Gradually and then suddenly. That's how the character Mike Campbell in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises answers the question: "How did you go bankrupt?" It turns out that the same answer applies to the question, "How did you get so old?" We know that time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future. What researchers are now learning is that, as it relates to human aging, time also occasionally leaps, surges, and accelerates. Actually, time isn't going faster. It's just that we're slowing down. Ironically, the only thing we can do more quickly as we age is age. In short, midlife is a crisis. "In a new study, scientists at Stanford University tracked age-related changes in over 135,000 types of molecules and microbes, sampled from over 100 adults. They discovered that shifts in their abundance — either increasing or decreasing in number — did not occur gradually over time, but clustered around two ages." WaPo (Gift Article): Feeling old? Your molecules change rapidly around ages 44 and 60. (I have a feeling my molecules are more precocious than most.) 2Whatcha Got?"The symptoms belonged to a broad spectrum of neurological disorders, but there was always something starkly atypical about the patients’ presentation. Their decline was too swift, or not swift enough; they lacked key indicators of a particular disease; or they failed to respond to known therapies, a hallmark of how neurologists diagnose conditions." NYT Mag (Gift Article): They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why. "Doctors in Canada have identified dozens of patients with similar, unexplained symptoms — a scientific puzzle that has now become a political maelstrom." 3The Fiber That Binds Us"At a glance, optical fiber looks like plastic fishing line, but there’s a lot more to it. It’s actually thin strands of extremely pure glass — silicon dioxide — that are flexible enough to be bundled into cables that can bend and loop. In the first step of the manufacturing process, which engineers call laydown, glass is crystallized into a fluffy solid form, like how cotton candy is spun on a stick." It's hard to imagine something that is spun like cotton candy but that gives people and even more addictive rush. But here we are. WaPo (Gift on Article) on the fiber that connects us. How the World Wide Web gets spun out of thin air. 4Floor Exorcism"What a legal lark to be a CAS judge and to lord it over athletes with rulings such as the banning of a Jamaican hammer thrower for a technical failure in her entry paperwork committed during a hurricane outage. Or, in the case of Gharavi, the stripping of gymnast Chiles’s bronze medal over an alleged four-second lapse by U.S. officials in filing a scoring appeal on her behalf, so you can give it to your longtime legal client, Romania, that trove of billable hours." Sally Jenkins: The push to strip Jordan Chiles of her Olympic medal smells awfully foul. "The court that ruled against Jordan Chiles is a hive of cronies and insiders, established and steered by the IOC and various sports federations as cover." 5Extra, ExtraA Pox in the Henhouse: "Since the beginning of this year, more than 17,000 cases and more than 500 deaths have been reported in 13 countries in Africa, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which classifies the outbreak as a 'very high risk event.'" WHO declares mpox outbreak a global health emergency. 6Bottom of the News"The amount of methamphetamine in each candy was up to 300 times the level someone would usually take and could be lethal, according to the New Zealand Drug Foundation — a drug checking and policy organization, which first tested the candies." New Zealand food bank unknowingly distributed meth in candy.
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