Category Archives: Human Longevity

Marie (Zoe Derauf) and her magical toy in "Loyce Houlton's Nutcracker Fantasy." (Courtesy photo: Jim Smith)

So pervasive are productions of "The Nutcracker" on Twin Cities stages this time of year that it's easy to forget that it was still something of a novelty when Minnesota Dance Theatre founder Loyce Houlton created her own version in 1964. While many a dance company makes the ballet an annual tradition, "Loyce Houlton's Nutcracker Fantasy" has them all beat for longevity.

And this year's version of the "Nutcracker Fantasy" still summons up a lot of magic. On opening night Friday at Minneapolis' State Theatre, the Minnesota Dance Theatre company and a few dozen guest artists and MDT trainees presented a production full of sparkle and grace. The Christmas party of the first act swirled with energy and excitement, the colorfully rendered setting bursting with color and movement.

However, the performance lost some momentum in the second act, when the choreography was often far too safe and unspectacular to match the passion that poured forth from Pyotr Tchaikovsky's score as played by a 44-piece orchestra under Philip Brunelle's direction. But things always took an elegant turn whenever Kevin Iverson appeared onstage as Godfather Drosselmayer. He's the magnetic maker of magical toys who leads young Marie (a consistently impressive Zoe Derauf) on her dreamy odyssey to a dessert-laden landscape. There, she's joined by her now human-size nutcracker, beautifully danced by Zachary Manske.

Iverson's every flowing movement was impressively synchronized with Tchaikovsky's music. Opening the ballet amid a slanted, enchanted village (a delightful design by James Guenther), Drosselmayer is soon sending human-size dolls off to a party with a sharp crack drill squad of rifle-toting soldiers, human marionettes manipulated by invisible strings, and dozens of dancers taking a shift in the spotlight.

The international assembly of dancers that entertains Marie and her prince proves a mixed bag. While Katie Deuitch and Chris Hannon offer a lovely hybrid of ballet and flamenco as the Spanish couple, neither the Arabian nor Chinese dances ask much of the performers. In some versions, these are the most thrilling dances in the ballet, but they were too simple to be satisfying. The lone excitement comes from the lithe, leaping Russians, Serena Lu giving the proceedings a needed shot of adrenaline with her twirling, tumbling performance.

The grand pas de deux of Act 2 can similarly provide an explosion of emotion with its surging strains and lovely lifts, but Houlton's choreography proved disappointingly conservative, although impeccably executed by Katie Johnson and Sam Feipel, their solos far more intriguing than their duets. But one can find plenty of outstanding ensemble work in the "Dance of the Commedia Dell'Arte" and "Waltz of the Flowers."

This production is at its best when creating a kind of three-ring circus of a ballet, something interesting always happening somewhere onstage. Such scenes feel like the ballet equivalent of a sugar rush, something of which we could use more as it winds to a close.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at rhubbard@pioneerpress.com.

Who: Minnesota Dance Theatre

Read more:
Review: Loyce Houlton's 'Nutcracker' retains its energy

The word "longevity" is sometimes used as a synonym for "life expectancy" in demography - however, the term "longevity" is sometimes meant to refer only to especially long lived members of a population, whereas "life expectancy" is always defined statistically as the average number of years remaining at a given age. For example, a population's life expectancy at birth is the same as the average age at death for all people born in the same year (in the case of cohorts). Longevity is best thought of as a term for general audiences meaning 'typical length of life' and specific statistical definitions should be clarified when necessary.

Reflections on longevity have usually gone beyond acknowledging the brevity of human life and have included thinking about methods to extend life. Longevity has been a topic not only for the scientific community but also for writers of travel, science fiction, and utopian novels.

There are many difficulties in authenticating the longest human life span ever by modern verification standards, owing to inaccurate or incomplete birth statistics. Fiction, legend, and folklore have proposed or claimed life spans in the past or future vastly longer than those verified by modern standards, and longevity narratives and unverified longevity claims frequently speak of their existence in the present.

A life annuity is a form of longevity insurance.

A remarkable statement mentioned by Diogenes Laertius (c. 250 AD) is the earliest (or at least one of the earliest) references about plausible centenarian longevity given by a scientist, the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicea (c. 185 c. 120 BC), who, according to the doxographer, was assured that the philosopher Democritus of Abdera (c. 470/460 c. 370/360 BC) lived 109 years. All other accounts given by the ancients about the age of Democritus appear, without giving any specific age, to agree that the philosopher lived over 100 years. This possibility is likely, given that many ancient Greek philosophers are thought to have lived over the age of 90 (e.g., Xenophanes of Colophon, c. 570/565 c. 475/470 BC, Pyrrho of Ellis, c. 360 c. 270 BC, Eratosthenes of Cirene, c. 285 c. 190 BC, etc.). The case of Democritus is different from the case of, for example, Epimenides of Crete (7th, 6th centuries BC), who is said to have lived 154, 157 or 290 years, as has been said about countless elders even during the last centuries as well as in the present time.

Various factors contribute to an individual's longevity. Significant factors in life expectancy include gender, genetics, access to health care, hygiene, diet and nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, and crime rates. Below is a list of life expectancies in different types of countries:[3]

Population longevities are increasing as life expectancies around the world grow:[3][4]

The Gerontology Research Group validates current longevity records by modern standards, and maintains a list of supercentenarians; many other unvalidated longevity claims exist. Record-holding individuals include:

Evidence-based studies indicate that longevity is based on two major factors, genetics and lifestyle choices.[5] Twin studies have estimated that approximately 20-30% of an individuals lifespan is related to genetics, the rest is due to individual behaviors and environmental factors which can be modified.[6] Although over 200 gene variants have been, according to the LongevityMap database,[7] associated with human longevity, these explain only a small fraction of the heritability of longevity.[8] Recent studies find that even modest amounts of leisure time physical exercise can extend life expectancy by as much as 4.5 years.[9]

In preindustrial times, deaths at young and middle age were common, and lifespans over 70 years were comparatively rare. This is not due to genetics, but because of environmental factors such as disease, accidents, and malnutrition, especially since the former were not generally treatable with pre-20th century medicine. Deaths from childbirth were common in women, and many children did not live past infancy. In addition, most people who did attain old age were likely to die quickly from the above-mentioned untreatable health problems. Despite this, we do find a large number of examples of pre-20th century individuals attaining lifespans of 75 years or greater, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Cato the Elder, Thomas Hobbes, Eric of Pomerania, Christopher Polhem, and Michelangelo. This was also true for poorer people like peasants or laborers. Genealogists will almost certainly find ancestors living to their 70s, 80s and even 90s several hundred years ago.

See the rest here:
Longevity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The purpose of our studies: to understand the mechanisms of aging and longevity in order to extend healthy and productive human lifespan. This scientific and educational website contains over a hundred of scientific and reference documents relevant to longevity and aging studies. It is receiving about 1000 visits per day from many prestigious organizations including the US Library of Congress, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and from the Royal Society - the UK National Academy of Science. This website is rated as the top # 1 website on longevity science topic in such major search engines as Google, Yahoo!, Alltheweb, etc. (when searching for longevity science term).Breaking News:

Table of Contents:

Dr. Natalia S. Gavrilova Center on Aging NORC at theUniversity of Chicago 1155 East 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637-2745 Fax: (773) 256-6313 Phone: (773) 702-1375 E-mail: Brief Biographical Sketch, NIH Biosketch Detailed Curriculum Vitae Resume Expertise Profile Statement of Research Interests

We also maintain close scientific contacts with Dr. Bruce A. Carnes at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Yulia Kushnareva at Burnham Institute, La Jolla, CA

What we have found and published:

Available at:

THE RELIABILITY THEORY OF AGING AND LONGEVITY Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2001, 213(4): 527-545. Abstract To download full text click here For Press Release click here For Media Coverage click here

Read the rest here:
Longevity Science: Unraveling the Secrets of Human Longevity ...

Retirees bowl in Sun City, Ariz., at America's first active retirement community. Human longevity is a confluence of so many factors interacting in so many complex ways, making it unlikely that there will ever be a surefire way to live to 120.

Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

In an age of breakneck technological and scientific progress, it can seem at times like anythings possible. Cars are driving themselves. Robots are tooling around Mars, taking pictures, and beaming them back to Earth. People are moving things with their minds.

For all the exponential advances, though, some technologies remain firmly in the realm of science fiction. We cant engineer genius babies. Were never getting our hoverboards. And, perhaps most dispiritingly of all, we havent figured out a way to cheat death.

It isnt for lack of trying. Research centers around the world have teams devoted to the study of human longevity, and scientists have been working furiously for years to uncover the secrets of long life in everything from mice to yeast to hydra. In fact, theyre making a lot of progress, and theres good reason to be optimistic that theyll someday hit on a breakthrough that will allow people to live significantly longer than they do today. But if youre sitting around waiting for the singularity, you might want to stand up and go for a jog instead.

Recent headlines make it seem like the cure for old age is just around the corner. Brain Experiment Could Give You an Extra 20 Years, one promised. Telomerase reverses ageing process, another declared. Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality? asked the New York Times Magazine. And National Geographics May cover featured a beaming infant and a tantalizing claim: This baby will live to be 120*. You might think the asterisk would point to a disclaimer, but its a fakeout: The disclaimer reads, Its not just hype. New science could lead to very long lives.

Sadly, such bold predictions are in fact mostly hype, says Jay Olshansky, a gerontologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The story was great, Olshansky said of the National Geographic piece, which detailed the rapidly growing body of scientific research on the genetic and molecular mechanisms involved in the aging process. But the titles all wrong. They shouldnt be making up numbers like that. So far, only one person has verifiably lived to be 120, and no one since the year 2000 has even come close.

The legitimate good news is that scientists are finally starting to tackle the problem of aging in a serious way, and some of their early findings are encouraging. Whereas medical research has focused for centuries on finding the causes and cures of specific diseases, a new crop of researchers is taking a different approach. Theyre looking for the mechanisms involved in the aging process itself. The thinking is that if you focus on curing just one disease, like diabetes, people will simply die from cancer or a stroke instead. But if you can figure out what makes the body more vulnerable to a broad range of diseases with each passing year, the impact on human health and longevity could be far greater. Olshansky calls this the longevity dividend.

Key to this quest are a number of long-running studies of specific populations of especially long-lived people. In rural Ecuador, researchers have pinpointed a genetic mutation that appears to make an isolated group of villagers unusually small of staturebut also less vulnerable to cancer and diabetes. In Hawaii, studies of Japanese-American centenarians pointed to variations in a gene called FOX03 that has also been tied to longevity in other species. And studies of centenarian Ashkenazi Jews in New York City homed in on the apparent genetic source of their unusually high levels of good cholesterol, which seems to fight heart disease. Several of the genes and mechanisms identified in these studies have been shown to affect the aging process in lab experiments on mice and other species.

The New York study is helmed by Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He told me hes optimistic that a breakthrough in understanding human aging could be on the horizon, given the pace of recent discoveries. But he also pointed out some obstacles.

See more here:
Human longevity: Research on animals and centenarians shows ...

John R. Wilmoth, Director

University of California, Berkeley

Vladimir Shkolnikov, Co-Director

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) was created to provide detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity. The project began as an outgrowth of earlier projects in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany (see history). It is the work of two teams of researchers in the USA and Germany (see research teams), with the help of financial backers and scientific collaborators from around the world (see acknowledgements).

We seek to provide open, international access to these data. At present the database contains detailed population and mortality data for the following 37 countries or areas:

For more information, please begin by reading an overview of the database. If you have comments or questions, or trouble gaining access to the data, please write to us (hmd@mortality.org).

View post:
Human Mortality Database

Biodemography is a multidisciplinary approach, integrating biological knowledge (studies on human biology and animal models) with demographic research on human longevity and survival. Biodemographic studies are important for understanding the driving forces of the current longevity revolution (dramatic increase in human life expectancy), forecasting the future of human longevity, and identification of new strategies for further increase in healthy and productive life span.

Biodemographic studies found a remarkable similarity in survival dynamics between humans and laboratory animals. Specifically, three general biodemographic laws of survival are found:

The Gompertz-Makeham law states that death rate is a sum of age-independent component (Makeham term) and age-dependent component (Gompertz function), which increases exponentially with age.

The Compensation law of mortality (late-life mortality convergence) states that the relative differences in death rates between different populations of the same biological species are decreasing with age, because the higher initial death rates are compensated by lower pace of their increase with age.

The Late-life mortality deceleration law states that death rates stop to increase exponentially at advanced ages and level-off to the late-life mortality plateau. An immediate consequence from this observation is that there is no fixed upper limit to human longevity there is no special fixed number, which separates possible and impossible values of lifespan. This challenges the common belief[1][2] in existence of a fixed maximal human life span.

Biodemographic studies found that even genetically identical laboratory animals kept in constant environment have very different lengths of life, suggesting a crucial role of chance and early-life developmental noise in longevity determination. This leads to new approaches in understanding causes of exceptional human longevity.

As for the future of human longevity, biodemographic studies found that evolution of human lifespan had two very distinct stages the initial stage of mortality decline at younger ages is now replaced by a new trend of preferential improvement of the oldest-old survival. This phenomenon invalidates methods of longevity forecasting based on extrapolation of long-term historical trends.

A general explanation of these biodemograhic laws of aging and longevity has been suggested based on system reliability theory.

See the article here:
Biodemography of human longevity - Wikipedia, the free ...

By Richard Halstead Marin Independent Journal

The Buck Institute sits nestled in the hills of Novato, California on Thursday, Mar. 28, 2013. (IJ photo/Frankie Frost)

A new study by scientists at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato suggests that it may be possible to extend life span far longer than previously thought.

Experimenting with nematodes, the researchers combined two techniques that have previously demonstrated effectiveness in increasing the life span of a variety of organisms in the laboratory: yeast, nematodes, flies and rodents. The results, which are reported in the current online edition of "Cell Reports," surprised them.

The worms lived to the human equivalent of 400 to 500 years, about five times longer than the scientists had expected.

"When we got this result, it was kind of a shock," said Pankaj Kapahi, the lead scientist on the study and a Buck faculty member.

Kapahi said in addition to implications for human life extension, the study's results could also lead to new approaches for battling age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Kapahi said the research suggests the possibility of employing combination therapies for aging in much the same way as is done for cancer and HIV.

One of the life extension techniques used in the experiment was the drug rapamycin, which is already licensed for use in humans.

"It was a well-known anti-cancer drug. Later on, it became clear it has life-extension effects," Kapahi said. "It also slows down a number of other age-related diseases."

Scientists discovered rapamycin's life-extension capability while searching for a drug that mimics the effects of caloric restriction, which had previously been identified as a means of extending life in laboratory studies.

Read the original post:
New Buck Institute study extends life span to human equivalent of 400 to 500 years

AXA Longevity-Pr. Stephen Coles: Is there an upper limit to human longevity?
To date, there are 90 known cases of people who are 110 or older, still alive and living somewhere in the world. An MD, Stephen Coles has specialised in the ...

By: axapeopleprotectors

Read the rest here:
AXA Longevity-Pr. Stephen Coles: Is there an upper limit to human longevity? - Video

Biology Of Human Longevity:
ll4.me Biology Of Human Longevity: EAN/ISBN : 9780080545943 Publisher(s): Elsevier Science, Academic Press Format: ePub/PDF Author(s): Finch, Caleb E. EAN/ISBN : 9780080545943 Publisher(s): Elsevier Science, Academic Press Format: ePub/PDF Author(s): Finch, Caleb E.From:NancyStrakaViews:0 0ratingsTime:00:13More inPeople Blogs

Read this article:
Biology Of Human Longevity: - Video

Sydney, Dec 23 (IANS) Bats are amazing creatures, which have survived for 65 million years against all odds, offering vital clues to immunity and human longevity, according to an Australian study.

"Bats are a natural reservoir for several lethal viruses, such as Hendra, Ebola and SARS, but they often don't succumb to disease from these viruses. They're also the only mammal that can fly, and they live a long time compared to animals similar in size," says Chris Cowled, post-doctoral fellow at the Australian Animal Health Lab (AAHL) in Geelong.

Cowled is part of the Bat Pack, a team of AAHL researchers, which conduct a wide range of research into bats and bat borne viruses, and their potential effects on the human population, the journal Science reports.

The Bat Pack, along with the Beijing Genome Institute, led a team that sequenced the genomes of two bat species -- the Black Flying Fox, an Australian mega bat, and the David's Myotis, a Chinese micro bat, according to an AAHL statement.

Cowled says the research may eventually lead to strategies to treat, or even prevent disease in humans.

"A deeper understanding of these evolutionary adaptations in bats may lead to better treatments for human diseases, and may eventually enable us to predict or perhaps even prevent outbreaks of emerging bat viruses," he said.

The rest is here:
Bats offer clues to immunity, longevity