What playfulness can do for you. Edwin de Vos and Dieter Reuther suggested the following interesting article from the Boston Globe, written by Leon Neyfakh. The adult human is a serious animal: a worker, a thinker, a problem solver. He or she strives for focus and efficiency, resisting frivolity in the name of being a grown-up and staying on task.
OK, so maybe that’s not always true. If it were, there probably wouldn’t be Ping-Pong tables popping up in America’s trendiest office buildings or karaoke nights in downtown Boston. And there probably wouldn’t be so many funny dog videos on Facebook or such a premium placed in social situations on making other people laugh. The fact is, even the most responsible adults occasionally indulge in what can only be described as playfulness: pursuing delight in all its forms, engaging in friendly, low-stakes competition, and investing precious resources in amusing themselves and others. It’s clear that playful people have a better time. Leon Neyfakh is the staff writer for Ideas. Scientists discover DNA body clock | Science. A US scientist has discovered an internal body clock based on DNA that measures the biological age of our tissues and organs.
The clock shows that while many healthy tissues age at the same rate as the body as a whole, some of them age much faster or slower. The age of diseased organs varied hugely, with some many tens of years "older" than healthy tissue in the same person, according to the clock. Researchers say that unravelling the mechanisms behind the clock will help them understand the ageing process and hopefully lead to drugs and other interventions that slow it down. Therapies that counteract natural ageing are attracting huge interest from scientists because they target the single most important risk factor for scores of incurable diseases that strike in old age.
Horvath looked at the DNA of nearly 8,000 samples of 51 different healthy and cancerous cells and tissues. "Does this relate to something that keeps track of age, or is a consequence of age? Why Does Hair Turn Gray? | Life's Little Mysteries. Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it. DNA trick throws ageing into reverse - health - 29 November 2010.
A technique to keep the tips of your chromosomes healthy could reverse tissue ageing. The work, which was done in mice, is yet more evidence of a causal link between chromosome length and age-related disease. Telomeres, the caps of DNA which protect the ends of chromosomes, shorten every time cells divide. But cells stop dividing and die when telomeres drop below a certain length – a normal part of ageing. The enzyme telomerase slows this degradation by adding new DNA to the ends of telomeres. Mariela Jaskelioff and her colleagues at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, engineered mice with short telomeres and inactive telomerase to see what would happen when they turned the enzyme back on. Four weeks after the team switched on the enzyme, they found that tissue had regenerated in several organs, new brain cells were developing and the mice were living longer.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09603 New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist. What Are the Odds?: Aging. PEOPLE OF HUNZA.