Tag: ageing

Impact Lab > ageing
Analysis, Big Problems, Birth

Older adults projected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history

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If you’re feeling old, you’re in good company and apparently a lot of it. New statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau show that for the first time in U.S. history, older people are projected to outnumber children. And they expect it to happen in a little over a decade.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 National Population Projections, the year 2030 will mark an important demographic turning point in the country’s history.

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Analysis, Genetics, Health & Fitness, Science & Technology News

What researchers with the world’s longest running study of human aging know for sure

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What is aging? That’s the question the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sought to answer in 1958 when it launched the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA)—now the world’s longest-running study of human aging.

Some 3,200 men and women have played a critical role in advancing our understanding of what it means to get older. And these particular volunteers made a lifelong commitment to participate in the research. In over six decades of work, BLSA researchers say they are certain of just two things: Aging is not synonymous with disease. And we all age differently.

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Analysis, Health & Fitness

How long can we live? The limit hasn’t been reached, study finds

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The mortality rate flattens among the oldest of the old, a study of elderly Italians concludes, suggesting that the oldest humans have not yet reached the limits of life span.

In Acciaroli, a hamlet in southern Italy, about one-in-60 residents are over the age of 90. A survey of about 4,000 Italians found that mortality rates in old age plateau around 105, suggesting that the ceiling for human lifespan has not yet been reached.CreditGianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Since 1900, average life expectancy around the globe has more than doubled, thanks to better public health, sanitation and food supplies. But a new study of long-lived Italians indicates that we have yet to reach the upper bound of human longevity.

“If there’s a fixed biological limit, we are not close to it,” said Elisabetta Barbi, a demographer at the University of Rome. Dr. Barbi and her colleagues published their research Thursday in the journal Science.

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Analysis, Big Problems, Human Behavior

The world is running out of Japanese people

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Japan is shrinking. Fast.

The health ministry recently announced that only 946,060 babies were born in Japan in 2017, the fewest births since official statistics began in 1899. At the same time, 1,340,433 Japanese people died last year. This means that the non-immigrant population declined by nearly 400,000 people.

It’s an astonishing shift. The Japanese population grew steadily throughout the 20th century, from around 44 million in 1900 to 128 million in 2000. The gains were primarily due to increased life expectancy, but also buoyed by families that typically had at least two children. But beginning in the late 1970s, birth rates crashed. While the average Japanese woman had 2.1 kids in the 1970s, today, they only have about 1.4—far lower than in comparably wealthy countries like the US and Sweden.

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Big Problems, Future, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

The next great workplace challenge: 100-year careers

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Scientists expect people to live routinely to 100 in the coming decades, and as long as 150. Which also suggests a much longer working life lasting well into the 70s, 80s, and even 100, according to researchers with Pearson and Oxford University.

Quick take: Thinkers of various types are absorbed in navigating the age of automation and flat wages, but their challenge will be complicated by something few have considered — a much-extended bulge of older workers.

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Future, Healthcare, Housing, Science & Technology News

Home Smart Home: The Shape Of Things To Come

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A new report predicts intelligent ‘Cognitive Homes’ of the future will be able to assess and manage our needs and desires in later life.

Almost 32 million people will be aged 60 or over in the UK by 2039. But what sort of living environment do older people face when they leave the workplace and embark on the next chapter of their lives?

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Breakthrough Thinking, Health & Fitness, Latest News, New Discoveries

North Korea Hails New ‘Anti-Ageing Super Drink’

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Microelements make up the Super Drink
North Korea has developed a “super drink” that, it says, can multiply brain cells and stop skin ageing. The secretive state’s official news agency, KCNA, says the drink contains 60 kinds of “microelements” extracted from more than 30 species of plants.

It attracted “much interest from Chinese, German and other businessmen” at a trade fair in Pyongyang last month, the agency reports. It was developed by a joint venture fruit juice company. KCNA says: “It, with effects of both preventive and curative treatment, helps improve mental and retentive faculties by multiplying brain cells.

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