science

The Biology of Why We Age—And Whether We Have to For most of human history, aging was fate. You were born, you grew, you declined, you died. The trajectory was fixed. The timeline might vary—disease, accident, fortune—but the direction never did. Entropy always won. That story is

Series: Microbiome Revolution | Part: 8 of 8 Primary Tag: FRONTIER SCIENCE Keywords: microbiome, holobiont, coherence, ecosystem, health, symbiosis Walt Whitman wrote, "I contain multitudes." He meant it philosophically. He didn't know how literally true it was. You are 37 trillion human cells and 38 trillion bacterial

In 1864, French physiologist Paul Bert stitched two rats together. Not metaphorically. He surgically joined them so they shared a circulatory system—blood flowing from one animal into the other and back. He called it parabiosis, from the Greek for "living beside." Bert was interested in physiology, not

In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka did something that shouldn't have been possible. He took adult mouse skin cells—fully differentiated, committed to their fate—and turned them back into embryonic-like stem cells. Four genes. That's all it took. Four transcription factors, now called the Yamanaka factors, could

David Sinclair is either the most important longevity researcher of our time or a very effective salesman of supplements. Possibly both. The Harvard geneticist has built his career around a simple claim: aging is not an inevitable decay but an information problem that can be addressed. The central mechanism, in

Series: Longevity Science | Part: 3 of 7 Primary Tag: FRONTIER SCIENCE Keywords: senolytics, senescent cells, SASP, dasatinib, quercetin, aging, fisetin In 2011, researchers at Mayo Clinic did something remarkable. They engineered mice with a genetic kill switch—a system that let them selectively destroy one type of cell throughout the