Can Humans Live to 1,000? Some Experts Claim We Can.

“I am working on immortality,” says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who has achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies. “Twenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off-the-wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible.”

Even the US government finds the field sufficiently promising to fund some of the research. Federal funding for “the biology of ageing”, excluding work on ageing-specific diseases like heart failure and cancer – has been running at about $2.4 billion a year, according to the National Institute of Ageing, part of the National Institutes of Health.

So far, the most intriguing results have been spawned by the genetics labs of bigger universities, where anti-ageing scientists have found ways to extend live spans of a range of organisms—including mammals. But genetic research is not the only field that may hold the key to eternity.

“There are many, many different components of ageing and we are chipping away at all of them,” said Robert Freitas at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, a non-profit, nanotech group in Palo Alto, California. “It will take time and, if you put it in terms of the big developments of modern technology, say the telephone, we are still about 10 years off from Alexander Graham Bell shouting to his assistant through that first device. Still, in the near future, say the next two to four decades, the disease of ageing will be cured.”

But not everyone thinks ageing can or should be cured. Some say that humans weren’t meant to live forever, regardless of whether or not we actually can.

“I just don’t think [immortality] is possible,” says Sherwin Nuland, a professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. “Aubrey and the others who talk of greatly extending lifespan are oversimplifying the science and just don’t understand the magnitude of the task. His plan will not succeed. Were it to do so, it would undermine what it means to be human.”

It’s interesting that Nuland first says he doesn’t think it will work but then adds that if it does, it will undermine humanity. So, which is it? Is it impossible, or are the skeptics just hoping it is?

After all, we already have overpopulation, global warming, limited resources and other issues to deal with, so why compound the problem by adding immortality into the mix.

But anti-ageing enthusiasts argue that as our perspectives change and science and technology advance exponentially, new solutions will emerge. Space colonization, for example, along with dramatically improved resource management, could resolve the concerns associated with long life. They reason that if the Universe goes on seemingly forever—much of it presumably unused—why not populate it?

However, anti-ageing crusaders are coming up against an increasingly influential alliance of bioconservatives who want to restrict research seeking to “unnaturally” prolong life. Some of these individuals were influential in persuading President Bush in 2001 to restrict federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. They oppose the idea of life extension and anti-ageing research on ethical, moral and ecological grounds.

Leon Kass, the former head of Bush’s Council on Bioethics, insists that “the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual”. Bioethicist Daniel Callahan of the Garrison, New York-based Hastings Centre, agrees: “There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death.”

Maybe they’re right, but then why do we as humans strive so hard to prolong our lives in the first place? Maybe growing old, getting sick and dying is just a natural, inevitable part of the circle of life, and we may as well accept it.

“But it’s not inevitable, that’s the point,” de Grey says. “At the moment, we’re stuck with this awful fatalism that we’re all going to get old and sick and die painful deaths. There are a 100,000 people dying each day from age-related diseases. We can stop this carnage. It’s simply a matter of deciding that’s what we should be doing.”

One wonders what Methuselah would say about all this.

Kids become chatterboxes within months of barely being able to speak a few words. How come?

 
Children do not need any specialised learning to suddenly improve their vocabularies. Instead, their behaviour can be described by a simple mathematical rule of thumb.

Parents become familiar with the so-called “word spurt”, the slightly disconcerting stage of a child’s life when they go from hardly talking to suddenly uttering hundreds of new words, sometimes after hearing them only once. (This can be disconcerting for parents whose children are suddenly uttering profanities like a angry truck-driver.)

At 18 months the average child can say 50 words, but by age two, they have learned up to 350 words; half a year later their vocabulary has doubled to 600.

Scientists have proposed various theories to explain children’s language land-grab. Perhaps learning a few basic words helps a child learn others. The theory of “naming insight”, for instance, suggests that at around 18 months children suddenly realise that each object has a specific name. (It’s not until around two that a child learns that when they cover their eyes and ‘hide’, that you can still see them.)

Another theory, called “fast mapping”, suggests that children quickly understand that groups of objects are related, and therefore they learn unfamiliar words describing objects within familiar groups more quickly.

Characteristic curve

Of course, there may be a much simpler explanation. The acceleration in a child’s learning may inevitably happen due to the way most languages are structured.

All languages contain a characteristic distribution and pattern of words. Where most are of medium difficultly to learn, there are a few that are either very easy, or very difficult. Children always learn a number of words in parallel. These parameters have been factored into computational models which simulate how long it takes to learn 10,000 new words.

Guess what? The simulation the model produces the same characteristic acceleration in learning. Essentially learning one new word makes learning another new word even easier. This allows a child to move through words of medium difficulty more quickly since their learned in parallel. Acceleration is an unavoidable by-product of variation in difficulty. (It’s a network effect.)

Of course computer modeling isn’t the real world and may not accurately get to the heart of while kids learn language so amazingly fast, but adults don’t learn as quickly and don’t show a similar acceleration in their language learning.

Exotic foreign males are most attractive - for female spotted hyenas at least. It’s this female preference for the unusual that drives young males to leave their clan and seek out another pack. After all, for hyenas as well as humans, diversity is the spice of life.

Every year early 90 per cent of male spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) leave their birth clan and disperse to pastures new, but until now it has never been clear what drives them away. Are they are avoiding competition for mates, trying to preserve resources for the rest of the pack, or avoiding inbreeding?

None of the above, say researchers led by Oliver Höner of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany, who have been monitoring all 400 hyenas in the Ngorongoro crater, Tanzania, since 1996. They have shown that the females are running the show, driving males to leave by selectively mating with immigrants from outside the pack and leaving the ‘pack males’ to take increasingly cold showers.

“We found that female hyenas prefer to mate with males who have immigrated into their pack, or who were born into the clan after the female was born,” says Höner. By following this simple rule, females avoid inbreeding and help to maintain the genetic health of the pack.

None of the males could be reached for comment. 

Everyone seems to know the basics, hair is made of dead cells. Beyond that we only know to shampoo it, comb it and try to prevent split ends. So how exactly is this hair formed when we have plenty of other dead cells falling off our skin all the time?

The key is a substance called keratin. When the cells die it leaves a cylinder of keratin, an extremely strong protein. So strong in fact, that the only biological material stronger than keratin is chitin.  Now before you go bragging about how strong your keratin is to all those bald friends you need to know that their are types of keratin. It just happens to be that the keratin that makes up the hair on your head is not near as tough as that which makes up the claws and scales of reptiles. 

So yes, their keratins could beat up your keratins.

While completely lifeless, hair does contain minerals, fats, and water (10%). So, if you are ever on a deserted island you could survive just a little longer on a nice fistful of hair. However, growing on average 1 cm a month means this food supply isn’t very replenishable. Eat wisely.

Puppy Love isn’t just just the glassy-eyed look that teen girls get when watching Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. Nope, it’s an actual condition in which teens show a number of manic and risky behaviors.

It seems that there is some scientific evidence to show that adolescents who feel ‘madly in love’ may be right. They actually are ‘mad’.

Lovestruck teens show many of the symptoms of a condition called ‘hypomania’ (a less pronounced form of regular mania) in which they sleep about an hour less that teens who aren’t smitten. They also act more compulsively, spend more money, drive faster, and pass more notes in class. (The note’s also have 500% more hearts and balloon writing on them than normal class notes.)

One study demonstrated that youngins in early-stage intense romantic love acted exactly as psychiatric patients during a hypomanic stage, concluding that intense romantic love in teenagers is a “psychopathologically prominent stage”.

Oddly enough, the symptoms of hypomania overlap with those of regular mania. These symptoms are visible in teens as periods of depression, endless texting to friends, ‘Do not enter’ signs appearing on their bedroom doors, an inability to be ‘understood by anyone, and a pronounced decrease in how cool they think their parents are. Don’t worry, there’s nothing you can do about this. (You may still want to hide the car keys and affix a geo-locator to your teen.)

Ah, the wonder of those teenage years. Hair sprouting everywhere and mania to boot.

Where would we be without dirt?

Honestly, the economy depends on dirt. If we didn’t have dirt it would put the entire cleaning industry out of business, the economy would collapse, and you’ll be out on the street waiting for a street-sweeper that would never need to come. Count your lucky stars that dirt’s got a long-term contract and isn’t cleaning up it’s act anytime soon. 

Dirt (soil) forms the pedospherem, which is a nice Latin name for the grubby interface between the lithosphere (rocky part of the planet) and the biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere.

Dirt is a three phase system comprised of all kinds of little bits, from rocks and minerals, organic matter (including all sorts of living organisms), ice, weathered rock and precipitates, liquid water solutions, and gases (worm farts).

The ‘liquid phase’ is primarily water, and is also known as the ‘soil solution’ where plants get their nutrients. The ‘gaseous phase’ is important for supplying oxygen to plant roots for respiration. Fortunately, there is no ‘teenager phase’.

Soil formation, or pedogenesis, (use that in a sentence some time this week) is the combined effect of physical, chemical, biological, and anthropogenic processes on big things turning them into progressively littler things which you want to keep out of the corners of your bathroom.

Oh yeah, we’re all going to become dirt in the end so show some respect. 

Can a butterfly flapping it’s wings can cause a hurricane?

Well, maybe. Really complex systems like the weather and ecosystems are pretty, well, complex. (How my wife drives is also a complex system but so far has resisted any scientific understanding.)

The butterfly effect is simply this: Any change in the initial conditions of a complex non-linear system creates wildly different outcomes.

A more technical description would be: sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory where small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system produce increasingly large variations in the long term behavior of the system. Whew.

The phrase The Butterfly Effect refers to the idea that the single flap of a butterfly’s wings change the initial conditions of the system enough to cause large-scale phenomena (hurricanes and such) since any variation in the initial conditions is vastly magnified with each iteration. And every flap of every butterfly wing in the world continually changes those conditions. (Someone passing gas in France probably caused the Katrina hurricane.) Now you know why you don’t want to be a weatherman. It basically means that we’ll never be able to predict the weather for more than a few days.

 

See that equation? Looks tricky doesn’t it? You can’t understand how my wife drives either.

Comparing the butterfly effect to the domino effect is slightly misleading. In the domino effect there is dependence on the initial sensitivity, but whereas a simple linear row of dominoes would cause one event to initiate another similar one, the butterfly effect amplifies the condition upon each iteration. Also, dominos are a game played by old people in Miami.

Animal populations can be subject to the same phenomena.

Predator-prey systems have complex dynamics. A bio system with two variables such as rabbits and foxes can create a system that is much more complex than is readily apparent. Lack of foxes means that the rabbit population can increase, but increasing numbers of rabbits means foxes have more food and are likely to survive and reproduce, which in turn decreases the number of rabbits.

So please, don’t pass gas. Forecasting the weather is hard enough.

Evolution is a fact. How evolution works is a theory.

“In the American vernacular, ‘theory’ often means ‘imperfect fact’—part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the argument: evolution is ‘only’ a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory.

If evolution is less than fact and scientists can’t even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it?

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome.”

- Stephen J. Gould, ” Evolution as Fact and Theory”; Discover, May 1981

Let’s consider evolution in light of another scientific fact - gravity. Gravity is also fact. How gravity works is a theory. Current theories about gravity might be disproved, but gravity itself remains a fact. 

A number of terms have been attached to Darwin’s theory although they are commonly misunderstood.

Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the strongest, smartest, fastest or best camouflaged. Survival of the fittest means that an organism that is best adapted to its ecological niche is more likely to create more offspring than less fit individuals. Consider the garden slug as an great example of fitness for survival.

Natural selection is Darwin’s theory of how the environment works on species. Individuals that are most successfully reproducing viable offspring form the core gene pool of a species. Environmental forces determine which individuals survive.

The evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution grows more unimpeachable as science discovers more about chemistry, geology, and biology.

Take a look at your dog. He’s a perfect display of the mechanisms of evolution. If he’s anything other than a 30 pound dingo looking mutt, the gene’s he displays that make him a cock-a-poo, German Shepard, or Bouvier (my favorite) were selected from an existing gene pool by humans to make him what he is. While all dogs are the same species and a great dane can breed (theoretically) with a chiwawah, you get the idea. His genes have been modified over time to make him different than he was.

So, The Theory of Evolution does not describe evolution as a supposition. It is the the current thinking about how the fact of evolution manifests itself.

If you’ve got kids, and I do, you can impress their little minds by having savvy answers ready for  the questions they answer while they’re examining their navels.

Why is the sky blue? Why doesn’t the sky just stay black with the sun acting as another point of light? Why do the stars disappear during the day?

Got your long-term memory ready? Here’s the answer. The first thing to understand is that the sun is slightly brighter than the moon and stars. You can verify this by staring at the sun and burning your retinas out in a minute or so. (Staring at the moon is doesn’t do this and is actually romantic.) Also of note is that the atmosphere (nitrogen and oxygen molecules) has an effect on the happy little sun beams passing betwixt them.

There is a physical phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering that causes light to scatter when passing through molecules that have a diameter one-tenth that of the wavelength (color) of the light.

Sunlight is made up of all different colors of light, but because of the physical properties of all those oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, blue wavelengths of light are scattered much more efficiently than the other colors. So while most wavelengths hitting the upper atmosphere just pass through and on into space, blue lights path get changed, resulting in a defuse blue light coming from all directions of the atmosphere.

So when you look at the sky on a clear day, you can see the sun as a bright disk surrounded by blue as the atoms in the atmosphere scatter the blue light waves toward you. Got that?

Of course the sky on Mars is not blue. (See the color pictures from Mars Pathfinder) This is because the atmosphere of Mars is very thin and dusty, and atmospheric light scattering is dominated not by Martian atmosphere (mostly carbon dioxide) but by suspended dust particles. These are larger than the wavelengths of visible light, and they are reddened by iron oxide from the Martian soil. It’s not just Rayleigh scattering, so the spectrum is different.

Now when you kids ask you why the sky is blue, you can dazzle them with the explanation above, or you can say that it’s blue because that’s your favorite color. It works just as well and will probably impress your kids even more.

More on the blue sky and scattering 

While you might be close to your friends and family, but you have friends who are closer still. 600 different species of bacteria inhabit your mouth every morning. They’re the little guys that make up that tasty film on your teeth. Yum.

And it doesn’t stop there. About 500 species of bacteria, as well as many species of yeast and other organisms, inhabit your human gastrointestinal tract and make up your “gut flora”.

Yep. You’re a veritable Petri dish of little goo-critters. If you’re an ‘average’ human, the bacteria weigh in at about 1kg and the number of individual micro-organisms easily outnumbers the total number of cells in your bug-loving human body. (So far, none of these organisms have been identified as the midicloreans that Yoda uses to channel The Force but perhaps if you don’t brush your teeth you’ll have a nagging desire to build a light saber.)

Luckily for us a large number of these organisms don’t cause disease — instead, they help protect us from disease. The gut flora perform many functions that contribute to the health of the human host; “friendly bacteria” mostly have names beginning with Lactobacillus or Bifidobacteria.

The friendly bacteria aren’t the only type of microorganism present in your gastrointestinal tract however. There are also a number of organisms that don’t provide you with any benefits; these include coliform bacteria, yeasts and bacteroides.