Longevity

Prepare for Aging or Prepare for Living?

This entry was posted in Biology Economics Longevity on by

I know my choice!

Nevertheless, the belief that aging is an immutable process, programmed by evolution, is now known to be wrong. In recent decades, our knowledge of how, why, and when aging processes take place has progressed so much that many scientists now believe that this line of research, if sufficently promoted, could benefit people alive today.Indeed, the science of aging has the potential to do what no drug, surgical procedure, or behavior modification can do-extend our years of youthful vigor and simultaneously postpone all the costly, disabling, and lethal conditions expressed at later ages.

These writers are on the modest end of gerontology research but even the programs they propose will do more to solve the problems with health care systems here and abroad than all the quibbling going on over how to get someone else to pay for your health care costs. Let’s earn the longevity dividend.

Read the rest here.

Tomorrow is Arriving Quickly

This entry was posted in Biology Health Care Longevity Technology on by

Susan Crawford already has a copy of Ray Kurzweil’s new book The Singularity is Near. I’m a bit jealous.
Readers of science fiction and tech geeks are already familiar with the concept of the singularity. The rest of you may want to catch up a bit by taking a quick read of this Wikipedia article.
Luckily, it looks like Crawford will be posting a bit as she reads and it looks like there will be plenty to contemplate and discuss:

Kurzweil focuses on complexity, noting that evolution produces increasing order, and that technology can extend evolution by building ever-more-efficiently on this order. Very quick feedback loops are all around us, pushing the rate of technological change along and producing faster and smaller devices. Meanwhile, biological evolution continues, but at such a slow rate that it hardly matters.
He boldly predicts that computers as we know them will disappear by the end of this decade, to be replaced by virtual reality environments. No more offices by 2020. He suggests it’s time to invest in tiny sensors and natural language search engines that can topple Google.

As with all such futuristic discussions things are never quite as predicted however as Crawford notes:

Even if he’s only half right (or even less than half right), Kurzweil’s work suggests that it’s a good time to be alive and interested in the effect of technology on human beings.

Which is one good reason I’d like to see this program be dramatically successful. It really is fun to be alive!
Sadly, those of us not getting review copies will not get to see this book until after it’s September 22 release date.

About Those Sugars You Are Eating

This entry was posted in Biology Health Care Longevity on by

Don’t:

I take a couple of nuts as Kenyon instantly shifts the topic — she does that often — and explains to me that she has totally changed her diet, eliminating most sugars, including those found in processed flour. Hence the peanuts. An experiment with her tiny worms is responsible, she says; that experiment proved that sugar switches on a genetic sequence that increases the amount of insulin produced by an organism, which in turn causes the body to demand more sugar. This not only adds flab to the waistline, if worms had a waistline, but also increases damage to cells in the body, speeding up the slow degradation of cells that contributes to aging.

Via Steeph.