Age is relative. If you put two people the same chronological age next to each other, one may look younger while one may nonetheless be biologically younger. Yet age is the biggest risk factor for most diseases even though it doesn't tell much of a health story.

Population statistics about age are as pointless in individual care as most epidemiology, but they can provide proxies for biological aging that at least have people taking important things for their future, rather than placebos like a USDA food servings chart.

Humanity progresses thanks to the diffusion and sharing of human knowledge. In particular, scientific progress is brought forth by the sharing of ideas, measurements and experimental results among scientists, and the distribution of excellent education. We have grown very good at doing that, but can we improve the sharing of knowledge for the common good? 

The answer is certainly yes, as the interconnection of the scientific community and the interdisciplinarity of its efforts are hampered by borders, language barriers, cultural differences, political influences, religious hindrances, education system challenges, and also by different conventions, policies, metrics in the different areas of scientific research.

A new paper describes the perfect combination of genetic alterations that tumors use to promote explosive growth and prevent their own demise, a development that could change the way oncologists understand and treat melanoma.

Telomeres, protective caps at the of the end of the chromosome, are required to prevent DNA from degrading. In healthy cells, telomeres become shorter with each cycle of replication until they become so short that the cell can no longer divide. Disruptions in maintenance of the length of the telomeres can lead to severe disease. Short telomere syndromes lead to premature aging and death, but extra-long telomeres are associated with cancer.

My nice Plaxo online address book disappeared when the host company was sold and the buyer discontinued the service. My contacts, up in smoke.

Dropbox (cloud storage and data synch) and TunnelBear (VPN) both decided not to support my OS any more, as did Google Chrome. I face expensive upgrades.

With a tiny fraction of the world population, the United States dominates science output. America dominates in Nobel prizes, and adult science literacy.

Yet leading the world in science literacy needs under 30% of its people, so it isn't that America is great, it is more that other countries are terrible. Anyone looking at the science policies of Europe - 'anything but science' is the default - when it comes to food, energy, and medicine knows they're regressing into the Dark Ages. Asia never stopped being the home of supplements and mysticism, it is why they lead the world in endangered-species-killed-for-folk-medicine occurrences.

Heart inflammation after a COVID-19 vaccine is very rare but epidemiology exists to vreate exploratory between products and outcomes and a recent analysis showed incidence of myocarditis, pericarditis or myopericarditis is two- to threefold higher after a second dose of the Moderna Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine compared to the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

That's not a reason to avoid a vaccine, any more than you should stop eating salad if it has a regular pesticide rather than an organic one, but it may mean that it's beneficial to choose specific vaccines for certain populations.

Virtual Reality devices are advertised everywhere but have as much uptake as USDA nutrition guidelines or 3-D televisions. One reason is that it's a lot of money for something you can use for 20 minutes without fatigue. Another is VR sickness, a type of motion sickness which comes from users seeing “motion” through their headsets without actually moving. The symptoms include headaches, nausea, and sometimes vomiting. 

Researchers from the U.S.