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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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19 Aug 2024
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Aging hits us in our 40s and 60s. But well-being doesn’t have to fall off a cliff.

 

 

This week I came across research that suggests aging hits us in waves. You might feel like you’re on a slow, gradual decline, but, at the molecular level, you’re likely to be hit by two waves of changes, according to the scientists behind the work. The first one comes in your 40s. Eek.

These clocks promise to measure biological age and help identify anti-aging drugs, but there are lingering questions over their accuracy.

For the study, Michael Snyder at Stanford University and his colleagues collected a vast amount of biological data from 108 volunteers aged 25 to 75, all of whom were living in California. Their approach was to gather as much information as they could and look for age-related patterns afterward.

This approach can lead to some startling revelations, including the one about the impacts of age on 40-year-olds (who, I was horrified to learn this week, are generally considered “middle-aged”). It can help us answer some big questions about aging, and even potentially help us find drugs to counter some of the most unpleasant aspects of the process.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds. And midlife needn’t involve falling off a cliff in terms of your well-being. Let’s explore why.

First, the study, which was published in the journal Nature Aging. Snyder and his colleagues collected a real trove of data on their volunteers, including on gene expression, proteins, metabolites, and various other chemical markers. The team also swabbed volunteers’ skin, stool, mouths, and noses to get an idea of the microbial communities that might be living there.

Each volunteer gave up these samples every few months for a median period of 1.7 years, and the team ended up with a total of 5,405 samples, which included over 135,000 biological features. “The idea is to get a very complete picture of people’s health,” says Snyder.

When he and his colleagues analyzed the data, they found that around 7% of the molecules and microbes measured changes gradually over time, in a linear way. On the other hand, 81% of them changed at specific life stages. There seem to be two that are particularly important: one at around the age of 44, and another around the age of 60.

Some of the dramatic changes at age 60 seem to be linked to kidney and heart function, and diseases like atherosclerosis, which narrows the arteries.

That makes sense, given that our risks of developing cardiovascular diseases increase dramatically as we age—around 40% of 40- to 59-year-olds have such disorders, and this figure rises to 75% for 60- to 79-year-olds.

Aging clocks estimate how fast specific organs are deteriorating—but it’s hard to know what to do with the results.

But the changes that occur around the age of 40 came as a surprise to Snyder. He says that, on reflection, they make intuitive sense. Many of us start to feel a bit creakier once we hit 40, and it can take longer to recover from injuries, for example.

Other changes suggest that our ability to metabolize lipids and alcohol shifts when we reach our 40s, though it’s hard to say why, for a few reasons. 

First, it’s not clear if a change in alcohol metabolism, for example, means that we are less able to break down alcohol, or if people are just consuming less of it when they’re older.

This gets us to a central question about aging: Is it an inbuilt program that sets us on a course of deterioration, or is it merely a consequence of living?

We don’t have an answer to that one, yet. It’s probably a combination of both. Our bodies are exposed to various environmental stressors over time. But also, as our cells age, they are less able to divide, and clear out the molecular garbage they accumulate over time.

It’s also hard to tell what’s happening in this study, because the research team didn’t measure more physiological markers of aging, such as muscle strength or frailty, says Colin Selman, a biogerontologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

There’s another, perhaps less scientific, question that comes to mind. How worried should we be about these kinds of molecular changes?

I’m approaching 40—should I panic? I asked Sara Hägg, who studies the molecular epidemiology of aging at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “No,” was her immediate answer.

While Snyder’s team collected a vast amount of data, it was from a relatively small number of people over a relatively short period of time. None of them were tracked for the two or three decades you’d need to see the two waves of molecular changes occur in a person.

“This is an observational study, and they compare different people,” Hägg told me.

“There is absolutely no evidence that this is going to happen to you.” After all, there’s a lot that can happen in a person’s life over 20 or 30 years. They might take up a sport. They might quit smoking or stop eating meat.

However, the findings do support the idea that aging is not a linear process.

“People have always suggested that you’re on this decline in your life from [around the age of] 40, depressingly,” says Selman. “But it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Snyder hopes that studies like his will help reveal potential new targets for therapies that help counteract some of the harmful molecular shifts associated with aging. “People’s healthspan is 11 to 15 years shorter than their lifespan,” he says. “Ideally you’d want to live for as long as possible [in good health], and then die.”

We don’t have any such drugs yet.

For now, it all comes down to the age-old advice about eating well, sleeping well, getting enough exercise, and avoiding the big no-nos like smoking and alcohol.

I happened to speak to Selman at the end of what had been a particularly difficult day, and I confessed that I was looking forward to enjoying an evening glass of wine. That’s despite the fact that research suggests that there is “no safe level” of alcohol consumption.

“A little bit of alcohol is actually quite nice,” Selman agreed.

He told me about an experience he’d had once at a conference on aging. Some of the attendees were members of a society that practiced caloric restriction—the idea being that cutting your calories can boost your lifespan (we don’t yet know if this works for people). “There was a big banquet… and these people all had little scales, and were weighing their salads on the scales,” he told me. “To me, that seems like a rather miserable way to live your life.”

I’m all for finding balance between healthy lifestyle choices and those that bring me joy. And it’s worth remembering that no amount of deprivation is going to radically extend our lifespans. As Selman puts it: “We can do certain things, but ultimately, when your time’s up, your time’s up.”

 

 

Original article here

17 Aug 2024
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To Delay Death, Lift Weights

 

Trust me, I understand—in theory—that I should be stronger. Yes, I’m an aerobic beast (or an aerobic addict, if you prefer), but I’m not oblivious to the benefits of having a reasonable amount of muscle. When I play the “look, you’re touching the ceiling!” game with my 18-month-old, I’d prefer that she get bored before I have to admit that Daddy can’t military-press her anymore. And I’m hoping that 20 years from now I’ll still be able to push myself out of an armchair without help.

But there’s a gap between “should” and “do.” This gap is one of the most vexing riddles in public health, and even people like me, who spend their days telling other people what they should be doing, aren’t immune to it. For that reason, I’m always eager for reminders of what’s at stake—and two new papers offer some eye-opening insights into the benefits of strength training, even for people who consistently blow the aerobic exercise guidelines out of the water.

The first is an analysis of the link between strength, muscle mass, and mortality, from a team at Indiana University using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The design was pretty straightforward: They assessed 4,440 adults ages 50 or up who had their strength and muscle mass assessed between 1999 and 2002. The researchers checked back in 2011 to see who had died.

For muscle mass, they used a DEXA scanner to determine that 23 percent of the subjects met one definition of “low muscle mass,” with total muscle in the arms and legs adding up to less than 43.5 pounds in men or 33 pounds in women. For strength, they used a device that measures maximum force of the knee extensors (the muscles that allow you to straighten your knee) and found that 19 percent of the subjects had low muscle strength.

The results, published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, found that those with low muscle strength were more than twice as likely to have died during the follow-up period than those with normal muscle strength. In contrast, having low muscle mass didn’t seem to matter as much.

The reference group is those without either condition. In comparison, those with both conditions were 2.66 times as likely to die during the study. Having low muscle mass but normal strength, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be such a bad thing.

The message here? Function matters more than what you look like. That doesn’t mean you can afford to let your muscle melt away as you age; having a good reserve of muscle mass may be important, for example, if you end up having to spend time in the hospital at some point. But it’s good news for those of us who struggle to put on muscle but persist in slogging through a reasonable number of pull-ups and other strength exercises.

The other study took aim at the perception that strength training is an afterthought in public health guidelines. Most of us remember that we’re supposed to get at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week. Reams of data support the beneficial health effects of hitting this goal.

But the guidelines also suggest doing “strength-promoting exercise” at least twice a week—a clause that’s often forgotten and the benefits of which are usually framed in terms of avoiding frailty and improving quality of life, rather than actually extending it.

Researchers in Australia analyzed data from 80,000 adults in England and Scotland who completed surveys about their physical activity patterns starting in the 1990s. The headline result was that those who reported doing any strength training were 23 percent less likely to die during the study period and 31 percent less likely to die of cancer. Meeting the guidelines by strength training twice a week offered a little extra benefit.

One interesting (and, for me, reassuring) detail: Strength training in a gym and doing bodyweight exercises seemed to confer roughly equivalent benefits. So you don’t necessarily need to heave around large quantities of iron.

In this particular cohort, the benefits of meeting only the strength-training guidelines seemed to be roughly equivalent to meeting only the aerobic-training guidelines—at least in terms of overall mortality. However, strength training didn’t confer any protection against heart disease. There’s some evidence that strength training may reduce blood pressure but increase artery stiffness, effectively canceling out the heart benefits. This study can’t answer that question, but the findings do suggest that ditching aerobic exercise entirely may not be optimal. And indeed, the best outcomes of all—a 29 percent reduction in mortality risk during the study—accrued to those who met both the aerobic and strength-training guidelines.

So, in summary, strength training is good for you. Does that really tell you anything you didn’t know? Perhaps not.

That said, a few months ago, I wrote about a study in which runners received automated online advice to help them avoid injuries. The advice seemed painfully obvious: Listen to your body, don’t increase pace and volume too suddenly, and so on. But it worked. Injuries were reduced by 13.1 percent. That’s more or less what I’m hoping for by writing this piece, for all of us: that a reminder of something obvious, bolstered by fresh evidence, will help me continue to do what I know I should.

 

 

Original article here

14 Aug 2024
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Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

 

In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.” In this month’s issue of Nautilus, which looks at the concept of flow through various portals in science, we revisited our 2014 video interview with Tegmark (transcribed below for the first time), in which the professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains why the feeling of time is one thing and the math quite another. That Tegmark, also the author of 2017’s Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, takes the keenest pleasure from peering into the world through the kaleidoscope of his physics toolbox is amply clear. During our interview, leaning out of his chair, waving his arms, pouring his water bottle onto the carpeted hotel floor to drive home a point, he was in a constant state of animation, much like the objects (both microscopic and gargantuan) that he studies.

You say time doesn’t flow, but our subjective perception is that it does. Where do we go wrong?

It certainly feels to us like time is flowing. Yet that’s not the only way of looking at this reality. I could say that 10 to the power of 29 particles constitute me, and they are moving around in some very complicated patterns. Einstein pointed out that the most elegant way of describing this mathematically is to say, Let’s look at where each particle is in the three-dimensional space at each time, and draw this in a four-dimensional spacetime, where time is the fourth dimension.

If I have a particle that is part of my knee, which hasn’t moved, that particle corresponds to a line. At all times, it’s at the same place. If I look at a particle that’s part of a red blood cell, which has been constantly orbiting around my circulatory system, it’s making a super fascinating shape in spacetime. If I look at all my red blood cells together, they would make a braid pattern, making this incredible tangle in spacetime. If you look at the electron in my brain while I’m thinking, it’s even more complicated. But it’s still just a four-dimensional pattern. So I can either say that reality is a complicated pattern of four dimensions, or I could say it’s this stuff that feels like it’s changing and moving around. Which is more fundamental? Which is more correct? These are just two different ways of describing the same thing.

 

It’s funny how physics, like any field, has a small number of hot-button issues that people get very emotional about

 

Is it part of the scientist’s job to explain why things feel the way they do?

We’ve seen a lot of examples of how things feel very different from the way they look in the equations. I would argue that almost all of the big breakthroughs in physics have this as their most difficult element. If you rewind to when Einstein came up with special relativity, you would find people like Lorentz and Minkowski had already written down a lot of the math. But Einstein was the guy who managed to figure out what it was going to feel like. He said if these are the equations, the way it’s going to feel is if you go near the speed of light, you’re going to feel time slowing down. And people said, Whoa, that’s really weird! Then they did the experiment and it’s correct. I had a fun conversation with physicist David Wineland. He told me that he’d built two atomic clocks that are super precise, and put one of them one foot below the other, and was able to measure that it runs slower!

Then quantum mechanics came along. It’s so complicated people still argue about it 100 years later! The math, though, is beautiful and clean. Randomness is fundamentally an illusion because there is no randomness in the math, even though it might feel random. I’m saying the same thing about time. Even though the flow of time is fundamentally an illusion, there is nothing flowing about the math, the equations aren’t changing, there is just a single four-dimensional pattern, albeit a very complicated and beautiful one, in spacetime. If you study it carefully, you’ll realize it’s going to feel like a flow of time. As physicists, that’s ultimately what we need to explain: Why does everything feel the way it does? We shouldn’t be so naive as to think that things will always feel the way they actually are, because the history of physics is a long sequence of examples of where we realize that the ultimate nature of things is very different from how they feel.

If time doesn’t flow, how do we understand the second law of thermodynamics, which says that time flows in the direction of increasing entropy?

It’s funny how physics, just like any field, has a small number of hot-button issues that people get very emotional about. Time and specifically the so-called second law of thermodynamics is one of them. It’s a simple statement that on average things keep getting messier. That lets you define the direction of time. But there has been a lot of controversy about it. On the one hand, there are people like Arthur Eddington, who tend to view this as almost a holy principle. It’s sacred and shouldn’t ever be questioned. He has this famous line where he says, Well, all sorts of things might turn out to be wrong, but if some theorist ever challenges the second law of thermodynamics, then too bad for that theorist, because there’s no hope for him other than the utmost humiliation! On the other hand, a lot of other people say, Look, we shouldn’t have any holy cows in physics, everything must be questioned, including the second law of thermodynamics.

 

It’s like the ending of Life of Brian, where they say, “You come from nothing, you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost?”

 

What’s questionable about the second law of thermodynamics?

It’s turned out you can derive the second law of thermodynamics from more fundamental things. Let’s say I did something clumsy like spill water on the carpet. If I played a video of it backward, and you saw the water come off the carpet and go into the bottle, it would look totally wrong. But if you just zoom in and look at the motion of the particles flying through the other particles of the air, it would look perfectly reasonable backward, just like a bunch of bowling balls bouncing the other way. After 100 years of thinking about this, we’ve come to realize the explanation is surprising. It has to do with what happened 13.8 billion years ago. The reason our universe keeps getting messier is because it started in a tidy state yesterday, which was even tidier the day before, and even tidier 13.8 billion years ago.

Why did the universe start in such a tidy state?

What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium; de Sitter space, as we call it—there will be no sense of time anymore. There will nothing you can do to determine whether time is going one way or the other. Time will then have un-emerged again. It will be like the poem, This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

What if I looked at my wristwatch then? Would it tick forward?

There wouldn’t be a wristwatch because all the atoms, or all the protons in your wristwatch, would’ve decayed. All the particles that had decayed would’ve left the cosmic horizon. If there were a wristwatch, and it’s functioning, there will be a sense of time and change. But just like there hasn’t always been a wristwatch, there will not necessarily always be one.

How is measuring time related to the existence of time?

It sounds crass to say that time is what we measure with a clock. But it is a very deep fact that if there are no clocks—bearing in mind that every atom is a clock, in the sense that something is going around something else, which you can think of as a clock—then it’s not change which has gone but the whole ability to define time, and the whole ability to perceive time will also be gone. So in that way, time could’ve emerged from nothing, and might also go back to nothing. It’s like the ending of one of my favorite movies, Life of Brian, with Monty Python, where they say, “You come from nothing, you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!” Well, we’ll see!

 

 

Original article here

10 Aug 2024
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Why You Can Smell Rain

When those first fat drops of summer rain fall to the hot, dry ground, have you ever noticed a distinctive odor? I have childhood memories of family members who were farmers describing how they could always “smell rain” right before a storm.

Of course rain itself has no scent. But moments before a rain event, an “earthy” smell known as petrichor does permeate the air. People call it musky, fresh – generally pleasant.

This smell actually comes from the moistening of the ground. Australian scientists first documented the process of petrichor formation in 1964 and scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology further studied the mechanics of the process in the 2010s.

Petrichor is a combination of fragrant chemical compounds. Some are from oils made by plants. The main contributor to petrichor are actinobacteria. These tiny microorganisms can be found in rural and urban areas as well as in marine environments. They decompose dead or decaying organic matter into simple chemical compounds which can then become nutrients for developing plants and other organisms.

A byproduct of their activity is an organic compound called geosmin which contributes to the petrichor scent. Geosmin is a type of alcohol, like rubbing alcohol. Alcohol molecules tend to have a strong scent, but the complex chemical structure of geosmin makes it especially noticeable to people even at extremely low levels. Our noses can detect just a few parts of geosmin per trillion of air molecules.

During a prolonged period of dryness when it has not rained for several days, the decomposition activity rate of the actinobacteria slows down. Just before a rain event, the air becomes more humid and the ground begins to moisten. This process helps to speed up the activity of the actinobacteria and more geosmin is formed.

When raindrops fall on the ground, especially porous surfaces such as loose soil or rough concrete, they will splatter and eject tiny particles called aerosols. The geosmin and other petrichor compounds that may be present on the ground or dissolved within the raindrop are released in aerosol form and carried by the wind to surrounding areas. If the rainfall is heavy enough, the petrichor scent can travel rapidly downwind and alert people that rain is soon on the way.

The scent eventually goes away after the storm has passed and the ground begins to dry. This leaves the actinobacteria lying in wait – ready to help us know when it might rain again.

 

 

Original article here

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