Aging Matters
The idea is to interrupt your workday periodically and do a full minute of vigorous exercise. Six times a day would be awesome. I’m working toward once an hour. Here’s the rationale: Exercise is the single most important thing we can do to improve our quality of life, keep our enthusiasm up, and banish depression. … Read more
A lot of people still try to understand aging as a kind of accumulated damage, or wear-and-tear. Theories of oxidative damage are one poular version, and anti-oxidants have been promoted as a remedy for aging by people who should know better. One trouble with the damage theories is the of things that increase damage, but … Read more
Demography is the statistical study of population age structures, or the study of aging and fertility through population statistics. It’s not deep math, but it definitely attracts people who love numbers. The world’s formost demographer is James Vaupel, an American who has been working at the Max Planck Inst in Germany most of his career. … Read more
This week, I report on three items from the biomedical literature: 1) Creating pluripotent stem cells may be much easier than we thought. 2) Direct evidence that cancer is not a function of a cell gone rogue, but rather a systemic disease, dependent on cellular environment and chemical context. 3) Nailing the coffin of the … Read more