DailyDirt: Living Longer And Longer

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The fountain of youth has been an elusive solution to the problem of aging. Sure, there are plenty of drawbacks to staying young forever, but living longer seems to be an ongoing trend, so if everyone is living longer anyway, we might as well try to stay young for as long as possible, right? Here are just a few interesting stories about getting really old.

• Stanford economists report that the decreases in death rates are improving more for people over 70 years old, rather than for kids or teenagers. So planning to retire early might not work out so well.... [url]
• Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov is trying to get other billionaires to pony up some research funds for a project that's aiming for cybernetic immortality for humans by 2045. This sounds like the plot of a bad summer action movie, so maybe they can finance part of the project by selling the movie rights to the story. [url]
• Calorie restricted diets were proposed as a possible way to living longer, but apparently it might not be such an effective regime. A 25-year study on rhesus monkeys shows that caloric restriction doesn't necessarily lead to longer lifespans. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: aging, death, health, immortality, life, life extension, lifespan, living longer