Playing Music Can Offset Aging Process
Photo: Stilfehler (CC)
Via ScienceDaily:
Age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training, according to a new study from Northwestern University.
The study is the first to provide biological evidence that lifelong musical experience has an impact on the aging process.
Measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage.
“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.” …
Read more here.
Woman Mysteriously Ages 50 Years In A Few Days
The immutable laws of science mean that there must be an equal, opposite condition that causes elderly people to spontaneously become young again. Via the Telegraph:
Vietnamese woman Nguyen Thi Phuong now looks like a septugenarian after the rapid aging affliction took hold following an allergic reaction to seafood.
Her sad story began in 2008, when her youthful beauty began to fade over the course of just a few days, leaving her with sagging, wrinkled skin all over her face and body. Until now she has been forced to wear a mask in public to hide her appearance from prying eyes, but now doctors are attempting to establish what caused her sudden and horrifying aging.
Some have argued that the condition is lipodystrophy – a rare syndrome that causes a layer of fatty tissue beneath the surface of the skin to disintegrate while the skin itself continues to grow at a startling pace.
The…
Spanish Blood Test Can Tell When You’ll Die. Maybe.
Three-dimensional molecular structure of a telomere (G-quadruplex). Credit: Giac83 (CC)
But do you really want to know? Giles Tremlett reports on the small Spanish biological research company at the center of claims that its blood test can predict the age you will die, for the Guardian:
As a taxi takes me across Madrid to the laboratories of Spain’s National Cancer Research Centre, I am fretting about the future. I am one of the first people in the world to provide a blood sample for a new test, which has been variously described as a predictor of how long I will live, a waste of time or a handy indicator of how well (or badly) my body is ageing. Today I get the results.
Some newspapers, to the dismay of the scientists involved, have gleefully announced that the test – which measures the telomeres (the protective caps on the ends of my chromosomes) –…
Aging Brains Made Youthful?
Photo: Mieciu K2 (CC)
Can we restore our “mental sketch pads” by renewing how our brain holds memory on the neurological level? The National Geographic reports:
You can’t teach an old brain new tricks—but you can restore its ability to remember the old ones, a new study in monkeys suggests.
Chemicals given to rhesus macaques blocked a brain molecule that slows the firing of the brain’s nerve cells, or neurons, as we age—prompting those nerve cells to act young again.
“It’s our first glimpse of what’s going on physiologically that’s causing age-related cognitive decline,” said study leader Amy Arnsten, a neurobiologist at Yale University.
“We all assumed, given there’s a lot of architectural changes in aged brains … that we were stuck with it,” Arnsten said.
But with the new results, “the hopeful thing is that the neurochemical environment still makes a big difference, and we might be able to remediate some of these things.”
[Continues at National…
‘Charlie the Smoking Chimp’ Dies from Old Age, At 52
Via Reuters:
JOHANNESBURG — A chimpanzee once hooked on smoking by visitors offering it cigarettes has died at a South African zoo at the relatively advanced age of 52, officials said on Wednesday.
“He appears to have died of old age,” said municipal spokesman Qondile Khedama. An autopsy will be conducted to determine the exact cause of death.“Charlie the smoking chimp” used to put two fingers to his mouth to mimic smoking and reach out with his other hand to bum cigarette butts from visitors at Bloemfontein Zoo. But when videos of him puffing away circulated globally a few years ago, zoo officials moved to cut off the supply of smokes.
The nickname stuck even though the cigarette habit faded.
The life expectancy for chimps in the wild is about 15 years and only 7 percent of wild chimps live past 40, a Harvard University report published in 2007 said.
The Science of Immortality
There has always been an interest in remaining young: immortality in myths, the fountain of youth, plastic surgery. People have continued to search for a means of stopping the aging process to prolong life. Immortality may be impossible for humans, but there is a fresh water animal that does not seem to age.
Photo: Hydra
Daniel Martinez was one of the first researchers to study hydras, of the phylum Cnidaria, at Pomona College. Martinez focused on the lack of senescence, “a deteriorative process that increases the probability of death of an organism with increasing chronological age.” Hydras undergo morphallaxis, tissue regeneration, which allows the genus to constantly renew its tissue. Hydras’ tissue regenerates itself, copying the same cellular structure, allowing their cells to remain ageless.
With mortality rates low, caused often by environmental changes like food shortage or displacement, hydras are to be considered biologically immortal.
Can Researchers Re-Activate Memory In The Elderly?
German neuroscientists have made a breakthrough in “age-related cognitive decline” which often begins in your late 40s (especially declarative memory – the ability to recall facts and experiences)!
Their new study identifies a genetic “switch” for the cluster of learning and memory genes which cause memory impairment in aging mice. By injecting an enzyme, the team “flipped” the switch to its on position for older mice, giving them the memory and learning performance they’d enjoyed when they were young.
Nitrates From Processed Foods and Fertilizers in Water Cause Alzheimer’s, Diabetes
Not much of a surprise is it? Add nitrates to your food or your water: say hello to disease. As reported in Medical News Today:
A new study by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital have found a substantial link between increased levels of nitrates in our environment and food, with increased deaths from diseases, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes mellitus and Parkinson’s. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (Volume 17:3 July 2009).
Led by Suzanne de la Monte, MD, MPH, of Rhode Island Hospital, researchers studied the trends in mortality rates due to diseases that are associated with aging, such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes and cerebrovascular disease, as well as HIV. They found strong parallels between age adjusted increases in death rate from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes and the progressive increases in human exposure to nitrates, nitrites and nitrosamines through processed and preserved foods as well as fertilizers.…
