An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Mini brains grown in a lab from stem cells have spontaneously developed rudimentary eye structures scientists report in a fascinating new paper. On tiny, human-derived brain organoids grown in dishes, two bilaterally symmetrical optic cups were seen to grow, mirroring the development of eye structures in human embryos. This incredible result will help us to better understand the process of eye differentiation and development, as well as eye diseases. Brain organoids are not true brains, as you might be thinking of them. They are small, three-dimensional structures grown from induced pluripotent stem cells -- cells harvested from adult humans and reverse engineered into stem cells, that have the potential to grow into many different types of tissue. In this case, these stem cells are coaxed to grow into blobs of brain tissue, without anything resembling thoughts, emotions, or consciousness. Such 'mini brains' are used for research purposes where using actual living brains would be impossible, or at the very least, ethically tricky -- testing drug responses, for example, or observing cell development under certain adverse conditions. Previous work in the development of organoids showed evidence of retinal cells, but these did not develop optic structures, so the team changed their protocols. They didn't attempt to force the development of purely neural cells at the early stages of neural differentiation, and added retinol acetate to the culture medium as an aid to eye development. Their carefully tended baby brains formed optic cups as early as 30 days into development, with the structures clearly visible at 50 days. This is consistent with the timing of eye development in the human embryo, which means these organoids could be useful for studying the intricacies of this process. There are other implications, too. The optic cups contained different retinal cell types, which organized into neural networks that responded to light, and even contained lens and corneal tissue. Finally, the structures displayed retinal connectivity to regions of the brain tissue. The research has been published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Scientists have come tantalizingly close to reproducing the power of the sun -- albeit only in a speck of hydrogen for a fraction of a second. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported on Tuesday that by using 192 gigantic lasers to annihilate a pellet of hydrogen, they were able to ignite a burst of more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power -- energy released when hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, the same process that occurs within stars. Indeed, Mark Herrmann, Livermore's deputy program director for fundamental weapons physics, compared the fusion reaction to the 170 quadrillion watts of sunshine that bathe Earth's surface. "This about 10 percent of that," Dr. Herrmann said. And all of the fusion energy emanated from a hot spot about as wide as a human hair, he said. But the burst -- essentially a miniature hydrogen bomb -- lasted only 100-trillionths of a second. Still, that spurred a burst of optimism for fusion scientists who have long hoped that fusion could someday provide a boundless, clean energy source for humanity. The success also signified a moment of redemption for Livermore's football-stadium-size laser apparatus, which is named the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F. Despite an investment of billions of dollars -- construction started in 1997 and operations began in 2009 -- the apparatus initially generated hardly any fusion at all. In 2014, Livermore scientists finally reported success, but the energy produced then was minuscule -- the equivalent of what a 60-watt light bulb consumes in five minutes. On Aug. 8, the burst of energy was much greater -- 70 percent as much as the energy of laser light hitting the hydrogen target. That is still a losing proposition as an energy source, consuming more power than it produces. But scientists are confident that further jumps in energy output were possible with fine-tuning of the experiment.

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A study of 6,400 people "from eight days old up to age 95, in 29 countries," finds that the human metabolism "peaks at the age of one, is stable from 20 to 60 and then inexorably declines," writes the BBC. Long-time Slashdot reader Hope Thelps shares their report: The study, published in the journal Science, found four phases of metabolic life: - birth to age one, when the metabolism shifts from being the same as the mother's to a lifetime high 50% above that of adults - a gentle slowdown until the age of 20, with no spike during all the changes of puberty - no change at all between the ages of 20 and 60 - a permanent decline, with yearly falls that, by 90, leave metabolism 26% lower than in mid-life "The most surprising thing for me," one of the researchers tells the BBC, "is there is no change throughout adulthood — if you are experiencing mid-life spread you can no longer blame it on a declining metabolic rate." Science magazine's headline? "Little kids burn so much energy, they're like a different species, study finds." [T]he first comprehensive study of energy use over the human life span has quantified their burn rate: Infants between the ages of 9 and 15 months expend a stunning 50% more energy in 1 day than adults do, adjusted for body size. These wee dynamos consume and use up energy even faster than pregnant women and teenage boys, most likely to fuel their energetically expensive brains and organs. "Little people are not burning energy like small adults," says Duke University evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer, who led the new analysis of data from around the world. "They are burning energy superfast ... like a different species."

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AmiMoJo writes: Reaching herd immunity is "not a possibility" with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said. Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was "mythical." "The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population," he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus. "The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who's still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus ... and we don't have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission." Although the existing vaccines are very effective at preventing serious Covid illness and death, they do not stop a fully vaccinated person from being infected by the virus that causes Covid-19. The concept of herd or population immunity relies on a large majority of a population gaining immunity -- either through vaccination or previous infection -- which, in turn, provides indirect protection from an infectious disease for the unvaccinated and those who have never been previously infected. Data from a recent React study conducted by Imperial College London suggests that fully vaccinated people aged 18 to 64 have about a 49% lower risk of being infected compared with unvaccinated people. The findings also indicated that fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%).

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omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein's theory of special relativity. It's called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934, and we have very good reason to believe it would work. But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don't have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser. Now, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory say they've found a way around this stumbling block using the facility's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- resulting in a direct observation of the Breit-Wheeler process in action. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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A pretty little white flower that grows near urban centers of the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a killer. NPR reports: The bog-dwelling western false asphodel, Triantha occidentalis, was first described in the scientific literature in 1879. But until now, no one realized that this sweet looking plant used its sticky stem to catch and digest insects, according to researchers who note in their study published Monday that it's the first new carnivorous plant to be discovered in about 20 years. "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site." Fewer than a thousand plant species are carnivorous, and these plants tend to live in places with abundant sun and water, but nutrient-poor soil. Graham's team was doing an unrelated project on plant genetics and noticed that the western false asphodel had a genetic deletion that's sometimes seen in carnivorous plants. The researchers started to think about the fact that this flower grew in the kind of environment that's home to various other insect-eating plants. "And then they have these sticky stems," says Graham. "So, you know, it was kind of like, hmm, I wonder if this could be a sign that this might be carnivorous." To see if the plants could actually take in nutrients from insects, researcher Qianshi Lin, now at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, fed fruit flies nitrogen-15 isotopes, so that this nitrogen could be used as a tracker. He then stuck these flies to stems of this plant. Later, an analysis showed that nitrogen from the dead insects was indeed getting into the plants. In fact, Triantha was getting more than half of its nitrogen from prey. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published online Monday, Lin and his colleagues say that this is comparable to what's seen in other carnivorous plants. What's more, the researchers showed that the sticky hairs on the flower stalk produce a digestive enzyme that's known to be used by many carnivorous plants. And when the research team looked at specimens of this plant preserved in herbariums, they found small dead insects stuck to the stems.

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Hmmmmmm shares a report from The Independent: Scientists in China have developed the hardest and strongest glassy material known so far that can scratch diamond crystals with ease. The researchers, including those from Yanshan University in China, noted that the new material -- tentatively named AM-III -- has "outstanding" mechanical and electronic properties, and could find applications in solar cells due to its "ultra-high" strength and wear resistance. Analysis of the material, published in the journal National Science Review, revealed that its hardness reached 113 gigapascals (GPa) while natural diamond stone usually scores 50 to 70 on the same test. According to the scientists, AM-III has tunable energy absorption properties comparable to semiconductors commonly used in solar cells such as hydrogenated amorphous silicon films. While in diamond crystals, the organized internal structure of its atoms and molecules contribute to their immense strength and hardness, in AM-III the researchers found that a combination of order and disorder of its molecules give rise to its strange properties. Using fullerenes, which are materials made of hollow football-like arrangements of carbon atoms, the researchers produced different types of glassy materials with varying molecular organization among which AM-III had the highest order of atoms and molecules. Increasing the order further, the scientists observed, could potentially kill the semiconductivity and other properties that required the atoms and molecules to be chaotic.

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From a paper on PNAS [PDF]: Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced "hockey stick" pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions. Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: With their crane-like necks, spindle legs and knobbly knees, giraffes are among the best loved and most recognizable of animals. Despite their elevated stature, however, giraffes have kept their surprisingly intricate social behavior under wraps. Once perceived as humble creatures that focused solely on feeding their majestic bodies, one book from 1991 described the giraffe as "socially aloof, forming no lasting bonds with its fellows and associating in the most casual way." But new research from the University of Bristol, published Tuesday in the journal Mammal Review, suggests giraffes have been misunderstood and are in fact a highly complex and social species. The most surprising thing for me is that it has taken until 2021 to recognize that giraffes have a complex social system. We have known for decades about other species of socially complex mammal, such as elephants, primates and cetaceans, but it is baffling to me how such a charismatic and well-known species as the giraffe could have been so understudied until recently," said Zoe Muller, study author and biologist at the University Of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences.

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Researchers around the world have continued breathing new life into a retracted study, which suggested that common antihypertensive medications were harmful in patients with COVID-19. From a report: Published online on May 1, 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study relied on Surgisphere data to claim an association between renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) inhibitor therapy and worse outcomes in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with cardiovascular disease. The journal retracted the paper due to concerns about fraudulent data on June 4, 2020 in a widely publicized move, but the study has continued to rack up citations -- totaling at least 652 as of May 31, 2021, reported Todd Lee, MD, MPH, of McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues. Just 17.6% of verified citations acknowledged or noted that the paper was retracted, according to their research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine. In May of this year alone -- 11 months after the article was retracted -- it was referenced 21 times. "Our findings challenge authors, peer reviewers, journal editors, and academic institutions to do a better job of addressing the broader issues of ongoing citations of retracted scientific studies and protecting the integrity of the medical literature," Lee's group urged. The hypothesis that angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs) may be harmful in patients with COVID-19 has been floated since the early days of the pandemic, with the reasoning being that since the SARS-CoV-2 virus enters human cells through ACE2 receptors, upregulation of these receptors could put patients at risk.

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Events in the genome of Welwitschia have given it the ability to survive in an unforgiving desert for thousands of years. From a report: The longest-lived leaves in the plant kingdom can be found only in the harsh, hyperarid desert that crosses the boundary between southern Angola and northern Namibia. A desert is not, of course, the most hospitable place for living things to grow anything, let alone leafy greens, but the Namib Desert -- the world's oldest with parts receiving less than two inches of precipitation a year -- is where Welwitschia calls home. In Afrikaans, the plant is named "tweeblaarkanniedood," which means "two leaves that cannot die." The naming is apt: Welwitschia grows only two leaves -- and continuously -- in a lifetime that can last millenniums. "Most plants develop a leaf, and that's it," said Andrew Leitch, a plant geneticist at Queen Mary University of London. "This plant can live thousands of years, and it never stops growing. When it does stop growing, it's dead." Some of the largest plants are believed to be over 3,000 years old, with two leaves steadily growing since the beginning of the Iron Age, when the Phoenician alphabet was invented and David was crowned King of Israel. By some accounts, Welwitschia is not much to look at. Its two fibrous leaves, buffeted by dry desert winds and fed on by thirsty animals, become shredded and curled over time, giving Welwitschia a distinctly octopus-like look. One 19th-century director of Kew Gardens in London remarked, "it is out of the question the most wonderful plant ever brought to this country and one of the ugliest." But since it was first discovered, Welwitschia has captivated biologists including Charles Darwin and the botanist Friedrich Welwitsch after whom the plant is named: It is said that when Welwitsch first came across the plant in 1859, "he could do nothing but kneel down on the burning soil and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination." In a study published last month in Nature Communications, researchers report some of the genetic secrets behind Welwitschia's unique shape, extreme longevity and profound resilience.

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Long-time Slashdot reader Mogster quotes : Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-prize winning physicist whose work helped link two of the four fundamental forces, has died at the age of 88, the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) announced Saturday (July 24). HIs work was foundational to the Standard Model, the overarching physics theory that describes how subatomic particles behave. His seminal work was a slim, three-page paper published in 1967 in the journal Physical Review Letters and entitled "A Model of Leptons." In it, he predicted how subatomic particles known as W, Z and the famous Higgs boson should behave — years before those particles were detected experimentally, according to a statement from UT Austin. The paper also helped unify the electromagnetic force and the weak force and predicted that so-called "neutral weak currents" governed how particles would interact, according to the statement. In 1979, Weinberg and physicists Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam earned the Nobel Prize in physics for this work. Throughout his life, Weinberg would continue his search for a unified theory that would unite all four forces, according to the statement. Weinberg also wrote a book called "The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe" — in 1977.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN is presenting a new discovery at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP). The new particle discovered by LHCb, labeled as Tcc+, is a tetraquark -- an exotic hadron containing two quarks and two antiquarks. It is the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered, and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. Quarks are the fundamental building blocks from which matter is constructed. They combine to form hadrons, namely baryons, such as the proton and the neutron, which consist of three quarks, and mesons, which are formed as quark-antiquark pairs. In recent years a number of so-called exotic hadrons -- particles with four or five quarks, instead of the conventional two or three -- have been found. Today's discovery is of a particularly unique exotic hadron, an exotic exotic hadron if you like. The new particle contains two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Several tetraquarks have been discovered in recent years (including one with two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks), but this is the first one that contains two charm quarks, without charm antiquarks to balance them. Physicists call this "open charm" (in this case, "double open charm"). Particles containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark have "hidden charm" -- the charm quantum number for the whole particle adds up to zero, just like a positive and a negative electrical charge would do. Here the charm quantum number adds up to two, so it has twice the charm! The quark content of Tcc+, has other interesting features besides being open charm. It is the first particle to be found that belongs to a class of tetraquarks with two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. Such particles decay by transforming into a pair of mesons, each formed by one of the heavy quarks and one of the light antiquarks. According to some theoretical predictions, the mass of tetraquarks of this type should be very close to the sum of masses of the two mesons. Such proximity in mass makes the decay "difficult," resulting in a longer lifetime of the particle, and indeed Tcc+, is the longest-lived exotic hadron found to date.

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Five public research institutions in France have imposed a 3-month moratorium on the study of prions -- a class of misfolding, infectious proteins that cause fatal brain diseases -- after a retired lab worker who handled prions in the past was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the most common prion disease in humans. From a report: An investigation is underway to find out whether the patient, who worked at a lab run by the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), contracted the disease on the job. If so, it would be the second such case in France in the past few years. In June 2019, an INRAE lab worker named Emilie Jaumain died at age 33, 10 years after pricking her thumb during an experiment with prion-infected mice. Her family is now suing INRAE for manslaughter and endangering life; her illness had already led to tightened safety measures at French prion labs.

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Mogster shares a report from SciTechDaily: A one-atom-thin 2D magnet developed by Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley could advance new applications in computing and electronics. The researchers synthesized the new 2D magnet -- called a cobalt-doped van der Waals zinc-oxide magnet -- from a solution of graphene oxide, zinc, and cobalt. The new material -- which can be bent into almost any shape without breaking, and is a million times thinner than a sheet of paper -- could help advance the application of spin electronics or spintronics, a new technology that uses the orientation of an electron's spin rather than its charge to encode data. And unlike previous 2D magnets, which lose their magnetism at room temperature or above, the researchers found that the new 2D magnet not only works at room temperature but also at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit).

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ohio State News: Scientists who study glacier ice have found viruses nearly 15,000 years old in two ice samples taken from the Tibetan Plateau in China. Most of those viruses, which survived because they had remained frozen, are unlike any viruses that have been cataloged to date. The findings, published today in the journal Microbiome, could help scientists understand how viruses have evolved over centuries. For this study, the scientists also created a new, ultra-clean method of analyzing microbes and viruses in ice without contaminating it. The researchers analyzed ice cores taken in 2015 from the Guliya ice cap in western China. The cores are collected at high altitudes -- the summit of Guliya, where this ice originated, is 22,000 feet above sea level. The ice cores contain layers of ice that accumulate year after year, trapping whatever was in the atmosphere around them at the time each layer froze. Those layers create a timeline of sorts, which scientists have used to understand more about climate change, microbes, viruses and gases throughout history. Researchers determined that the ice was nearly 15,000 years old using a combination of traditional and new, novel techniques to date this ice core. When they analyzed the ice, they found genetic codes for 33 viruses. Four of those viruses have already been identified by the scientific community. But at least 28 of them are novel. About half of them seemed to have survived at the time they were frozen not in spite of the ice, but because of it.

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Another scorching summer heat wave was set to peak across portions of the western United States early this week, with air so dry that rain from thunderstorms evaporated before reaching the ground and smoke from wildfires delayed hundreds of flights at one of the region's largest airports. From a report: Temperatures reached the upper 90s and lower 100s in parts of the Northern Rockies on Monday, and forecasters warned of "dry thunderstorms," which bring lightning that can spark fires, but no rain to quench them. It was the fourth major heat wave to afflict parts of the West since early June, bringing dangerously hot temperatures and helping fuel the deepening drought and exploding wildfires across the region. An excessive heat warning was also in effect for parts of Montana and Wyoming through Thursday, the National Weather Service said. Glasgow, a town in northern Montana, hit 110 degrees on Monday, the Weather Service said. By 2:45 p.m. local time, Billings, toward the southern portion of the state, was officially hotter than Death Valley, Calif., at 110.4 degrees. Weather officials in Billings took advantage of the toasty temperatures and baked a batch of cookies on the dashboard of a car. "It may have taken 5 hours but we have fully baked cookies," they shared on Twitter. Lander, in central Wyoming, reached a record 100 degrees on Monday, according to the Weather Service. In 130 years, it was only the 21st day in Lander to reach triple digits. Parts of Idaho, including Boise and Twin Falls, saw much needed rain showers.

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Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares news from Science magazine: When a giant space rock struck the waters near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it sent up a blanket of dust that blotted out the Sun for years, sending temperatures plummeting and killing off the dinosaurs. The impact also generated a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico that some modelers believe sent an initial tidal wave up to 1500 meters (or nearly 1 mile) high crashing into North America, one that was followed by smaller pulses. Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered fossilized megaripples from this tsunami buried in sediments in what is now central Louisiana. "It's great to actually have evidence of something that has been theorized for a really long time," says Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gulick was not involved in the work, but he co-led a campaign in 2016 to drill down to the remains of the impact crater, called Chicxulub... Cores from the 2016 drilling expedition helped explain how the impact crater was formed and charted the disappearance and recovery of Earth's life. In 2019, researchers reported the discovery of a fossil site in North Dakota, 3000 kilometers north of Chicxulub, that they say records the hours after the impact and includes debris swept inland from the tsunami. "We have small pieces of the puzzle that keep getting added in," says Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at the University of Vigo who was not involved with the new study. "Now this research is another one, giving more evidence of a cataclysmic tsunami that probably inundated [everything] for thousands of miles."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: By making alterations to the plastic manufacturing process, scientists hope to produce forms of the ubiquitous material that can break down far more safely and quickly in the environment than current versions do. Researchers in China have now demonstrated a new example of this that degrades in just a week when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, which they believe could make for electronics that are easier to dispose of at the end of their lives. The new material came about when study author Liang Luo from China's Huazhong University of Science and Technology was working on an advanced type of chemical sensor, as reported by PNAS. The materials scientist was developing a novel polymer film that changed color in response to pH levels. This process was driven by the material's unique molecular structure, with the chains of monomers giving the film its deep red color, and taking it away when these bonds were broken. Through his team's experiments, Luo found that the deep red color of the film quickly faded away and the material broke apart after several days in the sunlight. Breaking apart these bonds is a common objective in research efforts to better recycle plastics, and in doing so Luo may have inadvertently conjured up a promising, environmentally friendly version of the material. The molecular makeup of the plastic means it wouldn't be suited for use in soda bottles or shopping bags, as it is only stable as a functional material in the dark and without oxygen. But exposed to sunlight and air, it disintegrates rapidly and completely decomposes within a week, leaving no environmentally damaging microplastic fragments behind. A byproduct of the process is naturally occurring succinic acid, however, which could potentially be upcycled for commercial use in pharmaceuticals or food.

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From the Washington Post: When we are young, our skills tend to improve with age and experience. But once we are well into adulthood, it may start to feel as if it's all downhill. With every advancing year, we become slightly more forgetful, somewhat slower to respond, a little less energetic. Yet there is at least one important exception: In the emotional realm, older people rule supreme. For the past 20 years, Susan Turk Charles, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine, has been monitoring the shifting moods, the sense of satisfaction, the moments of contemplation and the occasional outbursts of anger, sadness and despair of people of all ages — with a special interest in how we handle and experience emotions as we grow older. She and her colleagues have found that, on average, older people have fewer but more satisfying social contacts and report higher emotional well-being.... "I took a class from Laura Carstensen at Stanford, and she was the first to say that there was more development after age 18. She was finding that unlike physical fitness or cognition, where you may see slowing or declines, emotional regulation and experience are often as good, if not better, as we age... Some neuroscientists believe that because we're processing information a little slower with age, that makes us think before we act. We do see a decline with age in overall mass of the brain's frontal lobe, the part that is responsible for emotion regulation, complex reasoning and speed of processing. But researchers also find that older adults often exhibit greater prefrontal cortex activity than younger adults when processing emotions. "A lot of work has found that older people have a positive bias, even without realizing they're doing this. Their default mode is 'Don't sweat the small stuff.' Older people more often let go of a situation they experience as negative, especially with friends and family. So it is picking their battles that we think older adults are better at..." Q: Centenarians report overall high levels of emotional well-being. Some may wonder whether it might just be that people who have more positive attitudes, or encounter less adversity, live longer. "It is true that people with satisfying relationships and positive emotions live longer. Researchers have looked at what could explain this, and they find that psychological well-being is related to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and better cardiovascular health." Asked for suggestions, the researcher proposes an inner strategy that "takes you away from focusing on the future and reminds you that the present moment is the most important."

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