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But if you’re ninty-five, does it help you feel younger? Probably not. AGNES, a sophisticated suit developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is designed to help people understand through personal experience what it’s like to get old:
AGNES simulates a gerontological atmosphere in retail, public transportation, and workplace environments. Braces and bands mimic joint stiffness and muscular fatigue. Leg straps create slower leg movements, and helmet attachments give the wearer an age-induced curved spine. Yellow eyeglasses make it difficult to read small print, and earplugs simulate difficulty with sounds and tones.
Video at the link.
Link -via Geekosystem | Project Website | Photo: MIT
Wrinkles
have found their match. Science has found a way to eliminate the onset
of wrinkles, muscle wasting and even cataracts (at least in mice):
It was done by "flushing out" retired cells that had stopped dividing. They accumulate naturally with age.
The scientists believe their findings could eventually "really have an impact" in the care of the elderly.
Experts said the results were "fascinating", but should be taken with a bit of caution.
The study, published in Nature, focused on what are known as "senescent cells". They stop dividing into new cells and have an important role in preventing tumours from progressing.
These cells are cleared out by the immune system, but their numbers build up with time. The researchers estimated that around 10% of cells are senescent in very old people.
Scientists at the Mayo Clinic, in the US, devised a way to kill all senescent cells in genetically engineered mice.
With four teenagers at home, I witness every day the strange thought processes they have. We’ve learned from recent research that the human brain undergoes immense changes during adolescence, which are often not finished until the mid-20s. National Geographic looks beyond that research into why the brain goes through such changes in adolescence, and finds it has to do with our evolutionary past. The risks teenagers take are in some ways very adaptive.
Let’s start with the teen’s love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected.
Seeking sensation isn’t necessarily impulsive. You might plan a sensation-seeking experience—a skydive or a fast drive—quite deliberately, as my son did. Impulsivity generally drops throughout life, starting at about age 10, but this love of the thrill peaks at around age 15. And although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful.
The entire article is available now in the October issue of National Geographic magazine. Link
(Image credit: Kitra Cahana)
Can
this be the scientific basis for vampires staying young forever? Researchers
at Stanford studying the effect of the age of blood donors have discovered
something quite interesting (in mice, anyhow):
Link (Photo: Rama/Wikimedia)Researchers at Stanford University just published a study in Nature that may give new hope to those looking to stop the effects of aging on the brain. The study found that when blood from a young mouse was injected into an older mouse, that older mouse enjoyed what could almost be termed a "rejuvenation effect": it began producing more neurons, firing more activity across synapses, and even suffered less inflammation.
Interestingly, performing the reverse, in which a young mouse was injected with blood (or, more accurately, plasma, which is the parts of blood without blood cells), resulted in young mice with distinctly elderly attributes--increased inflammation, a reduction in the production of new neurons, that kind of thing.
A new documentary is coming out that explores living longer and the age old pursuit of living forever. The most interesting feature of the documentary is this 101 year old British man who drinks several pints of beer a day and smokes just as much while he runs a marathon and works a full time job. Do you think it’s possible to live forever with the aid of technology in the near future? See video clips at the link.
A naked mole rat named Old Man was found dead last Thursday at his home at the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies in San Antonio, Texas. He was believed to be 32 years old. Old Man spent three decades assisting researchers in studying the process of aging. University of Texas at San Antonio physiology professor Rochelle Buffenstein knew him best.
Old Man was thought to be 11/2 to 2 years old in 1980 when he and 75 of his naked mole rat brethren were captured in a Kenyan sweet potato field — sweet potatoes being one of the mole rat’s favorite dishes.
Buffenstein brought him first to Cape Town University in South Africa, and then to City College of New York in Harlem. The pair arrived in San Antonio in 2007.
Naked mole rats are noted for their longevity with an average lifespan of 26 years. Other rodents live for two to four years. This makes them particularly useful for aging studies. Naked mole rats do not develop cancer. They develop plaque in their brains as they age like Alzheimer’s patients, but they do not display cognitive decline like humans do. Scientists are trying to find out why. Among the long-lived research subjects at the institute, Old Man stood out from the rest.
Even in his old age, Old Man remained an alpha male in his colony. Come feeding time, Old Man was served a special cereal that he loved and that Buffenstein imported from South Africa.
“He’d wrap his body around the bowl and eat until he was full,” she said. “The other rats would wait until he was finished before they ate.”
He also continued to mate with the colony’s breeding female right to the end. About the only outward sign of his advancing age was the sarcopenia, or loss of muscle mass, he developed about five years ago.
Tissue samples will be studied to determine the cause of death. Buffenstein is sure of one thing -it wasn’t cancer. Link -Thanks, Richard Marini!
(Image credit: Helen L. Montoya)
Researchers led by Harvard Medical School geneticist Ronald A. DePinho have managed to partially reverse the physical degeneration that results from aging:
[...] they achieved the milestone in aging science by engineering mice with a controllable telomerase gene. The telomerase enzyme maintains the protective caps called telomeres that shield the ends of chromosomes.
As humans age, low levels of telomerase are associated with progressive erosion of telomeres, which may then contribute to tissue degeneration and functional decline in the elderly. By creating mice with a telomerase switch, the researchers were able to generate prematurely aged mice. The switch allowed the scientists to find out whether reactivating telomerase in the animals would restore telomeres and mitigate the signs and symptoms of aging. The work showed a dramatic reversal of many aspects of aging, including reversal of brain disease and infertility.
Link via Gizmodo | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user woodly wonder works used under Creative Commons license
Olga Kotelko is an athlete. She holds 23 world records, mostly track records for the category of age 90 and up! Kotelko is 91 years old and runs, jumps, and throws a javelin in “masters” meets for those age 35 and over. Her success has led scientists to study her abilities in hopes of finding out how some bodies age at a predictable rate and others don’t.
Kotelko herself speaks often of the perils of getting carried away. “If you undertrain, you might not finish,” she says. “If you overtrain, you might not start.” But there’s some evidence that, in trying to find the sweet spot between staying in race shape and avoiding the medical tent, a lot of seniors athletes aren’t training hard enough — or at least, aren’t training the right way to maximally exploit what their body can still do.
Kotelko plans to continue competing and is looking forward to a new set of world records -when she reaches the “95 and over” age category. Link -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Patrik Giardino for The New York Times)
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Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have conducted tests on a compound that slowed age-related memory loss in mice. An enzyme called 11 beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 generates glucocorticoids, a class of hormones, that enhance memory formation:
The Edinburgh team showed that knocking out either one or both copies of the gene for this enzyme in mice preserved the animals’ memory into old age. To determine whether blocking the enzyme could improve memory in already aged animals, researchers then developed a compound designed to cross into the brain and inhibit the enzyme. Just 10 days of treatment in two-year-old mice–the maximum lifespan for a typical lab mouse–was enough to improve the animals’ performance on a test of spatial memory.
Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user jepoirrier used under Creative Commons license
New at the NeatoShop: magical breath sprays that will let you understand your mother instantly, help you communicate effectively with your father, accept the fact that you’re aging and even (gasp) understand modern art instantly. That is all. Carry on.
Why do we gain weight as we age? Don’t just blame all the bad stuff we eat … let’s blame nature, too. Darn those aging muscles:
In large part, that’s because we lose muscle cells as we age. When younger muscle cells get damaged, they’re quickly repaired. That’s not the case with older muscles, according to UCLA researcher and geriatrician Jonathan Wanagat. He says we don’t know why muscles literally shrink as we age. But there are a number of theories.
"I think one of the ones that have become increasingly interesting and popular is the idea that the stem cells in the muscle are not able to respond to damage or to aging the way they did when we were younger," says Wanagat. And if damaged muscle cells aren’t repaired, they sort of whittle away and die, he says. Decreases in growth hormone, testosterone and estrogen levels may also account for the loss of muscle fiber and the inability of tissue to replenish itself.
In addition, the muscle cells we’re left with are sort of worn out, according to Phillips. "If you think of muscles as being the energy powerhouse of our body, that’s where most of our calories are burned. And when we talk about metabolism, what we’re really talking about is how efficiently those powerhouse cells — the muscle cells of our body — burn the energy we bring in."
Energy is delivered to the body in the form of calories. And if you keep your caloric intake exactly the same as you get older, says Phillips, those unburned calories end up as fat.
Its sort of a one-two punch, says Wanagat. The energy powerhouse cells in muscles get damaged with age. That damage accumulates over time and, on top of that, the body’s ability to repair that damage also dwindles with aging.
Patti Neighmond of NPR has more: Link
A study published this month in the British Medical Journal reports that the survival of 1826 twins correlated with the “perceived age” of the subjects.
…perceived age was significantly associated with survival, even after adjustment for chronological age, sex, and rearing environment. Perceived age was still significantly associated with survival after further adjustment for physical and cognitive functioning. The likelihood that the older looking twin of the pair died first increased with increasing discordance in perceived age within the twin pair—that is, the bigger the difference in perceived age within the pair, the more likely that the older looking twin died first.
The photo embedded above is a computer-generated composite of 10 pairs of twins. “Left hand image represents twins who looked younger for their age (average perceived age 64, range 57-69) than those represented by right hand image (average perceived age 74, range 70-78).”
There are a variety of factors which may be instrumental in this relationship, including smoking status, body mass index, and sun exposure. These and other relevant factors are discussed at the link. The study was conducted in twins to minimize variables, but the conclusions may extend beyond twins to the general population.
Link to fulltext BMJ article, via the BBC.
In a recently-presented scientific paper, Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst from the University of Toronto’s Department of English and Department of Computer Science demonstrate changes in the vocabulary used in Agatha Christie’s later novels.
The professors digitized 14 Christie novels (and included two more available in the Gutenberg online text archive), and then, with the aid of textual-analysis software, analyzed them for “vocabulary size and richness,” an increase in repeated phrases (like “all sorts of”) and an uptick in indefinite words (“anything,” “something”) — linguistic indicators of the cognitive deficits typical of Alzheimer’s disease. The results were statistically significant; Christie’s lexicon decreased with age, while both the number of vague words she employed and phrases she repeated increased.
Further studies are planned for the works of P.D. James and Ross Macdonald.
Link, via Language Log, where there is an informed comment thread.
At 16 years of age and weighing only 16 pounds, Brooke Greenberg has a previously-undescribed condition which in many aspects seems to show an absence of aging of the body.
She is infantile in size, but she does not have ordinary dwarfism. She still has her baby teeth. Her cognition is that of a child. Her bone age is only that of a 10-year old.
Does Brooke hold the secret to the fountain of youth? Her physicians are hopeful that sorting out the mechanism for her persistent youthful characteristics might lead to more insights on the normal process of aging:
Brooke hasn’t aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa, says Brooke’s body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
Sorry to bring you the bad news, guys. Timothy Salthouse, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia studying cognitive aging, found that reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualization start to decline at age 27:
The first age at which there was any marked decline was at 27 in tests of brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability.
Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.
Professor Salthouse said his findings suggested "some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s."
Link – via Blue’s News
In this awesome animation titled "Tales of Mere Existence," Levni Yilmaz of Ingredient X tells us his theories and observations about youth and aging. One thing’s for sure, George Bernard Shaw nailed it on the head when he said that "Youth is wasted on the young."
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
