Posts Tagged ‘Aging’
“…my age is as a lusty winter, / Frosty, but kindly…”*…
Aging is tough; Catherine Hiller offers a guide…
For some people, being old just comes naturally. They’ve acted old for years, and they know just what to do. They are the lucky ones—the “old souls,” if you will. For many others, being old just seems weird. They think, Really? How did I get here? What do I wear? How do I navigate this new geography?
This guide is expressly written for those who are bewildered by the face in the mirror and somehow think that 70 qualifies as middle-aged. These people need gentle guidance so that they, too, can enjoy the special perks of being old, beyond the senior discounts. This guide aims to help newcomers fit in with their cohort and enjoy their well-earned privileges.
At 79, I know something about old age, and I’ve compiled the following guidelines hoping they will empower you to enjoy your entitlements…
Read on for such useful tips as…
… Your health is vital to you, so it must be important to others as well. People want to hear about your ailments, even the minor ones, as well as all the cures you’ve ever tried. Your every test result is intriguing to your family and friends, so you should discuss the details. Oddly, the health problems of others are of little interest to you, unless they mirror your own…
… Everything really was better when you were young. Your mind tells you that every generation feels this way (including the Athenians in the Golden Age, 400 years BC), but your heart tells you that this time, you are actually right! You came of age in the Summer of Love, which lasted about a decade. There was joy in the air, and a sense of personal and social freedom. Humankind would progress. Everything would be better! Be sure to talk to your children and grandchildren constantly about what it was like when you were young, and how very much worse things are today.
Embrace your inner curmudgeon! You have every right to be cranky, because many things are difficult, and the news is always appalling. At this point, you’ve had many disappointments, and likely some physical problems as well. There’s no need to mute your general displeasure. Being old is the time to express it fully, forcefully and funnily. (At least you assume your tirades are amusing.)…
… Your clothing choices will be determined entirely by comfort. In this, you and other old people are in the fashion vanguard. Remember the “little old ladies in tennis shoes”? Well, who wears sneakers now? Only everyone, all the time! Celebrate your preference for flowing clothes in neutral colors. Turns out some of you have been “coastal grandmothers” long before it was a thing. For years you’ve been wearing pants with elastic waistbands or drawstrings, predating and predicting pandemic dressing, when everyone wore sweatpants. Turns out old people are the true fashionistas!…
More pearls at: “How to Be Old,” from @oldstermag.bsky.social.
* Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 3
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As we muse on maturity, we might note that today is National Buffet Day, an annual celebration of an occasion for the senescent to practice most of the advice Hiller gives in the piece featured above.
“Long life is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, and hard to obtain in the world”*…
… maybe, as recent research from Saul Justin Newman explains, even harder than we thought…
The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. In the UK, Italy, Japan, and France remarkable longevity is instead predicted by regional poverty, old-age poverty, material deprivation, low incomes, high crime rates, a remote region of birth, worse health, and fewer 90+ year old people. In addition, supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five: patterns indicative of widespread fraud and error. As such, relative poverty and missing vital documents constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records…
The paper in full: “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud,” at @biorxivpreprint.
(Image above: source)
* Buddha
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As we long for longevity, we might send healthy birthday greetings to William H. Welch; he was born on this date in 1850. A physician, pathologist, bacteriologist, and medical educator, He was one of the “Big Four” founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first school of public health in the country.
Welch revolutionized American medicine by demanding of its students a rigorous study of physical sciences and an active involvement in clinical duties and laboratory work. His students included Walter Reed, James Carroll and Simon Flexner.
“Am I as admirable as that ant?”*…
There are lots of ants on earth. And, as Anna Turns explains, they play a big role as ecosystem engineers– as well as providing insights on everything from the climate to aging…
To most of us, they are small, uninteresting and sometimes annoying, but 2022 revealed just how ubiquitous ants are and how indispensable they are to the planet. Scientists revealed in September that there are an estimated 20 quadrillion (or 20 million billion) ants globally – that’s 2.5 million for every person on the planet.
More than 12,000 known species of ant live in all sorts of habitats, from the Arctic to the tropics and they represent one of the most diverse, abundant and specialist groups of animals on the planet. Leafcutter ants are fungus farmers, slave-making ants capture broods to increase their work force, while wood ants herd aphids to the juiciest parts of a plant to harvest their honeydew sap…
Experts agree that ants are ecosystem engineers because they play a crucial role in decomposing organic matter, recycling nutrients, improving soil health, removing pests and dispersing seeds. But, historically, ants haven’t attracted as much attention as crop pollinators, such as bees, which perhaps have more of an obvious economic value. That bias could soon change. Ants have been used as a biological pest control on citrus crops in China for centuries, and research published in August indicates that the pest control potential of some predatory ants could work better than some agricultural chemicals.
The wonders of ant biology throw up plenty of other possibilities for real-world applications. Queen ants that live more than 30 years – yet have the same genetic material as a short-lived worker ant – could teach us something about senescence. Nobody understands how queens store sperm for decades inside their bodies without any degradation, despite colonies living in different climates. Meanwhile, Schultheiss’ [Dr Patrick Schultheiss, of the University of Würzburg] research into ant navigation – how they find food and how they behave when they get lost – could help build mathematical models that instruct a robot searching for missing people.
Looking back at how ants evolved can shed light on a huge array of other plants and animals, too. Butterflies that rely on ants to tend to their caterpillars could disappear if those ants are wiped out, says Corrie Moreau, a professor at Cornell University: “Nature is this intricate woven tapestry and if you pull one thread, you’ll never know which is the critical thread that makes the whole thing fall apart.”…
“Insects and us: a mind-blowing 20 quadrillion ants and what they mean for the planet,” from @AnnaTurns in @guardian.
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As we get antsy, we might spare a thought for Swedish botanist Carl Linné, better known as Carolus Linnaeus, “the Father of Taxonomy,” died on this date in 1778. Historians suggest that the academically-challenged among us can take heart from his story: at the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was “less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else.” Still, he made is way from Lund to Uppsala, where he began his famous system of plant and animal classification– still in use today.
“It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it”*…
Still, some species “do it” differently than others…
It is well known that somatic mutations — mutations in our body’s genetic code that accumulate over time — can cause cancer, but their broader role in ageing is less clear.
Now a team of researchers have measured the somatic mutation rates of a range of mammals and discovered a striking correlation between mutation rate and lifespan. Lending evidence to the theory that somatic mutations are a cause of ageing rather than a result of it…
Ageing is linked to accumulated mutations: “The lifespan secret: why giraffes live longer than ferrets,” from @Nature.
* Mark Twain, on aging
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As we grow old gracefully, we might send carefully-deduced birthday greetings to William Ian Beardmore (WIB) Beveridge; he was born on this date in 1908. A veterinarian who served as director of the Institute of Animal Pathology at Cambridge, he identified the origin of the Great Influenza (the Spanish Flu pandemic, 1918-19)– a strain of swine flu.
“You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go”*…
Humans are natural problem solvers; still, sometimes no amount of thoughtfulness, hard work, or understanding will transform an intractable problem into a resolvable one. But, as Alex Berezow argues, we must accept this harsh reality to have peace in our lives…
Though our species name is Homo sapiens (Latin for “wise man”), perhaps a better one would be Homo problematis solvendis (“problem solving man”). If there’s a mountain, we’ll climb it; if there’s a moon, we’ll fly to it; if there’s a disease, we’ll cure it. Our species’ success in science and technology has even given rise to scientism, the naïve and arrogant belief that science alone is the only legitimate source of knowledge and that any problem — no matter how great — will one day be solved by science.
It is easy to see why many people believe that. We are taught from a young age that the trickiest homework can be solved through diligent study; the toughest sporting competitions can be dominated through training; and the complexities of interpersonal relationships can be settled through understanding and compromise. All of this conspires to create in each of us a false sense that no problem is too big to tackle. Yet, the unfortunate reality is that, sometimes, no amount of thoughtfulness, hard work, or understanding will transform an intractable problem into a resolvable one. Indeed, some problems really have no solution…
Berezow goes on to unpack three examples: the Riemann hypothesis, the problem of aging and cancer, and willful ignorance. Then he urges us to understand them as a metaphor…
As we grow older, we slowly come to the realization that there is very little in our lives that we actually can control. We didn’t control who our parents were, where we were born, our genetic gifts (or lack thereof), or the sort of upbringing we received. We can’t control our spouses or our children, let alone politicians. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that we can barely control our own thoughts and feelings. It should not surprise us, therefore, that the world contains unsolvable problems. I would go so far as to posit that there may be more unsolvable problems than solvable ones.
So, if there’s any moral lesson to learn from the aforementioned “unsolvable problems,” let it be that they serve as a metaphor for the greater truth that we control far less than we think we do, and that we must become comfortable with that discomforting fact. How? Perhaps the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr could help:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.Or perhaps this cheekier version will suffice:
Give me coffee to change the things I can
And wine to accept the things I cannot.
The very concept of a “problem with no solution” goes against human nature, but they’re everywhere– and we need to find ways to relate to them: “Problems with no solution: From math to politics, some things humans cannot solve,” from @AlexBerezow @bigthink.
* Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
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As we ruminate on resolution, we might we might send bright birthday greetings to Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen; he was born on this date in 1811. A chemist, he observed– with a prototype spectroscope that he created– that each element emits a light of characteristic wavelength (thus founding the field of spectrum analysis) and used his insight to discover two new elements, caesium and rubidium.
But Bunsen is probably best remembered for his creation of the Bunsen burner, a gas burner with a non-luminous flame that does not interfere with the colored flame given off by the test material–ubiquitous in labs around the world. Indeed, today is (Inter)National Bunsen Burner Day.
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