Word: age
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...reason for the difference remains only vaguely understood. Environmental factors such as smoking, stress and regular exercise all seem to influence the rate at which our cells age. Now, for the first time, researchers have found a genetic link to cellular aging - a finding that suggests new treatments for a variety of age-related diseases and cancers. (See TIME's Health Checkup "How to Live 100 Years...
...field of biological aging has in recent years focused on the long molecules of DNA contained in human cells called chromosomes. All chromosomes have protective caps at either end called telomeres. Each time a cell replicates itself (as it does before it dies), the telomeres shorten, like plastic tips fraying on the end of shoelaces. Shortened telomeres have been linked to a host of age-related illnesses such as heart disease and certain cancers. (Scientists have yet to study whether telomeres influence a person's appearance.) Last year's Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to three American scientists...
...better understand the aging discrepancy, a team of researchers in Britain and the Netherlands scanned more than 500,000 genetic variations across the human genome. Using a population of nearly 12,000, they then attempted to pinpoint a genetic link to telomere length. (See how to prevent illness at any age...
Spector and Samani say that understanding the components that determine telomere length may one day help researchers devise new treatments for age-related diseases, particularly heart disease (the study was partially funded by the British Heart Foundation). "I see in my practice 80-year-olds with healthy coronary arteries and 40-year-olds with heart disease. We may be on our way to explaining the genetic component in the explanation for why this is so, and so expanding our knowledge of the disease and how to treat it," Samani says. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
Smith is 63 now and ready for her memoir. But the story she's chosen to tell isn't about the rock-star years. It's a coming-of-age tale about a shy Jersey girl who falls in love with a lapsed altar boy from Long Island with "tousled shepherd's curls." He's Robert Mapplethorpe, future famed photographer and shrewd reprobate who would die of AIDS in 1989. As Smith tells us, "I would someday hold his ashes in my hand." After his death, his matter-of-fact pictures of leather S&M, with their strange composure, would...