Nintil posts these days are born in a fairly traditional way. Papers are stashed and read, following citations to find more things to add to the stash. The stash is worked through, meaning being read and having sections and figures copy pasted for later search and use. No note-taking takes place; when getting into new domains I don't know what's relevant so I may try to keep track of too many things. Instead, I rely on volume to figure out what's relevant, and that same volume of reading leads to a built-in…

Laura Deming recently tweeted on the matter of this post, and I replied: Would say that no one.But would also say that progress of science tends to be from the high level and vague to the low level and concrete (and useful). Evolution doesn't cure disease, but the lats 20 years of discoveries in bio do.— José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente (@ArtirKel) August 13, 2020 To expand on my tweet, I wanted to think here about what would it mean for something to be a "Darwin-level insight". M…

I recorded a video summarising what is known about longevity, more or less condensing what I have in my FAQ plus my other reviews on immunosenscence or epigenetic clocks. You can access the video here and the slides I used are accessible from there as well.

Senescent cells are one of the hallmarks of aging and their elimination is being pursued for therapeutic purposes. The idea that cellular senescence cannot be reverted has been stated multiple times. Here's a selection of papers that show up in Google Scholar, each of which having being cited over a hundred times. Judith Campisi (2001) Because telomerase, the enzyme that can synthesize telomeric DNA de novo, is not expressed by most human cells, telomeres shorten with each cell cycle. When the telomeres er…

Organs age at different rates as measured by epigenetic clocks. The heart is around 10 years younger than you (as measured by your blood). Looking at telomeres however they had a similar length in both. The extracellular matrix may matter more for aging than we thought Aging of the skin, a review Eosinophils, part of the immune system that I did not talk about at all in my immunosenescence review look like key players in inflammaging. The Red Team Challenge (paying to identify mistakes in a scientific pape…

Introduction This post reviews the changes that occur in the immune system with age, and why that might be. Usually I aim to provide more or less coherent, first-principles explanations that capture what is the state of the art in the relevant field, figuring out if something is a collection of heterogeneous findings, just noise, or a true simple fact hidden under imperfect study designs. I have not been able to do that here, as I found a lot of discrepancies in the underlying literature, some of which have…