Posts by Sophie Clearwater
Higher Education, Finer Dining: Inside the Culinary Scenes at California’s Top College Towns
Westwood University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles is one of the most diverse and unique culinary cities in the world, so it’s not surprising that UCLA students have the crème de la crème of restaurants right at their fingertips. Rival school USC is also a hallmark of L.A.’s educational landscape, and while the Trojans…
Read More‘Unprecedented’: Giant vulture delays takeoff after taking plane hostage
Was it looking for carrion luggage? A Ryanair flight out of Greece was delayed after an unexpected passenger — a giant flesh-eating vulture — landed on the aircraft and refused to budge. The plane had reportedly been prepping to depart Crete on August 16, when the super-sized scavenger alighted on the tail fin, the Greek…
Read MoreQueen Camilla Addresses King Charles III’s Cancer Diagnosis for the First Time
Queen Camilla is sharing how she and King Charles III have navigated his health battle. More than two years after Buckingham Palace announced the monarch’s cancer diagnosis, Camilla spoke about their journey in a short film published by Maggie’s—a charity she visited which provides support to cancer patients—on Aug. 19. “I remember coming to see a Maggie’s just after…
Read MoreAndrea Maier Wants to Solve Longevity’s Evidence Problem
Dr. Andrea Maier realized a fundamental truth about herself when she was in medical school: She was fascinated by old age. As a child, she’d been awed by women of great age and power, like her grandmothers. Working with older patients, she was curious about the intricate cellular systems that either preserved or destroyed their…
Read MoreJamie Justice Is Running a $101 Million Longevity Science Fair
Justice led a gerontology lab at Wake Forest University before being recruited to lead XPRIZE Healthspan when it was created in 2023 by tech entrepreneur and physician Peter Diamandis to make sense of the cacophony of voices in the field. Not surprisingly, efforts to understand how people can live better while living longer entice everyone…
Read MoreAn Antiaging Medicine Could Already Exist. Nir Barzilai Is On A Mission To Find It
Geneticist Nir Barzilai’s work has helped drive a new approach to medicine. Instead of treating individual diseases, his research has supported the idea that targeting the biology of aging with drugs and lifestyle interventions could more broadly extend “health span,” the healthy years of a person’s life. “Right now, our maximum lifespan is 115, and…
Read MoreWhat Ovaries Reveal About the Secret Ways Women Age, According to Francesca Duncan
One of Duncan’s major findings is that ovaries become increasingly inflamed, fibrotic—or scarred—and stiff over time. This stiffness affects egg quality and can hinder egg release, Duncan says, and could increase risks of diseases including ovarian cancer. Other organs, including the heart, lungs and liver, also become more fibrotic over time, and Duncan says the…
Read MoreWe Need to Change How We Think About Aging, Says AARP’s CEO
“Pop culture today is thinking about living longer and what we want our lives to look like,” Minter-Jordan says. “We’re able to really home in on that as a means of engaging younger demographics, but also bringing visibility to the growing ‘50-plus’ in our country.” That includes reminding people age 65 and older that Social…
Read MoreJuan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte Believes Aging May Come Down to a Cell’s Identity Crisis
It’s in the embryo that the 20,000 or so genes in the human genome start organizing to mature into the more than 200 different cell types in the body—similar to the way young people start discovering their talents and deciding on a career. In other words, like teens, cells develop an identity. Over time, however,…
Read MoreRobert Waldinger Knows the Secret to a Happy Life
The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938 with 724 young men: 268 sophomores at Harvard and 456 boys from disadvantaged Boston neighborhoods. For nearly 90 years, researchers have followed participants through questionnaires, interviews, medical records, and increasingly sophisticated health assessments. Under Waldinger’s leadership, the study expanded beyond the original participants to include their…
Read MoreLongevity Is More Genetic than We Thought. That’s a Good Thing
In January 2026, Uri Alon, director of the Sagol Institute for Longevity Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and his colleagues made headlines with a new take on the problem, where they asked what happens if you remove deaths from accidents, infections, and other factors—beyond diseases of aging—from the equation. Under those…
Read MoreShinya Yamanaka Made Cells Young Again. Can That Reverse Aging?
He started by trying to identify which genes were responsible for driving the development of embryonic cells. Then, he used engineered viruses that could infect cells (but no longer cause disease) to introduce these genes to adult cells; these, in turn, would instruct the cell to make the proteins that help the mature cells act…
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