating pretrained AI models with passive acoustic data, this work paves the way for low-cost, scalable monitoring of marine ecosystems. It demonstrates that transfer learning can unlock ecological insights without extensive manual annotation or specialized hardware.

A recent study in PLOS Genetics shows that doxifluridine rescues aging-related alternative splicing issues and extends lifespan in C. elegans via bacterial metabolism. For instance, live bacteria metabolize the drug into active compounds that improve cellular functions, sparking interest in novel longevity therapies.