Category Archives: Longevity

There are people whose spirits seem to keep the eternal flame of youth within them, even when time takes its toll. Vronique Tellier, who is 101 years old, is a perfect example. Resident of a retirement home located in Montauban, southern France, this lively woman revealed her secrets of longevity to La Dpche in an interview published on April 3. She has no medicine for rejuvenation or magic elixir, but she obviously has strong faith and invincible humor.

Born in Algeria in 1923, she lived there happily until the Algerian War (1954-1962), which forced her to cross the Mediterranean with thousands of pieds-noirs to reach the French coast. Its a painful memory for her.

Imagine leaving 40 years of memories behind in a few hours, simply locking the door of your house, without taking any belongings, in order to save your life, the lives of your parents and of your children.

Id rather lose my life than my faith

The death of her 20-year-old daughter is Veroniques greatest suffering. Yet she displays an unshakeable faith:

These are wounds that never close () What has kept me going is faith. I talk to God every day, he has never betrayed me. Hold on to the Lord, you will never be disappointed. In my sad moments, I look at Our Lady: She always stands tall, confident. I would rather lose my life than my faith, and I thank fate for having given me this spiritual richness.

Far from remaining inactive, this energetic centenarian maintains a well-oiled routine to keep herself fit and above all happy: gymnastics on Thursdays, phone conversations with her loved ones, and daily Mass.

Most of all, I go to Mass every day! When I get up there Ill tell the Lord: I did everything you told me to do, I hope to have a place at your side.

More here:
101-year-old's secret to longevity: Talk to God every day - Aleteia

Members and advisors of Kirkwoods newest club, the Black Student Union. PHOTO CONTRIBUTED

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. History Professor Jed Peterson said this was the idea that led him to assist in the development of Kirkwood Community Colleges Black Student Union.

Peterson said Ellen Waynawhere, criminal justic major, was in one of his history classes this semester and he went to her with the idea of forming the Black Student Union.

Waynawhere is only in her second semester at Kirkwood but said she was already seeing the need for a group of this nature as students were looking for more opportunities to celebrate diversity.During Black History Month, we just got cookies, Waynawhere stated.She added, When I was in Jeds class and he brought the idea to me I was so for it.

The group is new this semester, having only met three times, but they are growing in numbers. The group definitely has a lot of energy, stated Blessings Pongo, construction management major.

With the Black Student Union still in its infancy, members agree it is important to have a strong social aspect to the group. They also plan to heavily focus on giving back to the community of Kirkwood, and the community of Cedar Rapids as a whole.

Some of the finer details of college and adult life are lost on college-aged students and group members state they hope to give students the tools to be acquainted with these details.The group is aiming to encompass many aspects of adult life, being a place for students to have fun and learn along the way. Peterson said connecting the members is also beneficial as many are first generation college students.

Finding longevity for the Black Student Union is a goal shared throughout all the members of the group. Waynawhere stated, We are trying to build something where, in 25 years when Jeds not teaching, Im not in school anymore, its still a thing.

That is the hope for this group. Planting the tree now to see it grow into something that will give future students a chance to help their community and grow with it.

Students interested in joining can contact either of the advisors at jed.peterson@kirkwood.edu or mialisa.wright@kirkwood.edu.

Staff Writer

Max is a staff writer majoring in the Digital Arts Program. He also serves as a producer in Kirkwood Student Productions and plans to work in the video industry after college.

Image courtesy of Contributed

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Club to focus on longevity, giving back - Kirkwood Community College

It is right to talk about the future of the monarchy, given the upcoming coronation of King Charles III, but the genuine benefit provided by the institution means it neednt be too worried about the future. That is according to Princess Anne, the Princess Royal, who this week gave a rare interview to Canadas CBC News.

The discussion came after polling suggested that only one in three Britons believe the monarchy is very important, giving rise to the suggestion that public support for the institution is at an historic low. (It is worth noting that other surveys have expectedly produced rather different findings.) Newspapers, the Princess Royal appeared to suggest, set aside too much column space for such reports. Often described as the most hardworking member of the British Royal Family, she said the monarchy does much good for the country, particularly for those individuals who spend time with its members, but added that if you look at the media, you tend not to get that impression.

Commenting on ongoing discussions around the relevance of the institution ahead of the May 6th ceremony, the Princess said:

There will be [such discussions] everywhere. Its not a conversation that I would necessarily have. I think its perfectly true that it is a moment where you need to have that discussion, but I would just underline that the monarchy provides, with the constitution, a degree of long-term stability that is actually quite difficult to come by any other way.

Princess Anne appears unworried about the health of the monarchy, the interviewer suggested. She responded that I think youre putting words into my mouth, but when pushed, she added:

No, I wouldnt [say that I am worried], because I believe that there is genuine benefit from this particular arrangement, the constitutional monarchy, and I think it has good long-term benefits. And that commitment to long term is what the monarchy stands for.

Also in the interview, Princess Anne laughed off the much-discussed (though little-understood) notion that the monarch under King Charles will become more slimmed-down. The question, discussed in detail by royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams for The European Conservativehere, was, she said, more justifiable when there were a few more people around. That is, before the passing of Prince Philip and, of course, the Queen, as well as the stepping back from royal duties by Princes Harry and Andrew. In the current context, however, the Princess said this doesnt sound like a good idea from where Im standing. Princess Anne did, however, note that the coronation will be such a different scenario to the 1953 event. Here is what you can expect from the highly-anticipated event.

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Princess Anne Makes a Rare Appearance, Amid Questions Over ... - The European Conservative

The ovary is a time machine. It travels to the future, reaching old age ahead of the rest of the body. At birth, each ovary contains around a million folliclestiny, fluid-filled sacs that hold immature eggs. But the decline of these follicles is immediate and unceasing. By puberty, only about 300,000 remain. By age 40, the vast majority are gone. And by 51, the average age of menopause in the United States, virtually none are left.

Humans are an oddity in this regard. Most mammals remain fertile up to the end of their lives; the only species known to experience menopause naturally arehumans and some whales. In humans, the loss of hormones during menopause sets off a cascade of negative health effects: Bones get brittle; metabolism slows; and the risk ofcardiovascular disease,diabetes,stroke, anddementia increases. Paradoxically, women live longer than men on average butspend more of their older years in poor health.

Jennifer Garrison has a hunch that the ovaries are the culprit. That cocktail, that orchestra of chemicals that the ovaries make, is really important to overall health, says Garrison, an assistant professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California. When it goes away at menopause, it has a dramatic effect. On the other hand, having working ovaries for longer seems to carry longevity benefits. One study of 16,000 women found that later menopause made it more likelysomeone would live to age 90.

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Despite the fact that half the worlds population experiences ovarian agingincluding cisgender women and trans and nonbinary peoplelongstanding gender bias in science means it has remained an understudied field. But thats starting to change.

Garrison is a member of the Buck Institutes Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality, a first-of-its-kind facilityestablished in 2018 with a $6 million gift from attorney and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan. In 2019, she helped launch a related effort, theGlobal Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality, to fund outside researchers. An initial 22 researchers received inaugural grants totaling $7.4 million. Their goal is to understand why the ovaries seem intricately connected to health and longevity. Unraveling these mysteries could mean extending a persons reproductive yearsand potentially lifespanby delaying menopause.

In 2018, the field of reproductive longevity was so nascent that Garrison had a hard time finding faculty to interview, let alone hire, to staff the center. Few people were actively researching it, partly because the only other mammals that experience it are whaleswhich cant exactly be studied in a lab. Its also hard to study ovarian aging in such long-lived specieskiller whales, for example, can live up to 90 years in the wild. Instead, researchers have often tried to crack menopause and its link to aging by proxy: by observing chemotherapys effects on fertility, by studying a common menopause treatment that mimics female hormones, or by experimenting on mice, which are imperfect stand-ins for humans.

Five years later, the Buck Institutes efforts are starting to deliver results. Researchers might not have figured out how to slowreproductive aging yet, but theyve spurred interest in a long-overlooked organ and opened a new avenue of inquiry that could have implications for how everyone agesnot just people with ovaries. If we can understand whats happening in the ovary, Garrison says, that will probably tell us something about aging in the rest of the body, and could also give us a handle on how to intervene.

To work out how fast ovaries age, you need to look at a lot of cells. At Columbia University in New York, geneticist Yousin Suh and her colleagues have been collecting and analyzing cells taken from the ovaries of women in their twenties and those in their late forties and early fifties who havent yet gone through menopause. What they found shocked them. Cells from the ovaries of middle-aged women often resembled cells in other tissues from people in their seventies and older.

In cell type after cell type, Suhs team found unmistakable signatures of aging. They saw damaged DNA and dysfunctional mitochondriathe energy powerhouses within cells. Communication between cells broke down. They stopped dividing. A key regulator of cell growth and metabolism, called mTOR, was also overactive. Too much mTOR is associated with cancer and aging, and drugs that suppress it are used to slow tumor growth. For Suh, it was crystal clear evidence that the ovary is aging faster than the rest of the body at the molecular and cellular levels. Suh and her teamposted their findings online last year, and the paper is currently undergoing peer review.

The mTOR discovery was particularly intriguing. Blocking the protein has already been shown to increase lifespan in flies, worms, and mice. Now Suh wonders if the same benefits could extend to human ovaries.

Over at Northwestern University in Illinois, Kara Goldman, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, has also been exploring the link between mTOR and ovarian aging. She was interested in whether mTOR inhibitors could protect the ovaries against fertility loss caused by chemotherapy.

In a2017 study, she gave the drugs to otherwise healthy female mice that were also treated with chemotherapy. The hope was that the mTOR mice would be better protected against ovarian damage compared to mice that only received chemotherapy. And it worked. Both groups lost follicles because of the chemo, but the mice that received mTOR inhibitors had more of them left. Those mice went on to have more than twice as many offspring. In other words, the drugs seemed to preserve the ovaries, says Goldman, who serves as director of the clinical advisory board for the Bucks consortium.

Then Goldman took the research a step further. She wanted to see if these drugs could boost fertility in healthy mice. She gave daily oral doses of mTOR inhibitors to female mice for four weeks, beginning in young adulthood. When these mice mated, they produced twice as many pups over a seven-month period as a control group that didnt receive the drugs, suggesting they were better at reproducing than untreated mice.

Goldman and her team also wanted to make sure the drugs didnt have negative side effectsa drug to be used in otherwise healthy people to extend the lifespan of their ovaries would need to be extremely safe, she says. Her team monitored the health and fertility of the treated mice, as well as their first- and second-generation offspring, and thus far have found no ill effects. Theresearchers presented preliminary findings in 2021 and are still analyzing their data.

But will the same be true for humans? To find that out, Suh and her collaborator Zev Williamslaunched a trial to test whether the drug rapamycin, an mTOR inhibitor, can slow aging in the ovaries. They plan to enroll 50 women in their mid-thirties to early forties who dont plan on having any more children. For a year, half will take daily rapamycin pills and the other a placebo. Researchers will then test the number of healthy eggs the participants have left.

Their hope is that the group taking rapamycin will have more eggs. That would mean their ovaries are aging less rapidly than normal. What were trying to do is slow down the rate at which eggs get lost, says Williams, director of the Columbia University Fertility Center.

The fact that the ovaries age so much faster than other body tissues also makes them a valuable way to test anti-aging drugs. Studies like these could yield insights on a much shorter timescale than than those done on other tissues in the bodywhich could have implications for aging in both women and men.

Ultimately, Goldman sees a future in which women would take these drugs at an even younger age. The moonshot idea is to not only protect fertility but prolong ovarian health span, she says.

No one knows for sure if its possible to keep the ovaries functioning longer, or whether that will lead to a longer, healthier life. Mice, at least, seem to benefit when their ovaries stay healthy for longer. When researchers at Utah State University transplanted the ovaries of young mice into older ones, the recipientslived about 40 percent longer than their peers and alsohad healthier-looking hearts. But theres one problem with relying on mice as a stand-in for people: Like most other animals, mice dont go through menopause.

Brnice Benayoun, an assistant professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, is trying to genetically engineer menopause into mice so scientists can study the biological mechanisms behind it and figure out how to offset it. Menopause is basically the single most consequential event in a womans life in terms of health, says Benayoun, whos funded by the Buck Institute.

Researchers elsewhere have tried inducing a menopause-like state in two- to three-month-old mice by removing their ovaries or injecting them with a chemical to stop the ovaries from working. But Benayoun says thats like trying to suddenly make young adults menopausal. The animals dont show a gradual loss of ovarian function over time like humans do.

Benayoun and her team have knocked out a gene in mice that, in humans, leads to early menopause. In mice, it led to a more gradual loss of hormones. The research has not been published yet, but Benayoun thinks it may offer a closer approximation of what happens in humans: We can get hormonal states that are very similar to whats described in human women, she says.

Even if researchers figure out how to delay a fake menopause in mice, that doesnt mean it would be safe to do so with people. Thats the big question, says Stephanie Faubion, medical director of the North American Menopause Society and the director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Womens Health. Would there be any harms associated with it? We have no idea.

A common treatment for menopause may offer some clues. Hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, provides the body with estrogen and progesterone that stop getting made during menopause. Whilegenerally considered safe for most women, it can slightly increase the risk of blood clots and stroke, as well as some types of breast and ovarian cancers.

But the ovaries produce many more chemicals and signaling molecules than these two hormones. To Garrison, the issue with HRT is that it doesnt fully replicate the work of the ovary. While she calls HRT the best Band-Aid treatment we have, she considers it deeply imperfect because it doesnt mimic every chemical the ovary makes. We dont even know what they are, much less how to replace them, she says.

Perhaps the biggest mystery about menopause is why humans experience it at all. The grandmother hypothesis, a concept proposed in the 1960s, suggests an evolutionary benefit. It argues that menopause allows older women to care for their grandchildren, thus boosting their kins chances of survival and ensuring the continuation of their own lineage. By studying killer whaleswhich also experience menopauseresearchers have found that the presence of a living grandmotherincreases the chances of survival for a calf.

If the theory is right, this evolutionary mechanism could still be helpful to human familiesbut less so to the individual. Humans are living longer and starting families later than ever before. People born today may live as much of their lives after menopause as they do before it. Why shouldnt those postmenopausal years start later and be healthier? The reality is, the age of menopause is at odds with modern life, Goldman says.

Menopause may be inevitable, but Garrison thinks its possible to at least stall it to help people remain healthier in older age. With her initiative at the Buck Institute, shes trying to fill in the huge gaps created by sexism in science and chronic underfunding of womens health research. Historically, investigators haverelied too much on male lab animals andoften excluded women from medical and toxicology studies, generalizing to women from data collected from men.

Today,clinical trials are more gender-balanced, and in 2014 the US National Institutes of Healthannounced an initiative to balance sex in cell and animal studies. Still, theres catching up to do. We dont have a lot of basic knowledge because this area has been ignored by the biomedical research community for a very long time, Garrison says. Now, the field of female reproductive aging is finally getting the attention it deserves. These are solvable problems, she adds. We just need to do the work.

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The Secrets of Aging Are Hidden in Your Ovaries - WIRED

V Knuckles has come a long way since his childhood memories in Roxbury, MA. At 12, he moved to Cambridge, MA and rapidly developed his own flow with catchy lyrics and raw style alongside his cousin E'Flash. Together they formed the group N.B.S. (Natural Born Spitters) and the (Verbal) Vets in 1998. His latest release "Longevity" is a testament to his time in the industry as a veteran emcee who has gone through a whole lot. Knuckles and Mass legends REKS and Edo. G combine with super DJ & Producer Phoniks who laces them with a soulful and nostalgia-inducing backdrop made up of sombre strings, warm textures and a soothing vocal sample to boot. That is all that is needed for the emcees to share their respective stories of perseverance and endurance in this unforgiving industry. The visual also taps into the theme of introspection with its use of throwback clips of the emcees in their younger days and splicing them up with the present day. It sure is befitting to their respective legacies and shows viewers that they are here to stay.

The single is off the upcoming album The Next Chapter(Date TBA) entirely produced byPhoniks.

Watch/Stream "Longevity" on all DSPs here.

Go here to see the original:
V Knuckles , REKS and Edo. G are all about "Longevity"[Video ... - EARMILK

Memes have been a part of our culture for quite a while now. Its rare to find someone who doesnt use memes or understand their concept. In this internet age, memes are more popular than ever. A show, quote, influencer, or whatever you name it, can be memed and spread like wildfire. And 2023s Ramadan season was no exception.

One of the reasons why shows like Gaffar EL Omda, Taht EL Wesaya, and EL Sofara were extremely popular this Ramadan season was because of the memes being made and shared on social media.

Gaffar EL Omdas memes were inescapable, Taht EL Wesaya's memes made us cry, and El Sofara's memes made us wonder what happened in Gamasa.

Beyond this Ramadan season, Memes are not a regional phenomenon, they are global, with each country using memes to express something regarding its culture. But before we dive deep into the impact of memes on pop culture and arts, let us first understand what memes are.

Merriam-webster.com define memes as an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online, especially through social media

The term originated by Charles Darwin, but to keep the article concise, lets stick to the definition and explain further how memes work.

Memes can be universally understood, think of the famous one doesnt simply walk into Mordor meme, and they can have a specific meaning that is understood by a specific group or culture, for example, El Nazer memes are understood largely in Arabic speaking countries and are highly relatable to Egyptians due to its context and its Egyptian-rooted references.

Regardless of its origins or how other cultures use them, one thing is for certain: Memes can make or break art and media.

Since memes come from media or any pop culture event that happened, heir virality and shareability are a direct reflection of the overall quality and humor.

Its also worth noting that not everything can be turned into a meme, people like memes and share them quickly because it made them laugh. Thats why some talk shows or ads when they try to jump on a trend or recreate a funny meme, seem disingenuous.

So back to memes and arts, how do they affect each other?

When a work of art or any sort of media is made, its going to be viewed by millions and thousands of people. Whether the content itself is good or bad, doesnt matter. If it can be used for humor, it will be everywhere.

There are tons of examples in that sense

The Positive Impact

For instance, social media went wild after Greta Gerwig's newest film, Barbie, released its trailer and memes were everywhere. From recreating the poster to quoting the tagline Shes everything. Hes just a Ken.

To keep it local, the resurgence of El Ha2ee2a wel Sarab, A show that aired 20 years ago, has found its place in the millennial's and Gen Z's hearts as people started to create Facebook groups dedicated to the show and make memes about every single scene, Literally!

Or Hob El Banat Ahmed Baradas song, Naseyeny Wana Ganbak, has spread quickly, made into memes, and even used in TikTok.

The Negative Impact

When Sonic the Hedgehog's trailer was released, people were outraged that the animation was something out of a horror film. The memes and controversy were so loud that the studios changed the entire character design.

If any sort of media (film, showetc.) is executed poorly or without sincerity, people will use memes to voice their opinion and express their feelings to cancel or alter the original content.

Main Takeaway

Memes arent just for entertainment, some can be used to raise awareness about certain issues or help in uncovering hidden gems and cult classics that audiences might not have seen or heard about.

Long story short, memes are here to stay and probably will remain a reason for art to live and resonate into audiences minds.

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How the Meme Culture Impacts the Longevity of Arts - Egypt Today