The way Dr. Jesse Karmazin sees it, New York City needs some fresh blood. 

It’s been over a year since we last heard from the physician behind Ambrosia LLC, the company hoping to reverse aging by pumping adults with the blood plasma of the young, but don’t think for a second that Karmazin’s been sitting still. Far from it.

SEE ALSO: A startup is buying teenagers’ blood and selling it to the rich

Karmazin confirmed today over email that he plans to transform what was once a clinical trial running out of Monterey, California, into a full-fledged New York City-based clinic offering that most elusive of products: youth. 

And you’d better believe it will cost you. 

Here’s how it all supposedly works. Ambrosia acquires blood plasma from people under the age of 25, and, via a transfusion, puts that plasma into older people looking to regain a bit of their long-lost vitality. 

The idea, while far from conclusively proven, comes from the scientific field of parabiosis. Essentially, scientists noticed that old mice given blood from young mice appeared to exhibit some signs of better health and possibly even a reversal of aging. Possibly. Researchers weren’t 100 percent sure if the blood was the cause. 

Dr. Karmazin figured he should try this out with humans. You know, scientifically. 

And so, with blood purchased from blood banks, and test subjects willing to pay $8,000 a procedure, he got to work testing the idea out. 

“I think we’re seeing a reversal of aging,” Karmazin, speaking of his clinical trial, told Mashable last year. “Now we have data suggesting there’s real changes in physiology after treatment. The goal is to make it available to everyone.”

When we asked whether Karmazin, who is in his thirties, intends to try the treatment out himself, he declined to say. 

The trial ended in January, and while the results haven’t been published, the doctor is clearly moving ahead at full steam. 

He explained to Mashable over email that he hopes to have a New York City clinic open by the end of this year or early next year. So far, he said he’s had around 150 patients, and that many of his customers come back for repeat treatments. 

While the price per visit in the new clinic has yet to be announced, the reason for locating his clinic in NYC sure has. 

“NYC has the largest population of aging people in the US,” he told us.

Nothing wrong with meeting your customers where they are, we guess. 

Assuming any of this actually works — remember, the efficacy of this treatment is still unconfirmed —  the city that never sleeps might one day become full of people that never age. 

But don’t hold your breath. After all, all the young blood in the world can’t help you if you don’t take care of the basics.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who has been spearheading the investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election in an effort to uphold our nation’s democracy, needs tech support.  

SEE ALSO: And now we pick up the pieces after our meltdown over Rod Rosenstein’s non-resignation

Mueller was apparently spotted at the Apple Store in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington D.C. seated at a table with his wife and a store employee. D.C. local @megpianta snapped a photo of the trio for her Instagram story, tagging the location. 

“Give this man ALL the Genius Bar support he needs, pls,” she captioned the photo. 

As the employee demonstrates something on the MacBook screen, Mueller appears to be in a state of absolute distress. Perched on an uncomfortably high stool his brow is furrowed and he wears a tightlipped grimace. Meanwhile, his wife’s glasses slide down her nose as she concentrates on the MacBook’s screen. Fingers splayed out on the table, the Apple employee appears to be bracing himself for whatever spinning wheel of death the MacBook could spring on him. 

What was Mueller trying to fix? Did he, like the rest of us mortals, snack one too many times and get a few crumbs stuck under his laptop’s delicate keyboard? Did he also have to struggle with getting AirDrop to connect to his phone? Did he also have to sacrifice three business days and a goat to land a coveted appointment time?

We just have questions about this! It’s also possible that the Mueller family bought a new laptop. It does look like there is a box and possibly a receipt on the table, though Mueller seems like the type of person who saves receipts. 

President Donald Trump held a rare solo press conference on Wednesday afternoon, and it went about as you’d expect. 

Trump went head-to-head with CNN’s Jim Acosta early on. Before even asking his question, Acosta asked if Trump would call on a female reporter next.

“If you don’t mind, after I’m finished … if one of our female colleagues could go that would be great,” Acosta said. At that point in the conference, Trump had only called on male reporters for questions. 

“What does he mean by that? Explain,” Trump demanded.

Trump then cuts off Acosta, “What does it mean, no, what does it mean?”

“I think it would be great if a female reporter could ask you a question about this issue,” Acosta says in reference to the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. 

“I wouldn’t mind it at all. Wouldn’t make any difference to me,” Trump said. 

Acosta then addressed the elephant in the room, asking Trump why he always sides with the accused instead of the accuser. “Is that because of the many allegations that you’ve had against you over the years,” Acosta asked.  

Trump responded with a nonsensical string of sentence fragments, saying that women can also be accused of sexual assault, and he “didn’t think” victims of sexual assault are reluctant to come forward. 

The whole back and forth was incredibly awkward. Trump did call on a woman after Acosta, Hallie Jackson from NBC. Trump then proceeded to mock her for asking too many questions.

The conference comes a day ahead of a testimony from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding her allegations that Kanavaugh sexually abused her decades ago. Dr. Ford is now one of three women that have accused Kanavaugh of misconduct.

The grizzly bears are spared from hunting, for now. 

For as low as $600 per hunting permit, grizzly bears were scheduled to be legally hunted in Wyoming beginning on Sept. 1, making it the first such hunt in over four decades. But after first just temporarily suspending the hunt, a federal judge has now bucked attempts by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the Yellowstone-area grizzlies from the endangered species list.

The 48-page decision, however, wasn’t about hunting. It was about how this isolated population of some 700 bears requires influxes of fresh genetic material to remain biologically resilient in the years ahead. This detached bear population, Chief District Judge Dana Christensen determined, were too biologically vulnerable to be removed from the infamous list. 

“The real point is, the judge is correct. There is a real problem here,” Eric Hallerman, who researches the genetics of wildlife species at Virginia Tech, said in an interview. 

“I am so surprised that a judge is so well-versed in science that he sees this,” Hallerman said.

It doesn’t matter that there’s now a growing population of around 700 healthy bears in this area, which inhabit the unprotected areas in and around Yellowstone National Park. (Though, this is unquestionably a huge improvement from 1975, when biologists estimated a population of between 136 and 312 bears.)

The problem is that this population of grizzly bears is isolated. And when a population is isolated, genetic diversity is lost over time — it’s inevitable. Through a process called genetic drift — one of the foundations of evolution — certain genes in a population are passed down more than others.

This is especially the case in small populations as they “will lose genetic diversity just by chance as individuals carrying rare forms of a gene die or fail to reproduce,” Faith Walker, who researches wildlife genetics at Northern Arizona University, said over email. 

Even if there were considerably more than 700 grizzlies in the population, the bears would still fall victim to genetic drift.

SEE ALSO: Arctic ice hit one of its lowest points on record, but there’s another grim statistic

“It’s not really a numbers game,” Kristin Brzeski, a wildlife ecologist with an expertise in conservation genetics at Michigan Tech, said.

“You could have 1,000 of them, but eventually they will lose genetic variation due to drift if there’s no infusion of new genetic variability,” she said. 

“It makes it very hard for this population to keep projecting itself forward,” said Hallerman.

There’s an obvious fix, however: new bears from other populations, like the 900 bears living in and around Glacier National Park, mating with bears living in Wyoming. Yet, in the modern U.S., the wilderness is fragmented by cities, towns, highways, fences, and swaths of developed land. This puts a hitch in the natural flow of genes.

“You need animals to move and disperse so they can adapt to changing climates and habitats,” said Brzeski. “And that doesn’t exist — they can’t move to Glacier and back.”

There’s no question the climate is changing. On the more local scale, for bears, that means adapting to changes in their diet and the diseases they’re exposed to, said Brzeski.

“The big thing is to be able to adapt,” she said. “Things are changing.” 

The closest grizzly bear population to these isolated Yellowstone-area bears is Glacier, more formally known as the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. Yet as Christensen noted in his ruling, “there is no evidence of interbreeding” between these two populations — or any U.S. grizzly populations. The Glacier bears, at the closest points to the Yellowstone population, are still 70 miles away and divided by Interstate 90. 

A judge dissects the science

From the judge’s written decision, he appears disappointed, if not frustrated, with the federal government’s understanding of the science behind these grizzly populations.

Quoting from two grizzly population studies that were used by the Department of Fish and Wildlife Service (which oversees the Endangered Species Act) in its attempt to delist the bears, Christensen emphasized that “without an adequate gene pool, the Greater Yellowstone grizzly bear will be at increased risk of endangerment.”

In fact, the judge found that the federal agency “misread” this very research.

“The Service illogically cobbled together two studies to reach its determination that the Greater Yellowstone grizzly population is sufficiently diverse at this time,” Christensen wrote. “In doing so, it ignored the clear concerns expressed by the studies’ authors about long-term viability of an isolated grizzly population.”

Today, these 700 grizzles are clearly a conservation success story, as they’ve grown and been closely managed for decades under the watch of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. This scientific agency, led of the U.S. Geological Survey, did not have an expert available this week to comment on this story.

Yet, allowing this still-recovering population to be hunted almost certainly won’t help its cause. Hunts, though carefully managed and require permits, will further diminish the bears’ gradually dwindling genetic pool — even though they’re healthy today. 

“That doesn’t mean they can withstand anthropogenic gunshot fatalities on top of these other factors,” said Brzeski. 

What’s more, the unfolding circumstances in this Yellowstone-area bear population “don’t occur in a vacuum,” said Walker, noting that other grizzly bear ecosystems, like that around Glacier, also would benefit from a diverse gene flow from the Yellowstone bears. 

But how to exchange these genes remains a problem. Perhaps it can be done naturally, if the bears are given routes, or corridors, between their segmented populations.

“The jury’s still out on whether corridors can be promoted to let these grizzlies do their own match dot com,” said Walker. “Dispersal via such corridors doesn’t have to happen very often to have a big genetic impact.”

Over a decade ago, the federal government considered transporting in other wild grizzlies to buttress the gene pool in 2020, should the bears still not naturally accomplish this on their own.

For now, it appears these Yellowstone-area bears — protected again by the Endangered Species Act — are on their own genetically, fenced in by modern society. 

“This population is now on its own evolutionary trajectory,” said Hallerman.