5th January 2019, 2 min read

Science and Technology links (January 5th, 2019)

1. There are nearly 70,000 centenarians in Japan.
2. China’s population fell by 1.27 million in 2018.
3. Obesity is associated with increased senescent cell burden and neuropsychiatric disorders, including anxiety and depression. Clearing senescent cells could alleviate these symptons.
4. Women who come from families where the mother is the breadwinner are less likely to pursue a science degree at university level.
5. Stronger men live longer:
   

Muscular strength is inversely and independently associated with death from all causes and cancer in men, even after adjusting for cardiorespiratory fitness and other potential confounders.

1. Inflammation is a crude but effective part of our immune system that serves as a first line of defense. It is necessary but tends to get out of hand as we age. Arai et al. found that your level of inflammation was a potential predictor of how likely you were to reach extreme old age:
   

Inflammation is the prime candidate amongst potential determinants of mortality, capability and cognition up to extreme old age

1. An article published by Nature argues for rejuvenation strategies:
   

Ageing is associated with the functional decline of all tissues and a striking increase in many diseases. Although ageing has long been considered a one-way street, strategies to delay and potentially even reverse the ageing process have recently been developed. Here, we review four emerging rejuvenation strategies—systemic factors, metabolic manipulations, senescent cell ablation and cellular reprogramming—and discuss their mechanisms of action, cellular targets, potential trade-offs and application to human ageing.

1. Childhood leukaemia is a feature of developed societies and has to do with the fact that children are insufficiently exposed to bacteria and infections.
2. China has landed a rover on the far side of the Moon.
3. While climate change models predict that as the world warms, biomass will decompose more quickly, which would send a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, new research finds that it may work the other way around: warmer temperature may reduce decomposition and carbon emissions.
4. You can defeat Google’s captchas (meant to prove you are a human being) by taking the audio test and feeding it back to Google’s services to get a transcription.