Health
Combining Biochemical Pathways to Longevity: Toward a Recipe for the Youth Pill
From studies in rodents, we now know dozens of treatments that extend life span modestly.
Oct 8, 2013
Column
Josh Mitteldorf
Aging & evolutionary biology
Josh Mitteldorf is best known for promoting the theory that aging is not “wearing out” but rather an evolved program that limits lifespan. The surprising fact that our bodies are genetically programmed to age and to die offers an enormous opportunity for medical intervention. He began blogging about aging on this site in 2012. His guidance for a long life is at AgingAdvice.org. His two books on aging are available at Amazon and elsewhere.
Mitteldorf’s PhD is in astrophysics. Since about 2020, he has taken up a new challenge as curator and critic of science on the fringe, writing about promising science that the science establishment has unjustly neglected.
In other areas of life, Mitteldorf’s two daughters were among the first girls to be adopted from China in the 1980s. He has taught a weekly yoga class for fifty years. He is an avid amateur musician, playing piano in chamber groups, French horn in community orchestras. Follow his other writing at mitteldorf.substack.com, and listen to his poetry on YouTube.
Search Josh Mitteldorf’s columns only
Results stay inside this archive — not the rest of Science Blog.
Health
How we get old: 4 Processes of Active Self-Destruction
Last week, I wrote that the new view frames aging as an active process in which the body attacks its own healthy tissues.
Oct 1, 2013
Health
Aging and Life Extension: Unexpected Lessons from Evolution
This is the text of a brief presentation that I delivered yesterday in DC at a symposium on radical life extension.
Sep 23, 2013
Health
Creative Deprivation: How to Get Less from Your Food
When it comes to calories, inefficiency is the name of the game.
Sep 18, 2013
Health
Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence - Report from SENS-6
This year and last year, two parallel studies of caloric restriction in rhesus monkeys reported their results.
Sep 9, 2013
Health
New Take on Free Radicals
One of the oldest and best-established theories of aging holds that we age because of oxidative damage.
Sep 2, 2013
Social Sciences
Natural Selection has Rewarded those who Contribute to the Community with Long Life
New research supports a thesis that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside - and that feeling itself is good for our health and longevity.
Aug 26, 2013
Health
Meditation and Longevity
This is just one of the pitfalls in trying to scientifically evaluate claims about meditation and life expectancy.
Aug 13, 2013
Health
How does Aspirin Work?
Low-dose daily aspirin was an idea born in the 1960s, based on the insight that aspirin prevents blood clots and blood clots are the proximate cause of heart attacks and stroke.
Aug 6, 2013
Health
Osteo Options
How do you tell if an osteoporosis treatment is working? Stress-testing your femur until it breaks is not an option most patients would accept.
Jul 30, 2013
Life
Evolution of Evolution, and Evolution of Death
Evolution has bootstrapped its own process, creating the conditions that lead to more efficient evolution.
Jul 22, 2013
Life
E squared – the Evolution of Evolution
It may not surprise you to hear that for all standard computer languages, this procedure won’t work at all.
Jul 16, 2013