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Who says smoking cigarettes is so bad ... well, aside from the World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and every medical board and association on the face of the Earth? But should smokers be fortunate enough to dodge all that cancer, heart disease, emphysema and the like, they will be uniquely protected — for reasons unexplained by science — against a handful of diseases and afflictions. Call it a silver lining in their otherwise blackened lungs. Although long-term smoking is largely a ticket to early death, here are (gulp) five possible benefits...

Japan closer to doubling sales tax amid fiscal woes Friday 03rd June, 07:00 AM JST TOKYO — The Japanese government on Thursday announced a social security reform plan that would result in a doubling of the country’s consumption tax rate to 10% in stages by the year through March 2016 and lower pension payments to the elderly with higher incomes. The move came as the country has been struggling under swelling welfare costs due to the aging population, which have added to the government’s difficulty in restoring its fiscal health, the worst among major developed economies. But the reform initiative...

MENLO PARK, Calif., May 13 (UPI) -- A blood test that measures the length of a person's telomeres -- a predictor of longevity -- may be available soon, U.S. and Spanish researchers say. "Knowing whether our telomeres are a normal length or not for a given chronological age will give us an indication of our health status and of our physiological 'age' even before diseases appear," Maria A. Blasco, who heads the Telomeres and Telomerase Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center and who co-founded the company Life Length, told Scientific American. Telomeres are caps on the ends of...

China's population ageing rapidly China is heading for an elderly population crisis with over 60s now accounting for more than 13 per cent of the population and the country's 'one child' policy meaning there are not enough younger people to support them. By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai 3:25PM BST 28 Apr 2011 The first national census for a decade revealed demographic problems that could derail China's booming economic growth and which are placing a heavy burden on young Chinese. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, there has been a sharp spike in older Chinese, with the percentage of over-60s rising...

There's still no foolproof way to predict who will develop dementia, but brain scientists say they have identified a new clue: Cluelessness, as in an inability to tell when people are lying or using sarcasm. A preliminary new study conducted at the University of California at San Francisco suggests that the neurodegenerative process responsible for dementia also causes deterioration of regions of the brain responsible for detecting insincere speech. "These patients cannot detect lies," study author Dr. Katherine Rankin, of the university's Memory and Aging Center, said in a written statement. "This fact can help them be diagnosed earlier." It...

Am I the only one wondering why Barry Soetoro is wasting away to nothing?

If life begins at 40, you’d better hurry up and enjoy it, ladies. For in another ten years you are likely to think all men are ignoring you. A survey has found that eight out of ten women over the age of 50 think members of the opposite sex no longer notice them. So while The Beatles famously lamented becoming over the hill ‘When I’m 64’, women in 2011 will instead be wondering: ‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m... 50?’ As if that’s not bad enough, seven out of ten women also feel overlooked...

who turns 60 today (Feb 15) — is convinced she’s the last actress of her age who still has “her own face” and insists her natural appearance appeals to directors looking to cast older women.

The World Won't Be Aging Gracefully. Just the Opposite. By Neil Howe and Richard JacksonSunday, January 4, 2009 The world is in crisis. A financial crash and a deepening recession are afflicting rich and poor countries alike. The threat of weapons of mass destruction looms ever larger. A bipartisan congressional panel announced last month that the odds of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the year 2014 are better than 50-50. It looks as though we'll be grappling with these economic and geopolitical challenges well into the 2010s. But if you think that things couldn't...

The German government on Friday said it was working on a bill aimed at battling a growing tide of complaints against noisy children in what is a rapidly ageing society. Regulations on noise fall under Germany's emissions laws, and a bill tweaking these is due to go before Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet in February, a spokesman for the environment ministry said. "Noise made by childcare centres, playgrounds and places where ball games are played do not generally constitute a harmful environmental effect," the Passauer Neue Presse daily cited the bill as saying. The government is also working on an amendment...

Harvard scientists were surprised that they saw a dramatic reversal, not just a slowing down, of the ageing in mice. Now they believe they might be able to regenerate human organs Scientists claim to be a step closer to reversing the ageing process after rejuvenating worn out organs in elderly mice. The experimental treatment developed by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, turned weak and feeble old mice into healthy animals by regenerating their aged bodies. The surprise recovery of the animals has raised hopes among scientists that it may be possible to achieve a similar feat...

For decades, scientists have been searching for the fundamental biological secrets of how eating less extends lifespan. It has been well documented in species ranging from spiders to monkeys that a diet with consistently fewer calories can dramatically slow the process of aging and improve health in old age. But how a reduced diet acts at the most basic level to influence metabolism and physiology to blunt the age-related decline of tissues and cells has remained, for the most part, a mystery. Now, writing in the current online issue (Nov. 18) of the journal Cell, a team of scientists from...

“The fact that you are reading this indicates you escaped the abortion holocaust. But don’t relax yet. We are all candidates for the growing euthanasia movement.” These oft-repeated words of Msgr. William B. Smith, one of the Church’s best moral theologians until his death last year, came to mind as my father lay in the emergency room and a grave-faced doctor called me, my brother and our mother aside for a consultation. Since this was a top-rated yet secular hospital, I was already reviewing in my mind all I knew about Church teaching regarding “ordinary” and extraordinary” care. But I...

My friends all wait. They wait to make use of their degrees. They wait for a job to open. They wait to finish graduate school. Again. They all wait. The economy stinks. It stunk before we started earning salaries. The job market is nonexistent. Even small colleges are filled up. The technology we mastered as curious children is sitting there, but we can't do anything with it. No, it's too busy. It's being used by you people. And the jobs? You people. The schools? Again, you people. You baby boomers. You're why we're waiting. Like every generation before us, my...

SACHIRE, Georgia – Authorities in the former Soviet republic of Georgia claim a woman from a remote mountain village turned 130 on Thursday, making her the oldest person on Earth. Antisa Khvichava from western Georgia was born on July 8, 1880, said Georgiy Meurnishvili, spokesman for the civil registry at the Justice Ministry. The woman, who lives with her 40-year-old grandson in an idyllic vine-covered country house in the mountains, retired from her job as a tea and corn picker in 1965, when she was 85, records say. "I've always been healthy, and I've worked all my life — at...

Life looks a little rosier after 50, a new study finds. Older people in their mid- to late-50s are generally happier, and experience less stress and worry than young adults in their 20s, the researchers say. The results, based on a Gallup phone survey from 2008 of more than 340,000 Americans, held even after the researchers accounted for factors that could have contributed to differences in well-being with age, such as whether the participants were married, had children at home or were employed. So if having a partner and getting rid of the kids aren't responsible for the uptick in...

In the 2009 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, conducted last spring, only 18 percent of Japanese said they expected economic conditions in their country to improve over the next year. Remarkably, that represented a 13-percentage-point increase from 2008, when just 5 percent of Japanese said they expected improvement. The corresponding 2009 figures in China, India, and the United States were 82 percent, 75 percent, and 59 percent, respectively. Fewer than one-fifth (19 percent) of Japanese told the 2009 Pew interviewers that children in their country would grow up to be “better off” than people are today, compared with 89 percent of...

VIENNA (AFP) – A new vaccine against Alzheimer's, developed by the Austrian biotechnology firm Affiris, will soon be tested in six European countries, the company announced Friday.

LONDON (Reuters) – British scientists studying the genetics of aging said on Thursday that experiments on laboratory worms showed that a specific gene is strongly linked to lifespan, immunity and disease resistance. Since the gene, called DAF-16 in worms, is found in many animals and in humans, the finding could open up new ways to affect aging, immunity and resistance in humans, the scientists said. "We wanted to find out how normal aging is being governed by genes and what effect these genes have on other traits, such as immunity," said Robin May of the University of Birmingham, who led...

By Andy Xie 03.15.2010 18:20 Our Next Economic Plague: Japan Disease Growing old is hard, but watching formerly vibrant economies choke on debt and wither away is downright ugly Japan's nominal GDP fell 6 percent to 475 trillion yen last year, while its real GDP declined 5 percent. Meanwhile, nominal GDP in the United States decreased 1.3 percent to US$ 14.2 trillion and real GDP fell 2.4 percent. If you travel across Japan and the United States, you get the impression that America is in much worse shape: Americans cannot stop screaming about their woes, while the Japanese face economic...