BBC Knowledge Asia Edition2

THE SECRET OF LONGER LIFE

IN NUMBERS

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THIRSTY EARTH SLOWS SEA

LEVEL RISE

Climate change is turning the Earth into a giant

sponge. NASA scientists have found that while

glaciers and ice sheets are continuing to melt,

changes in climate over the past decade have

caused the Earth to soak up an extra 3.2 trillion

tons of water, slowing the rate of sea level rise

by about 20 per cent.

The discovery was made with NASA’s

Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment

(GRACE), two satellites which can detect

changes in Earth’s gravitational pull due to

changes in the amount of water on the planet’s

surface.

Vast amounts of water continually evaporate

from the oceans, fall as rain or snow, and then

run back into the oceans. “We always assumed

that our increased reliance on groundwater for

irrigation and consumption was resulting in a

net transfer of water from the land to the

ocean,” said lead researcher JT Reager. “What

we didn’t realise is that over the past decade,

changes in the global water cycle more than

offset the losses that occurred.”

It seems having a bit of a spring clean can leave you

feeling like a spring chicken. Researchers at Mayo

Clinic in Minnesota have found that flushing old

cells out of mice extended their lifespans by 17 to

35 per cent, the equivalent of extending a human

life from 80 to more than 100 years. The treated

mice also looked younger and showed less age-

related damage in their muscles and kidneys.

The technique is based on removing so-called

senescent cells – cells that have stopped dividing

and are no longer needed by the body – using an

otherwise harmless drug.

“Senescent cells that accumulate with ageing are

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tissues, and therefore shorten your life but also the

healthy phase of your life,” said researcher Jan van

Deursen. “Since you can eliminate the cells without

negative side effects, it seems like therapies that

will mimic our findings, either the genetic method

that we used to eliminate the cells or drugs or other

compounds that can eliminate senescent cells,

would be useful for therapies against age-related

disabilities, diseases or conditions.”

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