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  • A younger face -- NOW?

    Scientists have developed a new technique for rejuvenating skin cells. This technique using "Yamanaka" factors has allowed researchers to rewind the cellular biological clock by around 30 years according to molecular measures, significantly longer than previous reprogramming methods. The partially rejuvenated cells showed signs of behaving more like youthful cells in experiments simulating a skin wound. This research, although in early stages, could eventually have implications for regenerative medicine. It has already been replicated in other cell types, notably the heart muscle.

  • Avocados are heartful

    A 30-year study of more than 110,000 health professionals found that participan ts who ate at least two servings of avocado a week had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those who rarely ate avocados. Replacing animal products like butter, cheese or bacon with avocado was also associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease events.

  • Coffee: longer life!

    Good news for coffee lovers: According to the American College of Cardiology -- drinking coffee -- particularly two to three cups a day -- is not only associated with a lower risk of heart disease and dangerous heart rhythms but also with living longer, according to recent studies. These trends held true for both people with and without cardiovascular disease. Researchers said the analyses -- the largest to look at coffee's potential role in heart disease and death -- provide reassurance that coffee isn't tied to new or worsening heart disease and may actually be heart protective.

  • Cognitive decline is not inevitable

    "Cognitive decline is not inevitable," says senior author Henne Holstege, PhD, assistant professor, Amsterdam Alzheimer Center and Clinical Genetics, Amsterdam University Medical Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, talking to Medscape Medical News."At 100 years or older, high levels of cognitive performance can be maintained for several years, even when individuals are exposed to risk factors associated with cognitive decline," she said. Read the article on WebMD. You're never too old to rock 'n roll. It's called "neoteny" -- and if you don't know what this read my book. You can be "old" and stupid at 30. "Young" and smart at a 100.

  • A dog or cat is your brain's best friend

    Owning a pet, like a dog or cat, especially for five years or longer, may be linked to slower cognitive decline in older adults, according to a preliminary study released today, February 23, 2022 as an article in Science Direct

  • Drink coffee to live longer?

    Coffee and longevity – debate continues By Dr. Ananya Mandal 3 cups and you live longer. 6 cups and you die earlier.

  • Psychology Today: ADHD an evolutionary advantage?

    Peter Gray Ph.D. The ADHD Personality: A Normal and Valuable Human Variation We are a highly social species. Never in our evolution as humans did we survive on our own, as separate individuals. We always depended on our cooperative relationships with others, and the same is true today. From this point of view, it is not surprising that natural selection would have supported a broad range of personality types. People of different personalities are well adapted to make different kinds of contributions to the community (and, thereby, also to themselves). Ideally, they would all be valued for the unique contributions they can make and would be helped by others in their areas of weakness. Certainly this was true in hunter-gatherer bands, and we see it operating today within healthy families, tight-knit friendship groups, and well-run businesses. The dimension of control versus impulsivity is, I suggest, one of the most obvious and important dimensions of normal, healthy personality variation. In the course of our evolution, it was valuable that some of us were relatively more controlled and reflective while others of us were relatively less controlled and more action-oriented than the majority.

  • The Return of ADHD?

    Today, digital networks and AI are socially centrifugal, decentralizing social systems. "Cancel" culture and efforts by Big Tech and governments to control the Internet confirm rather than deny this expressing a reactionary need to control and regiment the tendency towards anarchistic autonomies--people opting out of the "system". ADHD genes were useful for hunters in small-group, egalitarian, non-hierarchical Paleolithic societies but not for the "civilizations" that emerged in the Neolithic, which demanded conformity, not invention.. Were ADHD genes selected out? Or suppressed epigenetically? In any case, the number of people with DrD4 R7 dropped drastically from as much as 30% to less than 3% In the last decade there as been a huge increase in the percentage of people diagnosed to well over 10%. DrD4 R7 is back. Why? We need creativity, innovation, spontaneity and engagement with reality as well as normativity. --JM ADHD & the Return of the Hunter Pete Turner (Excerpt) "My grandmother ... that there is a tendency in today’s society to give labels to everyone who has a certain kind of personality. But large groups of people cannot so easily be lumped into one category, despite our love to order and ‘box’ things. In reality, ADHD is just a term given to people that seem to exhibit many characteristics that themselves are toward a certain end of a spectrum. "

  • Ageing is Sageing

    People with less memory loss in old age gain more knowledge New findings on cognitive development in adulthood February 3, 2022 Max Planck Institute for Human Development Do cognitive abilities change together, or do they change independently of each other? Researchers present new findings. Yes, the brain keeps on developing.

  • Science Daily: huge increase in ADHD among girls

    New report finds 43 percent increase in ADHD diagnosis for US schoolchildren Girls showed a sharp rise in ADHD diagnosis during eight-year study period Date: December 8, 2015 Source: George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health : Twelve percent of US children and teens had a diagnosis of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in 2011, a number that has jumped by 43 percent since 2003, according to a large national study based on parental reports of an ADHD diagnosis.

  • The "Slut" Gene?

    ADHD. The Slut Gene? "Neurodivergence is a grab bag of "cognitive conditions", once considered "abnormal" but now in these Woke times called "disorders", to be "treated" by drugs (all hail Big Pharma) or through therapy (if you have the money and the time), with the promise of living a “normal” life, whatever that is. "Neurodivergence" includes everything from Tourette's to epilepsy to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to ASD and ADHD, with the last two most newsworthy since Elon Musk claimed to be an “Aspie”. Sex is in your jeans, but in the case of ADHD it’s in your genes. DrD4 R7 There is no scientific consensus on this but the culprit seems to be the DrD4 R7 allele. It has been called the "Slut Gene" because people with it can be hypersexual if not polyamorous. Big words meaning: they get laid a lot. Why? If you read my book, you know that the answer lies in human evolution. Should you be ashamed of what comes naturally? Hunters and gatherers lived in small bands of 25 to 30 people—the optimum Dunbar number for engagement and cooperation in any group—then and also now. Our ancestors avoided inbreeding, as wolves do, with the young, leaving for neighboring bands, easy to do since several bands generally shared one territory, cooperating for big hunts—and, if successful, big feasts—with singing, dancing-- and lots of gratuitous sex. Today, we have Spring Break. “Evolutionary psychologists” like Stephen Pinker, say our ancestors were brutal and violent, always at war with their neighbors. That’s nonsense—as is most of what Pinker writes. Popular – but still intellectual posturing. Equality and Dual Mating What distinguishes Homo Sapiens is not a capacity for violence but our unique social nature, leveraging empathy and altruism and a need for play. Early humans were the first hippies. Peace and love and parties. We are puppies not attack dogs. Back 35,000 years ago, everyone in a band of 25 was a "chief" -- women were equal to men and made their own choices. Besides one night stands at prehistoric wine and dine parties, women often sought out genetically fit partners during oestrus, when their perception of sexual attractiveness changed. Form triumphs over content; the moment over tomorrow. This is known as the “Dual Mating Strategy”, among its various names and social anthropologists and psychologists hate it. No doubt because they aren’t getting any. The scientific debate aside, studies show large percentage of children today have fathers different from the one they regards as “Dad ”. And when today’s women have one nighters they usually do it during oestrus, or when they come off the pill, when hormone levels change. It's more about optics than compatibility. The first time your eyes meet, you melt. The next day...oh...WTF! Psychologist Calcida Jethra co-author of Sex At Dawn says, “Darwin says your mother’s a whore. Simple as that.” As with Bonobos, sex is a social lubricant. (Pun intended). But what turns us on in fantasy or in a mad moment is not the same as what we want for a long-term companion, which is more about caring and sharing. Neanderthals by contrast were not as social –and became inbred, which is likely why they died out. Then came Climate Change But then came climate change, which as today, generates social evolution. We invented agriculture to cope. With that came notions of property, large scale society, first tribes, then civilizations and of course “work”, which is, of course, a four letter word, although not one known to our ancestors. Many of these new societies went so far as to mutilate women’s sexual organs to prevent them expressing their true, profoundly sexual nature. Gotta keep those bloodlines pure. In Western countries, we just mutilate young girls psychologically. "Don't touch THAT-- it's not NICE". However, ADHD people and Aspergers interact with reality and feelings in a very immediate way, often with very low latent inhibition which means "filtering" perception through social norms. That includes sexual feeling, of course. But while 30 to 50% of people in Paleo societies carried the genes of ADHD and Asperger’s which conferred advantages for the survival of their groups, what we need today is conformity and malleability. So, we preselect genetically and now just 5 and 10% of children are born with DrD4 R7. The “Slut Gene” means more testosterone, which among other things generates sexual feeling women. Why do you feel horny after a glass of wine. The wine generates testosterone, Dear. The Genius Gene and more But DrD4 R7 does whole lot more than that, thanks to low latent inhibition. It is also the Genius Gene , enabling creativity. Every genius has it. It’s the Wanderlust Gene because people tired of same-old, same-old just move around. It is the Adventure Gene because you high on challenge and adrenaline. It is the Longevity Gene since upwards of 70% of centenarians -- have it. Curiosity, activity, humor and living in the moment are the keys to survival under any conditions. The gifts conferred by ADHD were essential to survival for hunters and gatherers. But do not play well in our highly regimented societies, which value order and control above all else. Asperger's Asperger's could be linked to ADHD. Or a form autism. Genetically it’s associated with GABRB3 which ma enable hyper empathy --and hyper altruism—as is with Julian Assange and Greta Thunberg . The "lack of empathy" conventionally ascribed to ASD is actually oversensitivity to other's feelings and or the alienation of “not fitting in" ​ Most ADHD and Asperger’s’ “symptoms” are really a caused by a clash between nature and nurture, being forced to conform to inherently “abnormal” and unnatural values. If you have ADHD and /or Asperger’s as I do, people will often just tell you to “grow up”. Don’t. That’s just another way of saying “fit”. You will be happier and make the world a better place. Just keep in mind that you are not superior in any way to “normal”, who are just more capable to adapting to a crazy world. They have things you lack-- just as you have things they lack. You need each other as much today as you did 35,000 years ago. Sources: Prehistoric humans are likely to have formed mating networks to avoid inbreeding -- ScienceDaily Genetic Analysis Shows Early Humans Avoided Inbreeding, Incest (inverse.com) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-16999-6_238-1 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00502/full https://www.verdict.co.uk/drd4-7r-wanderlust-gene/ https://www.psychologytoday.cofm/us/blog/blame-the-amygdala/201909/the-curious-personality-the-drd4-7r-allele https://kennethrobersonphd.com/aspergers-syndrome-problem-empathy/ https://www.aane.org/emotions-and-empathy/#:~:text=In%20addition%2C%20some%20individuals%20with,than%20with%20the%20general%20population.

  • A universal vaccine?

    Get angry! You are being fucked. And you probably don’t even know it. Wikipedia has recently published a new article on COVID variants. Read it. It supports what I wrote a lot earlier – that what we call “COVID” is not one thing but a whole family of viruses, each with different characteristics and varying degrees of infectivity and lethality, with probable origins in earlier SAR CoV viruses Despite what the mainstream media says, the newest addition to the family—Omicron-- is not the end of the Pandemic; nor does presage a return to “Normal”, whatever that is. Nor is it necessarily any less harmful overall. Early on we knew a lot less about coronaviruses. Our present vaccines are therefore based on an outdated and partial understanding: they are really immunological band aids. What is needed is a coordinated scientific effort to produce a vaccine that works for ALL variants and provides 100% protection against infection. Is a “universal vaccine” possible? Is a universal vaccine possible? Yes. That has been the scientific consensus for a long time. Virologist Linfa Wang who works out of Duke-NUS Medical School has been studying bat-borne viruses for literally decades. When Wang studied vaccinated survivors of SARS CoV 1, he discovered they had developed something like “super antibodies” that protected them against, as far as he could see, ALL zoonotic coronaviruses. Prof Tomohiro Kurosaki, from the WPI Immunology Frontier Research Centre at Osaka University in Japan agrees. And so does the US Army, which is already working on such a vaccine. So, what’s the holdup? Simply the greed of Big Pharma. A lot of rich people have become a lot richer peddling vaccines that are effective against a limited range of variants, for just a few months. A universal vaccine would kill their cash cow. Although the US taxpaper-funded the development of mRNA technologies, Pfizer and Moderna own the patents and they just aren’t going to share, leaving the rest of the world to create their own stopgap measures. The Duke researchers asked for grant way back in 2020 to create a universal vaccine: it was refused because somebody somewhere “didn’t see the need” . Now, two years later, Fauci and the CDC are coming out in favor of a universal vaccine. Duke has finally got its grant. A lot of people died while Duke was waiting. But that wasn’t why they got the grant. The uncharitable will say that it was because Fauci felt it was time to cash in his stock options in Pfizer and Moderna. Why won't you get a universal vaccine for another million deaths? The real reason is geo-political -- if the US doesn’t develop such as a vaccine someone else will. God forbid that the Chinese or the Cubans or the Russians do it – and provide it free worldwide. Of course, they are already working on it. They are behind in mRNA R&D but they are catching up – fast. The US can probably have the WHO delay certification of vaccines created outside the Empire, as they have with the current Russian and Cuban vaccines but what if they are created by an “ally” like Japan or Israel? In the meantime, we have to deal with Omicron, the most infectious virus to date. The media are peddling the story that it is no big deal. That’s propaganda. Omicron is still dangerous -- it will still kill immunocompromised people or the “Co-Morbid”. Worse, it is already flooding hospitals, making it difficult for people with other conditions to get treatment. AND – we have yet to discover the long-term effects of coronaviruses on biological function and longevity. Your symptoms may be mild or non-existent. But that doesn’t mean you are not damaged. Get angry. If you don't nothing changes. Rage, rage against the dying.

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