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Science Friday > Archives > 2003 > May
> May 9, 2003:
Hour One: Fighting Spam / Genetics of Aging
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If you're tired of getting email that you didn't ask for offering
to sell you prescription drugs, participate in looting funds from
a Nigerian bank, oil company, or government official, or offering
you access to pornography, you're not alone. Increasingly, individuals
and Internet Service Providers are trying to take action to stop
the flow of unsolicited commercial email, commonly known as 'spam.'
This week, the company Earthlink announced that it would put into
place a challenge-response system by which individuals could force
people emailing them to prove that there was an actual person, and
not a computer script, behind an email. Some other technological
approaches to canning spam involve complex filters that 'learn'
what types of mail are unwanted and filter them into categories,
and methods that block off sending privileges to companies known
to permit spam (a penalty known as 'black-holing.') Then there are
the legal approaches to doing away with such nuisance emails --
proposals have ranged from banning it altogether, to requiring it
to be labeled as an advertisement, to establishing a small per-message
charge on emails sent to price indiscriminate mass-emailers out
of the spam market.
All of these approaches have their pluses and minuses, however. In
the first part of this hour, we'll talk about some of the alternatives
available for cutting down on the amount of spam you receive -- and
talk abbot some of the possibilities for cutting it out entirely in
the future.
Then, we'll shift focus to the genetics of aging. In work published
this week in the journal Nature, researchers discuss how one gene
found in yeast seems to play a role in regulating the organism's lifespan.
The gene, named PNC1, appears to turn on in periods of calorie restriction,
a condition that has been found to extend lifetimes in some organisms.
The researchers said that a yeast strain whose genome contains five
copies of PNC1 lives 70 percent longer than a 'normal' strain. We'll
talk about what the find might mean, as well as other genetic clues
to the aging process. Call in with your questions and comments at
1-800-989-8255, and share your opinions online in our Listeners' Lounge (registration required).
Guests:
Ted Gavin
Member, Board of Directors
SpamCon
Foundation
San Francisco, California
Phil Goldman
Chief Executive Officer
MailBlocks
Los Altos, California
David Sinclair
Assistant Professor of Pathology
Harvard Medical School
Boston, Massachusetts
Cynthia Kenyon
Herbert Boyer Professor of Biochemistry
and Biophysics
Director, Hillblom
Center for the Biology of Aging
University of California San Francisco
San Francisco, California
Books/Articles Discussed:
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- "Nicotinamide and PNC1 govern lifespan extension
by calorie restriction in Saccharomyces cerevisiae"
by Rozalyn M. Anderson, Kevin J. Bitterman, Jason G. Wood,
Oliver Medvedik & David A. Sinclair. Nature, vol 423,
pp181-185.
- (find
more SciFri books here)
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Related Links:
Genetics
of Life Span
Genetics
of aging in Drosophila.
The
DNA Files - GENETICS OF AGING & LONGEVITY - Program Summary
FOCUS
- March 23, 2001
UCSF
Today News
ABCNEWS.com
: Gene Mutation Doubles Fly's Life Span
Gene
with role in yeast life span discovered
Center for Aging, Genetics,
and Neurodegeneration (CAGN) at Massachusetts General Hospital
September
5, 1997, Hour 1: The Genetics of Aging
Federal
Trade Commission - SPAM EMAIL
SpamCon
Foundation: to reduce spam (junk email)
Can
We Ever Really Can Spam ?
Fight
Spam on the Internet!
Welcome
to CAUCE
A
Plan for Spam
Spam
Laws
Spam
Conference
This segment produced by Karin
Vergoth and Adrian MacDonald
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