>>A Blog About the Science and Technology of Living Forever

If you compare the annual death rates among two groups of men aged 50 to 70, the data shows men who work longer live longer. Death rates of those still working are roughly half that of the death rates of men the same age who are fully retired.What’s going on here? I thought retirement was supposed to be good for you! (By the way, the study showed that the effect was also there for women, but it was less pronounced.) The results shown on this chart immediately beg the question: Is this causation (working actually causes or enables you to live longer) or correlation (there’s no direct causal relationship). Here’s one possible explanation that would weigh in on the correlation side: People who were on disability benefits and whose health was compromised were excluded from both groups. Studies – as well as anecdotal evidence — suggests that engagement with life is what helps prolong life. This is what the authors of the book Super You also concluded. People get engagement with life from working longer. However, the can also get it from taking up causes, volunteering, hobbies, and contributing to family and community. It all comes down to “having a purpose”, said the Super You authors, which includes Andy Walker and Kay Walker. Finding powerful reasons for getting up in the morning in my retirement years is as important as my financial planning. My prior blog post, Can’t Retire Yet? Don’t Despair, suggests that we may need to work a little in our retirement years to make ends meet. In this case, I won’t be bitter–working may be keeping me alive! The jury is still out on the question of whether working might increase your longevity. What’s your take on...

A typical person lives 28,835 days until they meet their end and their cremated ashes or body is returned to the earth. Each one of us knows what a day (24 hours) feels like, and how long it takes, and how variable any day can feel. But 28,835 days is just a number—unless you count it out in jelly beans. Here’s some cool jelly bean facts from The Singularity Hub 5,475 jelly beans takes us to 15 years old the remaining 23,360 jelly beans sleeping, working, preparing or eating food, watching TV, doing chores, and commuting. beyond that, we have 2,740 days to be creative and for leisure time The site also says: “Modern medicine has added over 11,000 jelly beans since the turn of the last century. This varies globally, but US life expectancy was 47.3 in 1900 and 78.7 in 2010.” Have a look ay this great video that helps you visualize your life in jellybeans. (Thanks to Singularity...

HARRY ROSEN IS 103. He lives alone in a studio apartment on West 57th Street in Manhattan. His hearing has declined and he a bit far-sighted but his mind is as sharp as most men half his age. Still, he doesn’t remember the last evening he didn’t go out for dinner at one of the city’s top-rated restaurants. It’s been too many years. People say Harry doesn’t look a day over 90, and indeed when people ask him his age, he tells them he is 90. He’s never had a major operation and as far as he knows there is nothing wrong with him. And yes, every single afternoon Harry dresses up in one of his fine business suits, grabs his satchel, and heads out to hail a cab to one of his favorite dining establishments. He eats alone but the waiters always know who he is and patrons at nearby tables almost always strike up a conversation with him. Twice a week Harry goes to David Burke’s Townhouse on East 61st Street where a server greets him, escorts him to his usual corner table, brings him a glass of chardonnay and his usual appetizer of raw salmon and tuna. Harry was recently profiled in The New York Times.  The article makes for fascinating reading, the writer refers to Harry as the city’s “oldest foodie,” but there are no direct refers to any of his longevity secrets. Yet, reading through the lines, I’ve come up with a list of Harry Rosen’s 10 longevity secrets, which follows: Harry always orders fish. For a non-Eskimo he has unusually high levels of omega-3 fats in his diet. His omega-3/omega-6 ratio must be highly favorable to reducing any risk of heart disease or dementia. Harry’s daily routine never varies–this keeps his life stress free....

If you are a man and you want to live longer the answer, it seems, is simple.  A recent study by German experts revealed that men who marry younger women enhance their chances of longevity. So, if you are a man go ahead and shack up with a woman 15-17 years less your senior.  It my mean a longer lifespan and healthier future for you! The analysis was conducted by a research group at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. The researchers looked at the deaths of the entire population of Denmark between 1990 and 2005. Danish men who marry women much younger than them live longer. WHY? One hypothesis that explains the increased rate of longevity is natural selection. It is possible that younger women choose healthier, better maintained older men as their marriage mates. Therefore, it is these types of men who are naturally taking care of their health and as such have a better chance of living longer. A second idea presents the notion that many men with considerably younger wives are rich. Because of their financial means, these men enjoy a more comfortable lifestyle than average men, i.e. they have no worries about money, better access to regular medical checks, health cures, leisure, etc. All these factors contribute to a long life span. Another theory, suggested by Sven Drefahl of the Max Planck Institute, points to the fact that a younger woman will care for a man better and therefore he will live longer. A younger spouse may also have a beneficial psychological effect on the older partner and provide them with better care in old age. What about women? The funny thing is the same results bode useless to our female friends.  Women who marry men...

Kay Svela, who writes the homemaking blog Little Miss Wife, chimes in on the inequity between the genders on living longer in marriage. She explains why men live longer when they are married and how their wives can too. Read more: Why men do better when they are...

“Our genes harbor many secrets to a long and healthy life. And now scientists are beginning to uncover them. IN A FIELD historically marred by exaggerated claims and dubious entrepreneurs hawking unproven elixirs, scientists studying longevity have begun using powerful genomic technologies, basic molecular research, and, most important, data on small, genetically isolated communities of people to gain increased insight into the maladies of old age and how they might be avoided. In Calabria, Ecuador, Hawaii, and even in the Bronx, studies are turning up molecules and chemical pathways that may ultimately help everyone reach an advanced age in good, even vibrant, health.” National Geographic’s May 2013 issue contains one of the most thoroughly researched and interesting articles on longevity ever published. We highly recommend you read this article Also, because National Geographic’s editors couldn’t decide what race of baby to put on the cover and ended up publishing several versions, they also created a FACEBOOK app that lets you put your own face on a National Geographic cover. We tried it out and it works great! (see below)   If you’d like to try this, click...

Researchers in Switzerland have discovered the impact of a longevity gene in mice which is crucial in unveiling the secrets of aging. Their findings led to an experiment that extended the life-span of worms by 60% through use of basic antibiotics.

If you’re not willing to send electrical shocks through your brain – “mild” as they might be – to become smarter, here’s a much gentler option: play sounds while you sleep. Researchers have found that “carefully timed” sounds, like the rise and fall of waves washing against the shore, can help people remember things that they learned the previous day. I predict sales of white noise machines to increase in the near future. In the human brain a network of neurons are often activated together. The collective rise and fall of activity of the network produces oscillations, the lines we see in an EEG. At different times the brain oscillates at different frequencies. During sleep the brain produces slow, <1 Hz oscillations – hence the term “slow-wave sleep” – and these oscillations are thought to be important for consolidating memories. The idea that the scientists at the University of Tübingen in Germany wanted to test was whether or not auditory stimulation that boosted the slow-wave oscillations also boosted memory. The study included 11 people who learned word associations right before they went to bed. Their word association memory was tested before they went to sleep and then again the following day. While they slept, they were played short durations of pink noise, a hissing sound similar to white noise. Importantly, the pink noise sounds were timed to the sleeping person’s “slow-wave” brain oscillations. When the individuals received the pink noise stimulation they were able to remember twice as many word associations than without the stimulation. When they repeated the experiment with pink noise that was not synchronized to the slow-waves, they saw no improvement in memory. Monitoring the brain waves with EEG, the researchers also saw that the sound stimuli actually boosted the ongoing slow-wave oscillations. This led the researchers...

Chuck Lorre’s vanity card #411 from the Big Bang Theory

Americans will die sooner than some cultures in the world. So here are five things you can do to live longer

Are there limits on human longevity? Sure. Few people will make it past a hundred years of age in the environment of today’s medical technology – but today is today, and the technology of tomorrow will be a different story. If you want to talk about longevity and mortality rates, you have to qualify your position by stating what sort of applied biotechnologies are available. Longevity is a function of the quality and type of medicine that is available across a life span. It so happens that most of the advances in medicine achieved over the course of human history, the vast majority of which have occurred in the past fifty years, have solved problems that killed people early in life. Infectious disease, for example, is controlled to a degree that would have been thought utopian in the squalor of Victorian England. The things that kill older people are a harder set of challenges: great progress has been made in reducing mortality from heart disease in the past few decades, for example, but that is just one late stage consequence of the complex array of biochemical processes that we call aging. The point of this discussion? It is that tremendous progress in medicine, including the defeat or taming of many varied causes of death and disability, has not greatly lengthened the maximum human life span as experienced in practice. Read the rest of this article...

Regular aspirin use significantly reduced risk of cancer, metastasis and cancer mortality, findings from the largest-ever analyses exploring the drug’s effects on cancer indicate. Overall, aspirin users had a 38% reduced risk of colorectal and other gastrointestinal cancers compared with nonusers. Mortality risk was 15% lower and metastasis was 35% to 40% lower among regular aspirin users. Aspirin use also reduced risk for major vascular events, but these benefits were initially offset by an increased risk for major bleeding events. Both of these affects diminished over time, however, leaving only a reduced risk for cancer after three years, Peter M. Rothwell, FMedSci, of the University of Oxford in England, and colleagues reported in three studies published online in Lancet and Lancet Oncology. “In view of the very low rates of vascular events in recent and ongoing trials of aspirin in primary prevention, prevention of cancer could become the main justification for aspirin use in this setting, although more research is required to identify which individuals are likely to benefit most,” they wrote. Read the complete article and see a video at The Clinical...

One dose of the hallucinogenic drug LSD could help alcoholics give up drinking, according to an analysis of studies performed in the 1960s. A study, presented in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, looked at data from six trials and more than 500 patients. It said there was a “significant beneficial effect” on alcohol abuse, which lasted several months after the drug was taken. An expert said this was “as good as anything we’ve got”. LSD is a class A drug in the UK and is one of the most powerful hallucinogens ever identified. It appears to work by blocking a chemical in the brain, serotonin, which controls functions including perception, behaviour, hunger and mood. Benefit Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology analysed earlier studies on the drug between 1966 and 1970. Patients were all taking part in alcohol treatment programmes, but some were given a single dose of LSD of between 210 and 800 micrograms. For the group of patients taking LSD, 59% showed reduced levels of alcohol misuse compared with 38% in the other group. This effect was maintained six months after taking the hallucinogen, but it disappeared after a year. Those taking LSD also reported higher levels of abstinence. The report’s authors, Teri Krebs and Pal-Orjan Johansen, said: “A single dose of LSD has a significant beneficial effect on alcohol misuse.” They suggested that more regular doses might lead to a sustained benefit. “Given the evidence for a beneficial effect of LSD on alcoholism, it is puzzling why this treatment approach has been largely overlooked,” they added. Prof David Nutt, who was sacked as the UK government’s drugs adviser, has previously called for the laws around illegal drugs to be relaxed to enable more research. He said: “Curing alcohol dependency requires...

Colon cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death among men and women in the United States, but some colon cancers can be prevented with regular testing. March is National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, so there couldn’t be a better time to learn the facts about colon cancer and get tested. It could save your life. Did you know that the rate of colorectal cancer (commonly known as colon cancer) has been decreasing for most of the past two decades? One reason is because more people are getting screened for this disease, which is preventable, treatable and beatable. Colon cancer, which almost always starts with a polyp — a small growth on the lining of the colon or rectum — does not usually cause symptoms until it is in a more advanced stage. Colon cancer screening can find and remove these growths before they turn into cancer. But, many people are not getting the tests that could save their lives — perhaps because the procedure seems embarrassing. But colon cancer screening tests aren’t that bad. Two different types of screening tests are available — those that find cancer and polyps and those that mainly find cancer and are less likely to find polyps. Finding and removing polyps before they become cancerous stops colon cancer before it starts. Talk to your doctor about which test is right for you. Colonoscopy is often recommended because it looks at the entire colon, and because if a polyp is found, it can be removed during the procedure. Colonoscopy can be somewhat uncomfortable, but it is not painful. If you are 50 or older, the American Cancer Society recommends that you talk to your doctor about getting tested, even if you have no symptoms of the disease. And...

A link between memory loss and a high calorie diet has been suggested by researchers in the US. They were investigating mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which can be an early sign of dementia. Research, presented at a conference, claimed a high calorie diet was linked to having twice the risk of MCI, compared with a low calorie diet. Alzheimer’s Research UK said a healthy lifestyle was known to help protect against dementia. Mild cognitive impairment has become increasingly interesting to researchers as it may help predict who will go on to develop dementia, such as Alzheimer’s. A team at the Mayo Clinic in the US has investigated the effect of diet in 1,233 people aged between 70 and 89. None had dementia, but 163 were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. Doubling The patients were divided into low calorie intake (600 to 1,526 calories a day), middle (1,526 to 2,142.5) and high (2,142.5 to 6,000) and the incidence of mild cognitive impairment was compared. The results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. They showed no difference in the low and middle groups, however, the high intake group had more than double the incidence of MCI. Researcher Dr Yonas Geda said: “We observed a dose-response pattern which simply means; the higher the amount of calories consumed each day, the higher the risk of MCI.” The study cannot say that a high calorie diet causes MCI, people who are cognitively impaired could end up eating more food or there could be another factor involved which increases the risk of both. It has also not yet been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. But Dr Geda did suggest there was potential for therapy: “Cutting calories and eating foods that make up a...

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The following is a short excerpt from David Brin’s brilliant essay, “Do We Really Want Immortality?” A number of eminent writers like Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson and Gregory Benford have speculated on possible consequences, should Mister G. Reaper ever be forced to hang up his scythe and seek other employment. For example, if the Death Barrier comes crashing down, will we be able to keep shoehorning new humans into a world already crowded with earlier generations? Or else, as envisioned by author John Varley, might such a breakthrough demand draconian population-control measures, limiting each person to one direct heir per lifespan? What if overcoming death proves expensive? Shall we return to the ancient belief, common in some cultures, that immortality is reserved for the rich and mighty? Nancy Kress has written books that vividly foresee a time when the teeming poor resent rich immortals. In contrast, author Joe Haldeman suggested simple rules of social engineering that may help keep such a prize within reach by all. More people could wind up dying by violence and accidents than old age. Might we then start to hunker down in our homes, preserving our long-but-frail lives by avoiding all risk? Or would ennui drive the long-lived to seek new thrills, like extreme sports, bringing death back out of retirement in order to add spice to an otherwise-dull eternity? To read Brin’s essay, click here. David Brin, a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth, The Postman, and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War, is a 2010 Fellow of the IEET. Brin is known as a leading commentator on modern technological, social, and political trends. His nonfiction book The Transparent Society won the Freedom of Speech Award from the American Library Association. Brin’s most recent novel, Kiln People, explores...

It seems like every year another country’s lifestyle is touted as the new magic bullet to cure us of obesity, heart disease, and premature death: For an unclogged heart, herd goats and down olive oil like a Mediterranean. Avoid breast cancer and live to 100 by dining on tofu Japanese-style. Stay as happy as Norwegians by hunting elk and foraging for cowberries. The places we’re usually told to emulate are known as Blue Zones or Cold Spots. Blue Zones were pinpointed by explorer Dan Buettner and a team of longevity researchers and are described in his book “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.” They’re areas in Italy, Japan, Greece, California, and Costa Rica where the people have traditionally stayed healthy and active to age 100 or older. Similarly, Cold Spots, as identified by integrative medicine physician Daphne Miller, M.D., author of “The Jungle Effect,” are five areas in Mexico, Iceland, Japan, Greece, and Cameroon with low rates of “Western” ailments like heart disease, depression, and certain cancers. To read the rest of this article, click...

Dan Buettner is an amazing person. In 1987, he rode his bicycle 15,500 miles from Alaska to  Argentina, the first of three world records for endurance bicycling. The last of these became the subject of an Emmy-winning PBS documentary co-produced by Buettner and a book he authored, Afratrek: A Journey by Bicycle through Africa. More recently, Buettner is known for his exploration and study of “blue zones,” a term he coined for areas of the world where people live extraordinary long and healthy lives. In April 2008, Buettner released a book on his findings, The Blue Zone: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, through National Geographic Books. In the above video, Buettner discusses why most people are unable to maintain healthy lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise. And he talks about a program he initiated in  the small town of Albert Lea, Minnesota, that resulted in lasting changes that actually increased the life expectancy of its citizens by 3.2 years. Well worth watching if you are at all interested in living a longer life!...

America’s population of centenarians – already the largest in the world – has roughly doubled in the past 20 years to around 72,000 and is projected to at least double again by 2020, perhaps even increase seven-fold, according to the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau estimates there were 71,991 centenarians as of Dec. 1, up from 37,306 two decades earlier. While predicting longevity and population growth is difficult, the census’ low-end estimate for 2050 is 265,000 centenarians; its highest projection puts the number at 4.2 million. “They have been the fastest-growing segment of our population in terms of age,” said Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University. The rising number of centenarians is not just a byproduct of the nation’s growing population – they make up a bigger chunk of it. In 1990, about 15 in every 100,000 Americans had reached 100; in 2010, it was more than 23 per 100,000, according to census figures. Perls said the rise in 100-year-olds is attributed largely to better medical care and the dramatic drop in childhood-mortality rates since the early 1900s. Centenarians also have good genes on their side, he said, and have made common-sense health decisions, such as not smoking and keeping their weight down. “It’s very clearly a combination of genes and environment,” Perls said. The Social Security Administration says just under 1 percent of people born in 1910 survived to their 100th birthday. Some have speculated that as many as half of girls born today could live to 100. Those who work with people 100 and above say the oldest Americans are living much healthier lives. A good number still live independently and remain active, their minds still sharp and their bodies basically sound. They have generally managed...

A Swedish study of more than 4,000 obese people treated at 500 health care centers and surgery departments found that those who had weight-loss surgery were less likely to subsequently suffer a heart attack than those treated with routine care such as advice on lifestyle changes. About half the patients had bariatric or weight-loss surgeries, most often stomach stapling. “Compared with usual care, bariatric surgery was associated with reduced number of cardiovascular deaths and lower incidence of cardiovascular events in obese adults,” wrote lead researcher Lars Sjostrom at the University of Gothenburg. The patents were followed for more than a decade, on average. Among the findings, researchers found that following surgery, patients were 30 percent less likely to have a first-time heart attack or stroke than non-surgery patients. And they were half as likely to die from it. You can read more about this study by clicking...

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 3 – Mice bred to age too quickly seemed to have sipped from the fountain of youth after scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine injected them with stem cell-like progenitor cells derived from the muscle of young, healthy animals. Instead of becoming infirm and dying early as untreated mice did, animals that got the stem/progenitor cells improved their health and lived two to three times longer than expected, according to findings published in the Jan. 3 edition of Nature Communications. Previous research has revealed stem cell dysfunction, such as poor replication and differentiation, in a variety of tissues in old age, but it’s not been clear whether that loss of function contributed to the aging process or was a result of it, explained senior investigators Johnny Huard, Ph.D., and Laura Niedernhofer, M.D., Ph.D. Dr. Huard is professor in the Departments of Orthopaedic Surgery and of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Pitt School of Medicine, and director of the Stem Cell Research Center at Pitt and Children’s Hospital of PIttsburgh of UPMC. Dr. Niedernhofer is associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI). “Our experiments showed that mice that have progeria, a disorder of premature aging, were healthier and lived longer after an injection of stem cells from young, healthy animals,” Dr. Niedernhofer said. “That tells us that stem cell dysfunction is a cause of the changes we see with aging.” Their team examined a stem/progenitor cell population derived from the muscle of progeria mice and found that compared to those from normal rodents, the cells were fewer in number, did not replicate as often, didn’t differentiate as readily into specialized cells and were impaired in their ability to regenerate damaged muscle....