Wel­come to the 8th edi­tion of Hour­glass, the blog car­ni­val devoted to biogeron­tol­ogy. Enjoy!

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Use It or Lose It

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Cog­ni­tive Enhance­ment, Health and Assessments

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The Ben­e­fits of Caloric Restric­tion Read the rest of this entry »

If you are a blog­ger or read blogs often, you know that there are a good num­ber of excel­lent blog car­ni­vals focused on spe­cific themes. If you are inter­ested in med­i­cine, you know what car­ni­val to visit. Edu­ca­tion, the same. Biol­ogy, neu­ro­science, nurs­ing, birds, aging, philosophy…a vari­ety of top­ics are very well cov­ered in the blogosphere.

What you prob­a­bly haven’t come across is a high-quality “metacar­ni­val” or “car­ni­val of car­ni­vals”, where you can read the best blog posts ACROSS top­ics, sub­jects, disciplines.

This is why a few blog car­ni­val “orga­niz­ers” are launch­ing next Mon­day a monthly rotat­ing “MetaCar­ni­val” to fea­ture the most inter­est­ing posts from a vari­ety of high-quality blog carnivals.

Par­tic­i­pat­ing blog car­ni­vals so far, alpha­bet­i­cally: Read the rest of this entry »

Wel­come to the third edi­tion of Hour­glass, the monthly vir­tual gath­er­ing of blog­gers to dis­cuss the Biol­ogy of Aging.

For today’s edi­tion, let’s imag­ine all par­tic­i­pants sit­ting around a table lead­ing a lively Ques­tions & Answers ses­sion, dis­cussing as a group, lis­ten­ing, talk­ing. (And, well, aging.)

Q: What is aging?
Ms. Wikipedia: “Age­ing or aging (Amer­i­can Eng­lish) is the accu­mu­la­tion of changes in an organ­ism or object over time. Age­ing in humans refers to a mul­ti­di­men­sional process of phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and social change. Some dimen­sions of age­ing grow and expand over time, while oth­ers decline. Reac­tion time, for exam­ple, may slow with age, while knowl­edge of world events and wis­dom may expand.”

Aging may not be the sex­i­est  of words in our vocab­u­lary. Unless, of course (as I heard some­where recently but can’t prop­erly credit), you con­sider the most com­mon alternative.

Q: If the objec­tive of anti-aging research is to extend lifes­pan, isn’t there a risk that we may neglect qual­ity of life. After all, would peo­ple really like to spend more years afflicted by the dis­eases and the decline that often come with age?
Ed (dragged to the dis­cus­sion by Chris and Alvaro): I have rel­a­tively good news to share. A recent Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Den­mark found that the pro­por­tion of elderly Danes who man­age to remain inde­pen­dent holds steady at Read the rest of this entry »

Edu­ca­tion, Aging…two seem­ingly unre­lated top­ics, but with more biol­ogy in com­mon than may meet the eye…

You may enjoy the most recent edi­tions of two great blog carnivals:

- Car­ni­val of Edu­ca­tion, hosted by Joanne Jacobs.

- Hour­glass: a car­ni­val of biogeron­tol­ogy, hosted by Chris at Ouroboros. Chris recently launched this blog car­ni­val to pro­vide a home for “blog­gers who are writ­ing about biogeron­tol­ogy, lifes­pan exten­sion tech­nolo­gies, and aging in general.”

Anne writes my favorite post at Exis­tence is Won­der­ful, link­ing education/ learning/ nur­ture with aging.

She first explains that

“Many peo­ple use the word “aging” as a short­hand not just for the mere process of get­ting older (which is not only inevitable for every­thing in exis­tence, but some­thing to cel­e­brate — “get­ting older”, after all, means “expe­ri­enc­ing more life”!), but for the phys­i­cal degen­er­a­tion that occurs as meta­bolic, immune, and mechan­i­cal side effects take hold as a per­son ages. Per­son­ally I find this dual use of the word “aging” ter­ri­bly confusing”.

And then adds

“We don’t nec­es­sar­ily know what hard lim­its are on longevity until we opti­mize care. I saw a dra­matic turn­around in my fish when I learned how to prop­erly con­fig­ure the tank setup, and I hope to see the day when human med­i­cine makes a sim­i­lar leap in effectiveness”