考研英语听力，考研英语听力考不考
Hey there! Welcome to Life Noggin!
As you humans age, your body goes through lots of changes and one of those changes is wrinkled skin. I mean you humans despise wrinkles. Humans will do a lot to not look like a big hairy raisin. Worldwide, over $60 billion are spent on anti-wrinkle skin care products. But slapping some cream on isn’t really going to solve the issue.
The cause of wrinkles isn’t just skin-deep; it’s actually the same process that causes your arteries to stiffen as you age, which could cause some serious health problems, like heart disease or kidney damage. Yeah, believe it or not, these things are linked, and we might be able to prevent both of them. Let me dive a little deeper!
When your heart beats, artery walls expand and contract. This happens with the help of proteins, or long chain-like molecules, that form a stretchy web-like structure around the walls. This is called the extracellular matrix. I like the first one, but the second one really didn’t do it for me.
But sometimes, blood sugar molecules will break open, revealing their sticky ends. And every once in a while, these ends will stick to the proteins in the extracellular matrix and form a rigid bridge between them called a cross-link.
Didn’t think I was going to get stuck in microscopic traffic in a video talking about wrinkles? But here we are.
Eventually, as more and more sugar molecules create cross-links, the once stretchy web becomes stiff, making it difficult to expand and contract with each heartbeat. This takes away a vital cushion for the brain and the kidney against the powerful surge of the pulse, and also forces the heart to work harder, leading to illnesses like heart disease. It also makes your skin less elastic and structured, making it harder for it to snap back into its original shape, which results in wrinkles.
So, to fix that problem and the rest of problems that I mentioned, we need to somehow break apart those hard, sugary cross-links. Scientists have been looking for ways to do this and they believe that one promising avenue is a molecule called glucosepane, which is one of the products of those crosslinks I mentioned. As you age, the amount of glucosepane in your extra-cellular matrix increases. And studies have found that it causes stiffness in tissues and dysfunction in blood vessels. But this molecule is big and complex, which makes it really hard to break apart with the simple chemicals used in medicines. Instead, researchers have been looking for an enzyme which is a molecule that speeds up chemical reactions. In some exciting news, one group found some of these in bacteria that are capable of breaking apart glucosepane cross-links. While more testing is still needed, their work could pave the way for a future treatment.
Way less wrinkles and, yeah, your heart is going to work the way it should for longer! I’d say that’s a win-win! So, tell me, are you afraid of getting older? Are you worried about wrinkles or age-related diseases, or are you not really phased by aging? Let’s start a healthy discussion down in the comments!
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考研英语听力(考研英语听力考不考)
