Life extension techniques (in mice)

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a legend in the longevity field who has been steadfastly promoting the idea of life extension since well before it became mainstream. While with SENS Research Foundation, de Grey made significant contributions to geroscience, and at Longevity Summit Dublin last year, he announced the creation of his new brainchild, Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation (LEVF).

(But note that he left his previous position after being accused of sexual harassment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey.)

Note that this strain of mice typically lives 2.5 years, and this project wants to increase it to 3.5… but with interventions starting at 1.5 years. Thus the expected one-more-year of life would become two years.

We want to get mice to live a lot longer than they do now: at least a year longer, starting the treatment or treatments only after middle age. The idea is that this will appeal more directly to people who care, vote, pay taxes, and make donations than if you do early-onset interventions. So, I decided to put numbers on this, to have a milestone that clearly says this is where we want to get to. We believe this will be a sufficiently dramatic result….

There’s a control group that gets nothing, and there’s also a group that gets all four of our interventions, but there are also four groups that get exactly one intervention, so that we have some kind of baseline. And then we have four groups that get three out of the four. This is very important. The purpose of this is to determine whether there are antagonistic interactions between things, which is possible….

Starting late means that the overall experiment will take two years rather than four years. But the other one, which is just as important, is that because we are mostly doing rejuvenation therapies that remove damage rather than just slowing down the creation of new damage, we have a good chance of seeing they’re working from the divergence of survival curves quite quickly, like after only six months.

4,500 words: https://www.lifespan.io/news/aubrey-de-grey-on-levf-and-robust-mouse-rejuvenation/.

Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas: Smooth

I don’t think this will date me, because Smooth is still around. This article covers the idea behind, and the making of, one of the biggest songs of the 1990s. Santana hadn’t scored a hit single in more than 15 years. Part Latin-rock jam, part devotional love song? It almost didn’t happen.

Rob Thomas, who wrote the lyrics, says:

The (original) song was a different song. It was all about some party going on in a room. My wife [Marisol, then his fiancée; the two married in late 1999] went off for the afternoon and I stayed at home. I think the “smooth” part came first. I was thinking more about Carlos. I was thinking, “You’re so smooth,” about Carlos Santana. And then, “You hear my rhythm on your radio.” But then, I also realized somewhere in the middle of it that I had this wealth of information because I had this smokin’ hot Latin girlfriend already. Even though she was from Queens and not Spanish Harlem, everything else was on point, and it ended up being about her.

And:

The challenge was, “How do I create a believable conversation between Carlos and Rob?” Editing was a crucial part of that. Generally, the guitar doesn’t play when Rob sings. And that was really part of the trick of it. There are one or two notes where they land together in harmony, and then they get out of each other’s way. That was designed into the arrangement of everything.

Fights about the rights. Convincing Santana. Fascinating story about how a classic song developed: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/santana-rob-thomas-smooth-oral-history-841189. About 7,200 words.

Ordinary Iranians and the protests

In an authoritarian state such as Iran, protesting against the government can get you arrested, tortured, or even killed. Much of the population is afraid of that, of course. And yet, many have found a role in assisting without exposing themselves too much:

Apart from the two sides, on what everyone knows is a battlefield, a bigger group nonetheless circulates—an almost unending sea of young families, elderly couples and passersby, some just walking up and down the street, some sitting in their cars in the traffic. They are not shouting any slogans, not protesting anything, yet they brave the tear gas, the charges by security forces, the shouts to move along. They act as if it were just another evening and they’re out for a spin on the streets, window shopping, but they’re also giving cover to protesters—to disappear among them, or hop onto cars, or into shops, to escape the frenzied charges of security forces…

Every night at 9:00 the shouts begin. From rooftops, balconies, and windows of dark rooms, women and men, and sometimes even children, huddled into the dark recesses to avoid inquisitive eyes, shout “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom), followed by “Death to the Islamic Republic” and “Poverty, Corruption, High prices, Onwards to the Overthrow.” It started days after Mahsa Amini died in police custody, at age 22, arrested for how she wore her headscarf. Sometimes the chanting goes on for an hour.

About 2,600 words: https://time.com/6275538/iran-protests-eyewitness-report.

Also, this site https://www.understandingwar.org summarizes the Iran situation daily (as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Click on the headline, such as Iran Update, May 2, 2023, to see the full daily report.