ageing
edyong | February 22, 2010An assortment of tree-living mammals
In The Descent of Man, Darwin talked about the benefits of life among the treetops, citing the "power of quickly climbing trees, so as to escape from enemies". Around 140 years later, these benefits have been confirmed by Milena Shattuck and Scott Williams from the University of Illinois.
By looking at 776 species of mammals, they have found that on average, tree-dwellers live longer than their similarly sized land-lubbing counterparts. Animals that spend only part of their time in trees have lifespans that either lie somewhere between the two extremes or…
edyong | December 2, 2009If I say the phrases 'anti-ageing' and 'nutritional balance' to you, you'd probably think of the pages of quack websites selling untested supplements than the pages of Nature. And yet this week's issue has a study that actually looks at these issues with scientific rigour. It shows that, at least for fruit flies, eating a diet with just the right balance of nutrients can lengthen life without the pesky drawback of producing fewer offspring.
Despite the claims of the cosmetic and nutritional industries, chemicals or techniques that slow the ageing process are few and far between. We're a long…
edyong | September 5, 2009I was browsing a copy of New Scientist in the supermarket today and realised that I actually have a feature in it, having completely forgotten that it was coming out this week!
This one's on the fate of the oldest old - people aged 100 or over. This is one of the fastest rising demographics in the world and their numbers will surely swell even further with ageing populations and advances in modern medicine. The feature looks at what happens when people reach these extreme ages and what happens to them when they do.
It ended up being surprisingly optimistic. Far from being a helpless drain on…
edyong | July 8, 2009It's 1964, and a group of Canadian scientists had sailed across the Pacific to Easter Island in order to study the health of the isolated local population. Working below the gaze of the island's famous statues, they collected a variety of soil samples and other biological material, unaware that one of these would yield an unexpected treasure. It contained a bacterium that secreted a new antibiotic, one that proved to be a potent anti-fungal chemical. The compound was named rapamycin after the traditional name of its island source - Rapa Nui.
Skip forward 35 years and rapamycin has made a…
edyong | January 26, 2009People diet for many reasons - to fit into clothes, to look more attractive, or for the sake of their health. But to improve their memory? It's an interesting idea, and one that's been given fresh support by Veronica Witte and colleagues from the University of Munster in Germany.
Witte found that elderly people who slash the calories in their diet by 30% were better able to remember lists of words than people who stuck to their normal routine. It's the first experiment to show that cutting calories can improve human memory at an age when declining memory is par for the course.
The benefits…