Word: spans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...long time, many scientists believed that the human life-span was infinitely extendible. The average life-span early in the evolution of Homo sapiens is thought to have been just 20 years. By the beginning of the 20th century, that figure more than doubled--to a still brief 47. Since then, however, life expectancy has been exploding, with people in the developed world now able to live deep into their 70s and often beyond...
...life expectancy (the number of years you can expect to live before being claimed by illness or accident) is not life-span (the maximum age to which the perfectly maintained, disease-free body could remain alive before it simply wore out and broke down). All the gains in length of life have been achieved by treating diseases that used to kill us in youth or, at best, in what we now consider our middle years--and are thus gains in life expectancy. Meanwhile, life-span has remained fixed at a hard ceiling of about 125 years...
...quieter news is that while immortality is beyond us, that 125-year life-span is still out there beckoning. Eliminating the dietary and lifestyle habits that are setting you up for the heart attack that is going to kill you at 50 can, in a blink, extend your life by decades. Doing the same thing on a global level--and throwing in progress on disease treatment too--can cause the life expectancy of the entire species to inch further and further out. There are about 50,000 centenarians in the U.S.--a blip in a country of close...
...dawn of the 20th century, the roster of illnesses that spelled almost inevitable death seemed to stretch forever. Cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, cirrhosis, pneumonia, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis and even the flu were relentless killers. Some victims might hang on to eke out a normal life span, albeit in disability and pain; some might even recover entirely. But survival was purely a crapshoot, with depressingly unfavorable odds. The hospital was a place where people went to die, not to be cured...
...idea of telltale infant behavior is not new. In the 1950s, husband-and-wife psychiatric team Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas, both now 87, identified nine parameters of temperament--activity level, attention span, adaptability, intensity, distractibility, mood, sensory threshold, response to challenge and predictability of functions such as eating and sleeping--that emerge at about four weeks and indicate a lot about personality. "At one month, behavior starts to be discernible," says Chess today. "These differences define...