geekosystem

As I rapidly approach the ripe old age of 30, I am becoming increasingly aware of things like my hair and whether or not I still have any. Commonly held wisdom says that baldness is passed from your mother's father, but AsapSCIENCE tackles the question to teach us just how hair loss really works in this new video.

As soon as we're born, it's pretty clear we're going to die. Even if we manage to navigate the giant obstacle that is life, aging will eventually do us in. Why, though? What, exactly, is it that's making us look old and slowly killing us? The good folks over at AsapSCIENCE have thankfully broken things down into easy to understand terms. It's no less depressing, but at least you'll know exactly why your body's decided to fail you so spectacularly.

In news that makes us glad our memories are, as a team, pretty terrible, a team of researchers led by the University of Sussex has found evidence suggesting that a gene variant associated with dementia late in life is also associated with improved memory, math skills, and verbal abilities earlier in life. It's a troubling reminder that, sometimes, the candle that burns twice as bright really may burn half as long.

The cells in the body can only divide so many times before they die. It is this cellular lifespan that makes us grow older (whether we like it or not). But reproductive cells, the cells that go into making new lives, have an unlimited lifespan. Researchers have searched for decades to discover what it is about these cells that keeps them young while other cells age. Now, researchers from MIT have discovered a gene in yeast that controls the aging process. While the research has a long way to go before any comparisons can be drawn to the way human cells age, it does shed light on aging at a cellular level as a whole. Published in the journal Science, a team of biologists have identified the gene NDT80 in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), which controls the aging process. By activating the gene in old yeast cells the researchers were able to double the typical lifespan of the cell (which is normally around 30 cell divisions).