 Senescent cells and dad jokes are both hallmarks of aging. They're outdated, irritating, and both make you die a little inside. But new research has given scientists fresh insight that could help us fight back against these destructive relics. Well, senescent cells. Yeah, there's been very little progress on dad jokes. Welcome to Lifespan News. I'm Emmett Short. Today, we're talking about new research into senescent cells that found that they can adhere to neighboring cells, eventually ripping apart and leaving fragments of themselves inside their victims reminds me of an ex-girlfriend. Anyway, learning how they work could help us figure out the relationship between senescent cells and cancer. Cellular senescence is central to aging. That's that's actually the sentence I use to do a mic check. Cellular senescence is central to we're good. OK, so in this new preprint study, scientists mark one out of every thousand cells with a fluorescent protein. So what they found was pretty amazing. After a few days, tiny fluorescent dots started to appear like the cells were already tiny, but these new dots were even tiny. And they turned out to be cellular fragments attached to the membranes of other cells. Time lapses showed how the cells moved around and bumped into each other and contacts between non-senescent cells, so healthy cells, were brief and ended without damaging either cell. But if at least one of the cells was senescent, they sometimes bonded together. Then as the cells eventually moved apart, the senescent cell was torn, leaving a part of itself attached to the other cell, as you can see in this actual video taken with a microscope. The fragments began appearing just three days after the induction of senescence. And by day four, there were an average of 10 to 12 fragments per senescent cell. It's like they sweat superglue and keep bumping into things. It's not ideal. Making things worse, the fragments exhibited spinning, projecting and retracting arms or crawling like behavior. Yikes. It's like walking dead inside your body. The researchers also wanted to see what effects the fragments have on the cells. So they added these fragments to liver cells and it increased their growth rate. And in 3D culture, cancer cells with the fragments became more active and invaded the gel and formed branches, which is super scary. But at least we understand it now a little better, which gets us one step closer to figuring out how to control it. Now, I know I framed senescent cells in a pretty bad light here, but this is not the whole story. OK. You may be thinking senescent cells bad and want to cancel them from your bodies. But just like most things in life, it's a little more nuanced than that. There have been other studies that have demonstrated some benefits of senescence. So even down to the cellular level, there's good and evil in all of us. And we're going to need more information before we know how we should respond. And when we get that information, we're not going to keep it to ourselves. We'll make a video right away. So make sure you subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss out. I'm Emmett Short, and we'll see you next time on Lifespan News.