Word: lifespan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...beginning to change. At Carnegie Mellon, for instance, psychologist Sheldon Cohen has been exploring exactly how positive emotions affect the body. (This is the flip side of previous work by Cohen and others linking stress, Type-A behavior and negative emotions to lowered immunity, heart disease and shorter lifespan.) Cohen's research shows that people with a "positive emotional style" have better immunity to cold and influenza viruses when exposed in the lab. His most recent work, presented at the conference, suggests that this is mainly due to the release of optimal levels of cytokines, proteins that regulate the immune...
Cohen and his colleagues have also been studying how social relationships and positive emotions can impact lifespan. Their work builds on a famous 2001 University of Kentucky study of aging nuns, which found that the more positive emotions the nuns had expressed in brief autobiographies written 60 years earlier at age 22, the longer they lived. In an interesting twist on that study, Cohen and colleague Sarah Pressman similarly analyzed a collection of autobiographies - this time, written by 96 leading psychologists at an average age of 65. Once again, there was a correlation between longevity and positive emotions...
Thuras and Foer say they've both been surprised by the reception they've gotten during the site's short lifespan; high traffic forced them to beef up their server in the first week the site went live. Thuras says it's hard to say exactly why Atlas Obscura resonates with travelers, who have flocked in droves to contribute new places to the site. "I think as the world gets smaller, people are still excited to see that there's lots still to discover - and that there's still a lot of weird stuff out there," he says. The hope...
...order to reach so precise a finding, the study's authors had to do some exhaustive number-crunching, surveying pollution rates and longevity in 51 cities across the U.S. over a 21-year period from 1979 to 2000. Overall, they found that lifespan in all of the areas increased by an average of nearly three years - from 74 to 77 - as a result of a host of factors, most notably reduced smoking and improved income. But 15% of the change was attributable to cleaner...
...bigger siblings, Sojourner came with only a very brief factory warranty - just 30 days in its case - and like its bigger siblings, easily exceeded it, operating for five months before finally surrendering to the Martian elements. It's rarely a good idea to take NASA's estimates of the lifespan of its ships too literally. The agency tends to lowball these calls, making it more likely that the machines will perform better than advertised - and, not incidentally, that taxpayers will feel as though they're getting their money's worth. Still, when flight controllers on the Spirit and Opportunity teams...