Slow the growth, save the world? Why declining birth rates need not mean an end to prosperity

A good read about the so-called #fertility #crisis and the question of shrinking #population. Selected quote:

A University of Queensland economist, Prof, John Quiggin, says the whole fertility crisis is “bogus” – and not just because policies to address it appear to be universally failing.

“Economically, the cost of raising children is much higher than the cost of looking after old people,” he says.

But that cost is born by parents, so in a sense they’re giving “a free gift to society”.

“The odds are you’ll be in reasonable shape until about six months before you die at which point you’ll need about the same care as a baby,” he says. “So raising a baby to look after an old person makes no sense.”

Sandra Kanck, a former Democrats senator and national secretary of Sustainable Population Australia, agrees. “The cost of raising a child is way more than the cost of putting someone in aged care,” she says, adding that having more children puts more pressure on the planet.

“So the resources we think are available to us are not available to our children,” she says. “It’s contributing to climate change and creating greater instability.”

As for fears about an ageing population, she says, these are based on flawed assumptions. “Like that everyone over 70 is basically senile, and that all the baby boomers will end up in aged care,” she says.

“Most of them are making an incredible contribution. Many are still in the workforce … and those who have retired are operating a free babysitting service for their grandchildren.”

#capitalism #ageing

Hello, I’m #newhere. 👋 Thanks for the invite, *@Holly Jahangiri! *🌹

My interests include #ageing, #creative-writing, #dogs, #healthandwellness, #history, #lifestyleandleisure, #memoirs, #music, #photography and #travel. You’ll find articles about those subjects and more on my website, THE DOGLADY’S DEN. Dedicated hashtag is #dogladysden

Cute pic of my dog Zoey, for added colour. Looking forward to getting acquainted. Cheers from Canada! 😀🍁

Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen - Eyes as big as plates, Agnes 2

Eyes as Big as Plates is the ongoing collaborative project between Karoline Hjorth (NO) and Riitta Ikonen (FI). Starting out as a play on characters from Nordic folklore, Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. The series is produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety year old parachutists. Since 2011 the artist duo has portrayed seniors in Norway, Finland, France, US, UK, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Sweden, Japan, Greenland, Czech Republic and South Korea. Each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Here nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures they create in collaboration with the artists.

Eyes as Big as Plates est un projet collaboratif de Karoline Hjorth (Norvège) et Riitta Ikonen (Finlande). Ayant débuté comme un jeu sur des personnages du folklore nordique, Eyes as Big as Plates s'est transformé en une recherche permanente de l'appartenance de l'homme moderne à la nature. La série est produite en collaboration avec des agriculteurs, des pêcheurs, des zoologistes, des plombiers, des chanteurs d'opéra, des femmes au foyer, des artistes, des universitaires et des parachutistes de 90 ans à la retraite. Depuis 2011, le duo d'artistes a fait le portrait de personnes âgées en Norvège, en Finlande, en France, aux États-Unis, au Royaume-Uni, en Islande, dans les îles Féroé, en Suède, au Japon, au Groenland, en République tchèque et en Corée du Sud. Chaque image de la série présente une figure solitaire dans un paysage, habillée d'éléments de l'environnement qui n'indiquent ni le temps ni le lieu. Ici, la nature agit à la fois comme contenu et comme contexte : les personnages habitent littéralement le paysage en portant des sculptures qu'ils créent en collaboration avec les artistes. (traduit avec DeepL)

#art #photo #photographie #photography #Hjorth #Ikonen #portrait #vieillesse #ageing #nature

https://eyesasbigasplates.com/list-of-works/

The belief on getting old ...
https://notesandsilence.com/2022/09/02/suffering-of-ageing
#zen #meditation #silence #ageing #time #wisdom #spirituality

Balancing on one leg may be useful health test in later life, research suggests | Health | The Guardian

If you have difficulty standing on one leg, it could be a sign of something more serious than overdoing it at the office summer drinks party. Middle-aged and elderly people who cannot balance on one leg for 10 seconds are almost twice as likely to die within 10 years than those who can, research suggests.

But note that the test subjects were all white Brazilians.

#science #medicine #health #ageing #death

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/20/balancing-on-one-leg-useful-health-test-later-life-research

Effects of Aging Have Been Reversed by Putting Young Mouse Poop in Old Mice

It sounds like something that might have come out of a sci-fi novel, but it's based on cold, hard, printed research: transplanting fecal microbes from young mice into old mice seems to reverse key signs of aging in the guts, eyes, and brains of the older animals.

Right, that's it! Pet shop, here I come! 😁

#science #medicine #health #ageing

https://www.sciencealert.com/transplanting-poo-from-a-younger-mouse-could-help-stave-off-the-effects-of-aging

Removing benches, blocking cycle paths: why are police interfering in the UK’s public spaces? | Phineas Harper | The Guardian

The Secured by Design initiative is damaging British cities, robbing them of greenery and public amenities while promoting fear

Remove the benches and where will the older people sit? Or will they become antisocial?

#UK #police #LawEnforcement #leisure #ParksAndOpenSpaces #ageing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/02/police-public-spaces-secured-by-design-uk-cities

Could we make ageing a thing of the past? | Books | The Guardian

Recent scientific advances raise the prospect of living longer – but ‘healthspan’ is just as important as lifespan

#science #medicine #health #ageing

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/02/could-we-make-ageing-a-thing-of-the-past

A method to 'time jump' human skin cells by 30 years has been developed. "In 2007, Shinya Yamanaka was the first scientist to turn normal cells, which have a specific function, into stem cells which have the special ability to develop into any cell type. The full process of stem cell reprogramming takes around 50 days using four key molecules called the Yamanaka factors. The new method, called 'maturation phase transient reprogramming', exposes cells to Yamanaka factors for just 13 days. At this point, age-related changes are removed and the cells have temporarily lost their identity. The partly reprogrammed cells were given time to grow under normal conditions, to observe whether their specific skin cell function returned. Genome analysis showed that cells had regained markers characteristic of skin cells (fibroblasts), and this was confirmed by observing collagen production in the reprogrammed cells."

"Researchers looked at multiple measures of cellular age. The first is the epigenetic clock, where chemical tags present throughout the genome indicate age. The second is the transcriptome, all the gene readouts produced by the cell. By these two measures, the reprogrammed cells matched the profile of cells that were 30 years younger compared to reference data sets."

So what this is all about is that if you take a cell such as a skin cell, and take them all the way back to embryonic stem cells -- which are called "induced" pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) because they don't become stem cells by themselves, someone has to 'induce' them -- then they can turn into any cell, but you probably don't want that -- you just want to reset your skin cells to age = 0 but keep them as skin cells. Previous attempts just rolled back the age a little, because they didn't fully activate the "pluripotency" genes.

What they did here was first ensure that all of the aforementioned "Yamanaka factors" (which are genes known as Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc, and GFP, in case you were wondering) are expressed. This reprogramming is capable of generating pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) cells. As mentioned between 10 and 17 days, they switch and execute their "MPTR protocol". MPTR stands for "maturation-phase transient reprogramming". The way it actually works, though, is, well, first you have to realize they somehow got the aforementioned "Yamanaka factors" to require a chemical called doxycycline before they get the "Yamanaka factors" to "induce" the cell into becoming an "induced" pluripotent stem cell (iPSC). Then, what they do at the right point in the 10 to 17 day window is withdraw the doxycycline. Weirdly, doxycycline, in case you're wondering what that is, is an antibiotic. It's a tetracycline antibiotic where "tetracycline" means they are molecules with 4 fused rings.

Anyway, after this procedure, 25% of the skin cells went back to age 0. This is from cells from people aged 38 to 53 and the cells' epigenetic expression indicated the same age.

Most of the rest of what's described in the paper is the process used to verify that the skin cells had regained their skin cell function. They looked at them under regular light microscopes and found, "The cells had undergone a mesenchymal to epithelial like transition and were forming colony structures that progressively became larger with longer periods of reprogramming, consistent with the emergence of the early pluripotency marker SSEA4." "Mesenchymal" means cells of connective tissue while "epithelial" means skin cells. SSEA4 is an antibody that normally appears on the surface of skin cells.

"We investigated further the identity of the cells after MPTR by conducting DNA methylation array analysis and RNA sequencing to examine their methylomes and transcriptomes." "Cells lose aspects of the fibroblast transcriptional program and/or gain aspects of pluripotency transcriptional program, which is consistent with the loss of the fibroblast surface marker CD13 and gain of the iPSC surface marker SSEA4." The function of CD13 is something to do with cell-cell fusion, but I don't know exactly what -- the important thing to note here is that its expression is expected with connective tissue (fibroblast) cells.

"Transiently reprogrammed cells did not express the pluripotency marker NANOG and expressed high levels of the fibroblast marker FSP1. Notably, NANOG was temporarily expressed at high levels at the intermediate stages of transient reprogramming alongside FSP1, suggesting that these cells simultaneously possessed some transcriptional attributes of both fibroblasts and iPSCs."

The name "NANOG" comes from an Irish phrase that means "Land of the Young", and refers to a protein that helps embryonic stem cells maintain pluripotency -- pluripotency meaning the ability to transform into any cell type.

FSP1 stands for "ferroptosis suppressor protein 1". If you've heard of "apoptosis", which is when a cell dies on purpose, basically, "ferroptosis" is distinct type of programmed cell death, which uses iron as the name implies. Why it is showing up here, I don't know. They say it is a "fibroblast marker".

When looking at the epigenetics, "We found typical regions change during reprogramming were fibroblast-like after transient reprogramming, such as the promoter of POU5F1 being hypermethylated and the promoter of FSP1 being hypomethylated in our transiently reprogrammed cells. Notably, the POU5F1 promoter was temporarily demethylated and the FSP1 promoter remained lowly methylated at the intermediate stages of transient reprogramming, suggesting that these intermediate stage cells possess some epigenetic features of both fibroblasts and iPSCs."

POU5F1 is a "promoter", which means it controls the expression of other genes. In this case it plays a key role in embryonic development and stem cell pluripotency.

Finally they say, "Together, these data demonstrate that fibroblasts can be transiently reprogrammed to the maturation phase and then revert to a state that is morphologically, epigenetically and transcriptionally similar to the starting cell identity."

A jump through time -- new technique rewinds the age of skin cells by 30 years

#discoveries #stemcells #ageing

Ageing process is unstoppable, finds unprecedented study | Ageing | The Guardian

Backed by governments, business, academics and investors in an industry worth $110bn (£82.5bn) – and estimated to be worth $610bn by 2025 – scientists have spent decades attempting to harness the power of genomics and artificial intelligence to find a way to prevent or even reverse ageing.
But an unprecedented study has now confirmed that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints.

#science #medicine #health #gerontology #ageing

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/17/ageing-process-is-irreversible-finds-unprecedented-study