Like him or loathe him, he does get one excited about the future…
Personally, I’m just looking forward to the day all service personnel are replaced by ultra friendly, knowledgeable, and attractive robots.
TED talks: Ray Kurzweil on the coming singularity

A mixture of vitamin C and E, beta-carotene, and magnesium has been shown to attenuate hearing loss in animals subjected to loud noise. This suggests antioxidant vitamin supplementation is likely very useful for all you personal audio junkies out there.
Here’s the press release:
Vitamin supplements may protect against noise-induced hearing loss
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Vitamin supplements can [...]

Richard Morimoto et al. from Northwestern University published a paper showing that Sirt1 regulates the activity of Heat Shock Factor 1 (HSF1) in cells, possibly explaining some of the protective and anti-aging properties associated with Sirt1.
Here’s the link to the article in question: Stress-Inducible Regulation of Heat Shock Factor 1 by the Deacetylase SIRT1
And [...]

A Brown University press release reported today on the discovery of a cellular mechanism that may eventually evolve into an anti-aging methodology.
The discovery centres around a genetic mutation called Indy (I’m Not Dead Yet) that they first discovered in 2000, which markedly extended (almost doubled) the average lifespans of the flies, with maximum lifespan also [...]

Avid scientific news readers like me and you are aware that a number of articles have hit the mainstream media recently claiming that vitamin supplementation does very little indeed, particularly with regard to preventing cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc. These studies typically contain several problems that completely mitigate their scientific relevance, but these problems are unfortunately [...]

2008 was a pretty fun year, what with the Olympics, the US election, and most importantly the inauguration of this blog! But, I love a new year and I’m happy to say goodbye to the old. Let’s all raise our standards and see if we can maintain them as we journey through what the media [...]

There’s been increased talk of late regarding the potential for compounds contained in coffee potentially protecting against skin cancer.
The other study that came to mind (I can’t find the article, sorry!) was one that found that coffee combined with exercise somehow mitigated the damage caused by sunburn by enhancing apoptosis of damaged cells.
This latest study [...]

An interesting idea was presented recently in Medical Hypotheses, postulating that common obesity (i.e., fatness that does not have an underlying medical cause) is due to a lack of vitamin D.
Most of us experience weight gain over winter, and I had always assumed that it was due to the changes in lifestyle that the winter [...]

Researchers at the Harvard Medical School will be publishing details in the November 28 edition of Cell of a potential mechanism of aging that is conserved throughout the animal kingdom, from yeast to humans.
Professor David Sinclair and his team have discovered that aging may in fact be a case of gene regulation gone haywire, as [...]

Excessive blood concentrations of low-density lipoproteins (LDLs), otherwise known as ‘bad cholesterol’, are implicated in cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis and stroke. Now, a research team in Montreal at the Biochemical Neuroendocrinology Research Unit at the IRCM has revealed a novel way to reduce LDL levels, possibly diminishing the risks of cardiovascular disease by 88%.
Levels [...]