Existence is Wonderful Audio - Episode 9 is now up and ready for download. This episode has a fairly monotropic focus on Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, and represents something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while.
I like to think of SENS in terms of it being a useful framework to approach aging from an engineering standpoint, as explained in the podcast. It’s not a recipe for making people live longer in and of itself, but rather, a good start in terms of viewing age-related health problems as potentially solvable. So, I hope this episode is at least somewhat useful and at least marginally interesting.
Feedback is very much appreciated, since I want to make sure I am talking about these sorts of things in an understandable manner.
In this episode, I briefly outlined the Seven Deadly Things associated with aging. These Seven Deadly Things are:
1. Cell loss, cell atrophy
2. Nuclear mutations and epimutations
3. Mutant mitochondria
4. Death-resistant cells
5. Extracellular crosslinks
6. Extracellular junk
7. Intracellular junk
If you’d like to learn about these Things in greater detail, and hear some actual scientists talking about them, I would like to draw your attention to the audio files linked at the bottom of each page associated with each of the items above. These files are primarily recordings from the 10th Congress of the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology (IABG 10) and SENS 2 conferences held in recent years, and are an excellent supplementary resource for anyone wanting to learn more about biogerontology while they jog or wash the dishes.
IABG 10 talks are listed here and available for download.
SENS 2 talks are listed here and available for download.
I’ve listened to about 10 of the above talks over the past week, and though the audio quality is somewhat variable, the information is tremendously interesting.
Episode 10 of Existence is Wonderful Audio will be soon forthcoming; I’ve been working on the scripts for episodes 9 and 10 in parallel, and they’ve both been rather a long time in the making.
And as a final (and somewhat off-topic) note, just because I think it’s really nifty, here are some neat examples of High Dynamic Range Imaging:
A lovely pile of rubbish
Blue and white—a chair, and a magnificent sky
A shiny colorful indoor area
There are heaps more in the Flickr pool; I haven’t tried creating any such photos myself yet, but I would really like to at some point. A large part of the reason I find this sort of imaging appealing is because it very closely approximates the way I see the world all the time. The third photo in particular looks a lot like what I see when I first enter a place like a shopping mall. One aspect of my brain-wiring is that I tend to see the details of, well, everything by default. Every bit of visual information tends to be fairly equally weighted as far as my brain is concerned.
This is definitely part of the reason I’ve never had a drivers’ license, but it’s also a part of the reason why I find so much beauty in the world (and why I can draw accurately and why I have excellent edge-detection skills), and I would never trade it for anything. I’m not trying to self-aggrandize here, but this definitely seemed like a good example of a biological trait that can be a strength or a liability depending upon context—and an example of something that I would never want to lose, even if losing it might make life logistically easier for me in some ways.
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