Can We Slow Down Aging?

For those of you living in the US, my lab will be featured in today's Nova Science Now episode "Can We Slow Down Aging?" on Channel 9 (KQED PBS TV) at 8 PM PST (repeated on Sunday Jan 30 at 7 PM).

vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas...

A government-funded study of more than 9,000 children found 6% had used a sunbed and in some areas of the country 40% of teenagers used them every week.

Goodness, even when I was a teenager (a long, long time ago), we already knew that using sunbeds will surely cause skin cancer. How come those kids don't know that? I'm scared to think that they might know it, but are still going to risk it for a pretty looking "healthy" tanned skin...

What's with this obsession of white people to have more tanned skin and with the people of color to look whiter? We should teach our kids to celebrate diversity and see beauty in every human being.

On a similar note: link

jumping increases bone density

In the meantime, the current state-of-the-science message about exercise and bone building may be that, silly as it sounds, the best exercise is to simply jump up and down, for as long as the downstairs neighbor will tolerate. “Jumping is great, if your bones are strong enough to begin with,” Dr. Barry says. “You probably don’t need to do a lot either.” (If you have any history of fractures or a family history of osteoporosis, check with a physician before jumping.) In studies in Japan, having mice jump up and land 40 times during a week increased their bone density significantly after 24 weeks, a gain they maintained by hopping up and down only about 20 or 30 times each week after that.

too cool not to share it

I posted it already on facebook, but not all of you use it, so here it comes again:
ScienceNOW news about oral sex in fruit bats and the original research article describing the study - do not forget to jump down to supplementary information and watch the attached S1 video.

Sponsored by Chinese tax payers :)

toxic parents

NYT has a piece on the subject that became an important part of my life recently: dealing with toxic parents.

My own mother can be pretty bad at times, but she is really nothing compared to Anil's mother, who is by far the most abusive person that I have ever met in my life. Anil is a wonderful person and deserves all the happiness in the world, so it breaks my heart to see him sacrifice his life for his crazy (literally) mother. It also saddens me that I do not know how to help him. Sometimes life can be frustrating and unfair.

Newsweek on aging

Newsweek has this nice short piece on aging research. One of the people interview there is my boss :) It feels good to know that other people care about research that we are doing.

Botox for eyelashes

The very same company that introduced Botox into plastic surgery clinics, now hopes to make even more money with Latisse, an eyelash-extending drug/cosmetic.

i love Nikon :)

This is simply mind-blowing. Nikon released a new SLR camera (D90) that can record video!

If I would be buying a camera today, Nikon D90 would undoubtfully be my first (and only) choice.

Watermelon is a new Viagra

Apparently, eating watermelon exerts the same relaxing effect on our blood vessels as Viagra. The blood vessel relaxation fascilitates flow of the blood to the periferial tissues of our bodies, which can potentiate sensual experiences during a sexual act. From now on, I'm going to include watermelon in the menu of all my romantic dinners and breakfasts :)

thou shalt not carry out morally dubious scientific experiments

I guess this is not the last attempt of Catholic Church to discourage even further number of people to itself (read more on BBC News page):

The Vatican has brought up to date the traditional seven deadly sins by adding seven modern mortal sins it claims are becoming prevalent in what it calls an era of "unstoppable globalisation".

Those newly risking eternal punishment include drug pushers, the obscenely wealthy, and scientists who manipulate human genes. So "thou shalt not carry out morally dubious scientific experiments" or "thou shalt not pollute the earth" might one day be added to the Ten Commandments.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell".

Live long and well

How would you feel about extending your lifespan expectancy by 14 years? According to the EPIC study it is relatively easy. It's enough that you won't smoke, you will exercise regularly, you will drink only moderate amounts of alcohol and you will eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day.

If you would like to know how this study was done, read this article: Combined Impact of Health Behaviours and Mortality in Men and Women: The EPIC-Norfolk Prospective Population Study

bobaraba craze

While females in Western countries use a variety of treatments to make their bottoms look skinny, women in certain parts of Africa use treatments that are supposed to have an opposite effect. All that thanks to a hit song Bobaraba, which means "big bottom" in the local Djoula language (see BBC story for details).

Of course the song is already on youtube:

High-heels and sex life

BBC reports this hilarious research study that proves that wearing high-heels can boost your sex life as a result of improving your pelvic floor muscles. How great that I love high-heels.

The Long Now Foundation

I just got the following email from The Long Now Foundation. I found it amazing, so I thought that I will share it with you here:

Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster's job is not to predict outcomes, but to map the "cone of uncertainty" on a subject. Where are the edges of what might happen? (Uncertainty is cone-shaped because it expands as you project further into the future--- next decade has more surprises in store than next week.)

Rule: Wild cards sensitize us to surprise, and they push the edges of the cone out further. You can call weird imaginings a wild card and not be ridiculed. Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

Rule: Change is never linear. Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in "S" curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change. "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance."

"Inflection points are tiptoeing past us all the time." He saw one at the DARPA Grand Challenge race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert in 2004 and 2005. In 2004 no cars finished the race, and only four got off the starting line. In 2005, all 23 cars started and five finished.

Rule: Look for indicators- things that don't fit. At the same time the robot cars were triumphing in the desert, 108 human-driven cars piled into one another in the fog on a nearby freeway. A survey of owners of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners showed that 2/3 of owners give the machine a personal name, and 1/3 take it with them on vacations.

Rule: Look back twice as far. Every decade lately there's a new technology that sets the landscape. In the 1980s, microprocessors made a processing decade that culminated in personal computers. In the 1990s it was the laser that made for communication bandwidth and an access decade culminating in the World Wide Web. In the 2000s cheap sensors are making an interaction decade culminating in a robot takeoff. The Web will soon be made largely of machines communicating with each other.

Rule: Cherish failure. Preferably other people's. We fail our way into the future. Silicon Valley is brilliant at this. Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that.

Rule: Be indifferent. Don't confuse the desired with the likely. Christian end-time enthusiasts have been wrong for 2,000 years.

Rule: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often.

Rule: Embrace uncertainty.

Saffo ended with a photo he took of a jar by the cash register in a coffee shop in San Francisco. The handwritten note on the jar read, "If you fear change, leave it in here."

More in Harvard Business Review

bike, sex, privacy

As everybody knows I am in love with my bike, but still BBC reports a story of somebody who clearly must love his bike even more than I do mine... Read it, it's absolutely hilarious: link

intelligence burried in hips

Recent paper from "Evolution and Human Behaviour" demonstrates that women with curvy figures are brighter than their slim counterparts and produce more intelligent offspring (These results are based on the study including 16,000 women and girls, which measured their performance on cognitive tests). Here is link to BBC article about this issue.

Viva la pasta!

necessity is the mother of invention

The world works like this: some lazy guy does not feel like pushing the rock up the hill, so he invents a wheel (domesticates a horse or whatever); other guy is married to Xanthippe that makes him wash dishes, so he invents a dishwasher; yet another guy can not stand hearing his mother/wife complaining about him never making his bed in the morning, so he becomes a scientists and using tax payers money he demonstrates that leaving your bed unmade is actually beneficial for your health: link

FIAT

Here is an amazing story about a theft of two cows and two goats using... Fiat Uno. That reminds me of a story from my home country. Apparently, in the 70's in Polish TV there was a commercial of Fiat 125p, in which they showed that 16 people can fit into this car... I am not sure which of the two is a bigger achievement - 2 cows and 2 goats in Uno or 16 people in 125p?

science and creationism

Homer Jacobson, an author of 1955 paper called “Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life”, recently retracted his paper as he realized that is used by creationists as a scientific proof that life could not have started on earth without divine intervention.

A full story in NYT:
"The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith."

We live in a strange world, where people can take whatever you published and interpret it as it suits them, even when it goes against your own belives.

Poles in Britain

NYT has a very interesting article about Polish work-related immigration to Great Britain and its influence on British economy. It seems that Britain has greatly benefited from the presence of large population of Polish people not only economically but also culinary... ;-)
Ah, I am dreaming about Delicje, Tyskie, Zywiec, pierogi z kapusta i grzybami, placki ziemniaczane...