Inflammation leading to Diabetes

Several years ago, Daniel and Shawn Winer began to speculate that different types of immune cells, including T cells and B cells, can cause inflammation in the fatty tissue that surrounds and cushions organs in the body. This inflammation occurs in mice fed a high-fat, high-calorie diet when the rapidly growing fat cells outstrip their blood supply and begin to die. (It’s also seen in humans with type-2 diabetes.) The dying cells spew their contents, and immune system cells called macrophages are summoned to clean up the mess.

“This immune reaction causes havoc in the fatty tissue,” said Engleman, “and we’ve found that it involves two other immune system cells — T cells and B cells — in addition to macrophages.” The resulting onslaught by the immune system inhibits the ability of the remaining fat cells to respond to insulin and causes fatty acids to be shed into the blood. This sets in motion a physiological cascade that leads to fatty liver disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and further insulin resistance throughout the body.

The researchers found that mice genetically engineered to lack B cells were protected from developing insulin resistance even when they grew obese on the high-fat diet. However, injecting these mice with B cells or purified antibodies from obese, insulin-resistant mice significantly impaired their ability to metabolize glucose and caused their fasting insulin levels to increase.

The researchers then studied 32 age- and weight-matched overweight people who differed only in their sensitivity to insulin. “We were able to show that people with insulin resistance make antibodies to a select group of their own proteins,” said Engleman. “In contrast, equally overweight people who are not insulin-resistant do not express these antibodies. http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2011/april/engleman.html

How a 6 lb gallon of gasoline produces 20 pounds of Carbon Dioxide

It seems impossible that a gallon of gasoline, which weighs about 6.3 pounds, could produce 20 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) when burned. However, most of the weight of the CO2 doesn't come from the gasoline itself, but the oxygen in the air.

When gasoline burns, the carbon and hydrogen separate. The hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water (H2O), and carbon combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide (CO2).

A carbon atom has a weight of 12, and each oxygen atom has a weight of 16, giving each single molecule of CO2 an atomic weight of 44 (12 from carbon and 32 from oxygen).

Therefore, to calculate the amount of CO2 produced from a gallon of gasoline, the weight of the carbon in the gasoline is multiplied by 44/12 or 3.7.

Since gasoline is about 87% carbon and 13% hydrogen by weight, the carbon in a gallon of gasoline weighs 5.5 pounds (6.3 lbs. x .87).

We can then multiply the weight of the carbon (5.5 pounds) by 3.7, which equals 20 pounds of CO2!  http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/co2.shtml

Head East Old Man

Maine's median age in 2010 was 42.7, the Census reported Thursday. That's two years older than the median in Florida, and more than five years above the national median age of 37.2.

Antioxidants Revisited, Inflammation and Aging Gains Support

"If lethal cancer is a disease of "accelerated aging" in the tumor's connective tissue, then cancer patients may benefit from therapy with strong antioxidants and anti-inflammatory drugs," said Dr. Lisanti. "Antioxidant therapy will "cut off the fuel supply" for cancer cells." Antioxidants also have a natural anti-inflammatory action.
 Interestingly, cancer cells induce "oxidative stress," the rusting process, in normal connective tissue, in order to extract vital nutrients.

Dr. Lisanti and his team previously discovered that cancer cells induce this type of stress response (autophagy) in nearby cells, to feed themselves and grow.

"What we see now is that as you age, your whole body becomes more sensitive to this parasitic cancer mechanism, and the cancer cells selectively accelerate the aging process via inflammation in the connective tissue.

In another study, the researchers explain that cancer cells initiate a "lactate shuttle" to move lactate -- the "food" -- from the connective tissue to the cancer cells. There's a transporter that is "spilling" lactate from the connective tissue and a transporter that then "gobbles" it up in the cancer cells."

The implication is that the fibroblasts in the connective tissue are feeding cancer cells directly via pumps, called MCT1 and MCT4, or mono-carboxylate transporters. The researchers see that lactate is like "candy" for cancer cells. And cancer cells are addicted to this supply of "candy."

It's all the same mechanism, where one cell type literally "feeds" the other. The cancer cells are the "Queen Bees," and the connective tissue cells are the "Worker Bees." In this analogy, the "Queen Bees" use aging and inflammation as the signal to tell the "Worker Bees" to make more foodhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110526152549.htm

Map of wages across the U.S. the Bay Area looks pretty rich!

Good article about how caloric restriction is the one proven way to exceed maximum lifespan.  Of interest this map of life expectancy, I find it interesting that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand beat the US.   A recent study on Mother's Day also ranked those three countries in the top 10 best places to be a mother, the US didn't even make it on the list.  This article about anti-aging in a pill points out the challenges to resveratrol and brings up another compound, rapamyacin.  Interestingly the article leaves out many other small compounds that have been suggested to extend lifespan, but it does a good job sticking to the facts.

Organism	On caloric restriction	Using drugs or genetic modifications
Yeast	Lives three times as long as normal.	Inhibiting the TOR nutrient-sensing pathway by deleting TOR and related genes produces a several-fold increase in life span.
Fruit fly	Lives two times as long as normal.	Reducing activity of the insulin/insulin-like growth factor signaling (IIS) pathway through genetic deletions extends life. So does using rapamycin, a drug that acts via the TOR pathway.
Mouse	Lives 30 to 50 percent as long as normal.	Mutations that reduce activity of the IIS pathway or the TOR pathway, called mTOR in mammals, increase life span. So do rapamycin and the diabetes drug metformin. Mannoheptulose, which slows metabolism of glucose, may extend life by 30 percent.
Monkey	Less age-related disease and lowered age-related mortality after 15–20 years.	No published results of experimental drugs.
Human	Long-term study of 25 percent reduction in calories is ongoing.	Not yet determined. Some researchers have hopes for rapamycin and mannoheptulose, among others. Studies of resveratrol and SIRT1 activators, which both stimulate sirtuins, and metformin are ongoing.

This interesting paper , Index Cohesive Force Analysis Reveals That the US Market Became Prone to Systemic Collapses Since 2002, described by this article suggests that the Capital Asset Pricing Model, the backbone of modern day portfolio theory, does not accurately allow for a projection of valuing risk through the term called Beta, when choosing between asset classes: In Figure4 (GRAPH HERE) we show that the average of the systematic risk over all stocks (blue curve) differs from the average of the stock-index correlations (red curve). As in the case of the average correlation, we observe a jump in at the beginning of 2002. However, we did not decipher a trend reverse in the value of as we found for the ICF during the first months of 2010. We note that in a market which behaves as described by the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) [36], the of the market should equal 1. In such market, as a result of its definition, the ICF should diverge. Hence, our results might indicate that the market dynamics do not follow the CAPM. 

The paper describes a new way of assessing the overall market, the Index Cohesive Force (ICF), defined above. This new factor can capture the stiffness of the market, or put another way, how it can break and have seizures, or how it can dart back and forth like a herd. "the ICF parameter presented here can be further generalized, such as by a normalization of the volatility, or standard deviation of correlations; we propose this normalized ICF parameter as an Herding factor, which allows a quantification of herding in financial markets."

Thoughts on How to Store Money?

When you think about investments, you really want to think of money you are putting off spending today, that you want to spend later, and still have the ability to at least buy the same amount of goods if not more.  When you get older you want that money more available, in a form that is more secure.

Financial advisors talk about the choice in terms of risk.  Risk is the price we pay to have the ability to store our money in a method that will beat inflation and hopefully bring even better returns.  By placing our money in the hands of other people we take the risk of not getting our money back.  The larger the risk, the higher the risky person is willing to pay in interest to entice you to give them your money.

Stocks or equity, equal ownership of a business, is the more riskier option of the two securities financial advisors will talk about.  The other major class is bonds, I.O.U.s from major businesses, that promise to pay a specific legally binding return for a contract with certain terms -here you only need to worry if the business will go bankrupt. With stocks, however, you have to try to figure out how much the business is totally worth, predict the future dividends the company will pay out over the company's lifetime, and whether an innovative product will make the company excessively profitable -much harder to calculate, hence more risky.

This advising piece addresses the question of how much risk to hold onto when you are older. The recommendation is about the mix of bonds and stocks to hold, less stocks as you get older, just because they are so much more risky to figure out than whether a company will go bankrupt or not:  Starting somewhere between 35% and 50% in stocks at 65 and gradually reducing your stock holdings so that you're at, say, 25% to 35% stocks by age 75 and 20% to 30% in your 80s is a reasonable guideline.The right blend will depend a variety of factors: your age, stomach for risk, the size of your portfolio and what other resources you may have to fall back on (home equity, a pension, etc)

But there is also another way to think about how to store your money.  When you use the language of storing your money you might imagine a vault.  This suggest the concept of materializing your money into tangible items to store your purchasing power.  Gold is an example that has been hot since about 2006 when the yield curve inverted, a harbinger of bad things to come -it indicates a preference for a kind of government fixed-income security like bonds, treasuries, that mature sooner than later; this can be interpreted to mean people think a bad business environment is on the horizon and the government will be lowering interest rates, and thus treasuries will have lower returns in the near future, so buy up the high interest rate fixed-income securities now while they are available. When a bad business environment is predicted to be on the horizon, as suggested by an inverted yield curve, it might be best to avoid business-based avenues to storing money such as bond I.O.Us and stock equity slices of business ownership.

Buying gold, or other physical items, however, still carries the risk of theft or destruction, or the risk that something valuable today, say laptop computers, could become less valuable tomorrow.  Storing money in physical items should only be a short-term plan of action. In the long run, when the world is a place where innovation and rapid change are easily applied, it is best to stick with the more dynamic business ownership means of storing your money through stocks.  Yet when you life depends on your assets, you want to pick the least-riskiest approach to storing your money while still getting better returns than just holding your cash in a bank account, and thus bonds are recommend as you become older. 

How Failure Improve Society

There is a guest post by Tim Harford, the author of Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, on the Freakonmics blog.

From his post:

I’ve been studying how these processes of experimenting and adapting have worked, or failed to work, in dealing with some of the important problems we face today, from promoting innovation to preventing future financial meltdowns. And I’ve also been exploring our psychological responses to failure – why we fear even small setbacks, and how we can over-react when things are going badly. I’ve concluded that adapting in the face of failure is absolutely vital – and a more painful challenge than I at first expected.

Awaiting my Asian President

Here is an interesting article about how Asians rock, when it comes to learning.  I am eagerly awaiting the day we elect our first Asian president, who hopefully will be from the San Francisco Bay Area. 

The most recent academic test scores from the Program for International Student Assessment show that four of the world's five top-scoring countries are Asian countries. (Finland is the non-Asian exception). In California, Asians represent 12 percent of high school graduates, but one-third of admissions to the University of California and almost half of all undergraduate admissions to UC San Diego.

Likewise the latest U.S. Census figures show that Asians as a group are much more likely to have college degrees and also have much higher household incomes.

Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week, according to the American Time Use Survey

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Free Market Makes Misery?

A fascinating study that suggests go-go capitalism makes for unhappy civilians.   The US along with  Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland were pooled on life satisfaction.  The research included 10,405 people from these 15 advanced industrialized countries who were asked, "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?"

On a scale of 1 to 10 -- with 10 the highest level of satisfaction -- the average rating for all respondents was 7.39,  with respondents from the United States reporting an average of 7.26.  The US had one of the lowest scores.

The study measured government intervention into the economy in four ways: government tax revenue as a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP), government consumption of GDP, generosity of unemployment benefits and a country's welfare expenditures as a percentage of GDP.

"In many cases, less government intervention can allow for a more efficient economy, but greater economic efficiency doesn't necessarily translate into greater contentment with one's life," Flavin said. "If you get sick and can't work or lose your job and there are few social protections in place, you're more likely to be anxious and less satisfied."

Remember the Membranes

Here is a study showing  mutations in genes for proteins called "lamins" are responsible for genetically induced accelerated aging found in the condition called progeria.   These lamins are important for creating the nuclear lamina which forms the scaffolding for the nuclear envelope encompassing our DNA.  Previous work has indicated major parts of the nuclear envelope are linked with progeroid syndromes.  

The journal paper revealed a mutation in a gene called barrier-to-autointegration factor 1 (BANF1) is responsible for the drastic changes in nuclear envelope structure because of the changes to lamins. Patients had a dramatic reduction in the protein produced by this gene, and their cells exhibited substantial abnormalities in the nuclear envelope. These nuclear defects could be rescued by expression of normal BANF1.

This all makes sense in that access to the DNA through the nuclear envelope to turn on and off genes is very important to allow functional survival. 

75grams of Apples a day = Health

Apples, even dried apples, make for a healthy body, according to research from Florid State University.
This study randomly assigned 160 women ages 45-65 to one of two dietary intervention groups: one received dried apples daily (75g/day for 1 year) and the other group ate dried prunes every day for a year. Blood samples were taken at 3, 6 and 12-months. The results surprised Dr. Arjmandi, who stated that "incredible changes in the apple-eating women happened by 6 months- they experienced a 23% decrease in LDL cholesterol," which is known as the "bad cholesterol." The daily apple consumption also led to a lowering of lipid hydroperoxide levels.
These results go to show the value of cultural health knowledge. Early to bed and early to rise will probably do you well, as will taking head of all those sayings about how to treat your family, friends, neighbors, and strangers.

Diet Restriction not Fat Loss

This article reports interesting findings on how extreme weight loss in mice experiencing caloric restriction did not get a longevity boost, however it presents them in a way that could confuse people. The article suggests the results challenge the scientifically proven "law," one could almost say, that reducing calories across various species of animals increases lifespan to the point of exceeding the maximum observed lifespan.  That is to say if the maximum lifespan of humans was 120 years, a human that practiced dietary restriction for his or her entire life would live longer than 120 years. 


This research at first appears to challenge these findings by showing that mice on dietary restriction who lost a lot of fat died earlier than mice on caloric restriction that lost less fat.  On closer examination of the research abstract there is clarification that they are working with mutant mice,  41 recombinant inbred strains of mice, and that it is the fat mice that lose a lot of fat that die earlier.  This discover actually dovetails well with existing literature that losing a lot of fat is a dangerous event for the body. Many chemicals are stored in adipose tissue, perhaps even natural toxins unrelated to the external environment, that can be released from lipid storage as fat cells decrease in volume.  These results support moderation with weight-loss versus drastic purge dieting. 

Cure for unhappiness: "It's all gonna work out tomorrow, as it all worked out yesterday."

 People who look at the past through rose-tinted glasses are happier than those who focus on negative past experiences and regrets, according to a new study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The findings suggest that persons with certain personality traits are happier than others because of the way they think about their past, present and future.  This jives with studies that show optimistic, grateful, forgiving people live longer lives.  The authors suggest that savoring happy memories or reframing painful past experiences in a positive light could be effective ways for individuals to increase their life satisfaction. Also just doing anything can make people happy, and researchers think this might explain why people get into bad situations like doing drugs, because it satisfies the desire "to just do something!"

Science meets markets

Science study of switching events, where something goes from positive to negative, or up to down in the case of stock prices, related to bubble events.   "We find that this empirical law with a unique parameter is valid for very small bubbles as well as for huge bubbles." In other words, the formation of bullish and bearish trends does not depend on the time scale. The well known catastrophic bubbles that occur over large time scales, such as the global financial crashes of 1929 and 2008, are not outliers. "We found the blueprint of financial trends," summarizes Preis and concludes: "We can learn from the large number of tiny bubbles how huge market bubbles emerge and burst. The challenge is to destroy bubbles before they become huge."

From the research paper:  We suggest that the well known catastrophic bubbles that occur on large time scales—such as the most recent financial crisis—may not be outliers but single dramatic representatives caused by the formation of increasing and decreasing trends on time scales varying over nine orders of magnitude from very large down to very small.