Scientists are working on separating the genes for longevity! But is the world ready for that advancement? Will our social and financial systems be able to respond to those changes? Is aging necessary? Are the wrinkles and gray hair, weakening muscles, neurodegeneration, reduced cardiovascular function, and increased risk of cancer that afflict organisms toward the end of their lives inevitable? Or are these age-related changes part of a genetic program that can be altered? Molecular biologists experimenting with organisms such as yeast, roundworms, fruit flies, and mice have found that they can dramatically extend life span by tweaking single genes. The altered organisms don’t just live longer, they age more slowly, in many cases retaining youthful characteristics even after normal individuals have died. More remarkable, the genetic manipulations that cause these changes seem to work through a common pathway across all species. This suggests that if there is a program that controls aging, it must be ancient indeed: in evolutionary terms, yeast and mammals diverged about a billion years ago. Read more

This is an article on study done in Scotland on how the Estrogen affects the attractiveness of women.. and how make up is basically used to demo heightened fertility rather than just fashion! Beauty, as it turns out, isn't skin deep. A study at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, has shown that attractiveness in females relates to the hormonal composition of blood. (These are composite images of the faces of 10 women with the highest level of estrogen and 10 women with the lowest levels.The composite image of 10 women with high estrogen levels is on the left. Men chose it as the most attractive in the study.) Read more

Is Obesity's mal-effects a myth or reality? Here is a contrarian take on how obesity can affect health! Between 1976 and 1991 the prevalence of overweight and obesity in the United States increased by about 31 percent (Heini and Weinsier 1997), then between 1994 and 2000 it increased by another 24 percent (Flegal et al. 2002). This trend, according to a 2004 analysis, shows little sign of slowing down (Hedley et al. 2004). The fact that more of us are getting fatter all the time raises a significant public health concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began calling the problem an epidemic in the beginning of this decade as the result of research that estimated 280,000 annual deaths as a consequence of obesity (Allison et al. 1999). Since then there has been a strong media campaign devoted to convincing Americans to lose weight. In 2003, Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the CDC, made a speech claiming that the health impact of obesity would be worse than the influenza epidemic of the early twentieth century or the black plague of the Middle Ages. In 2004 the campaign reached a fever pitch when a report was released that increased the estimate of obesity-related deaths to 400,000 (Mokdad et al. 2004). Finally, in March of this year, a report appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine that predicted a decline in life expectancy in the United States as a direct result of obesity (Olshansky, et al. 2005). Read more