USC Leonard Davis Communications

New Scientist featured research by Changhan David Lee of the USC Leonard Davis School that found mitochondria help transfer vital genetic information within a cell. The discovery opens up treatment possibilities for diseases as another target for therapies. The researchers found that although the nucleus was thought to have complete control of a cell’s genetic material, mitochondria also play a significant role as well.

Vogue featured research by Valter Longo of the USC Leonard Davis School on the health benefits of intermittent fasting and the impact of diet on aging.

“Eating within 12 hours a day is important, and if you’re overweight, eating two meals a day plus a snack rather than the five meals (three meals and two snacks) we often hear about, is also important,” said Longo.

Physics World quoted Caleb Finch of the USC Leonard Davis School on the far-reaching effects of air pollution on aging.

“The negative health consequences associated with air pollution are on a par with obesity,” says Finch. “Essentially it accelerates all age-related health conditions.”

Inverse interviewed Mara Mather of the USC Leonard Davis School on the plausibility of Westworld characters’ cowboy hats having cognitive scanning abilities. Mather states that the show creates a sci-fi scenario that’s “not implausible” and are “a natural extension of what we have today.”

“Currently, fMRI provides us with some crude mind-reading capabilities,” Mather explains. Using it researchers can guess pretty well about how people are thinking about certain things — Mather says that they even can use it to tell whether someone is thinking about playing tennis or about someone else’s face.

“As long as we have some training data to learn your individual brain patterns, we can extract a blurry rough image of what your visual cortex is seeing or imagining,” says Mather. “Eventually, the machinery is likely to get more powerful and smaller — perhaps even small enough to fit into a hat.”