We live in a youth obsessed culture where old people are spurned.
Thus the constant quest for maintaining youth at all cost...
On April 2, 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León and his crew became the first recorded Europeans to set eyes on Florida.
Legend holds that they made this discovery while searching for the Fountain of Youth, a magical water source supposedly capable of reversing the aging process and curing sickness.
A closer look, however, reveals that the fountain likely provided little to no motivation for their voyage.
In fact, no surviving documents from the time, including letters from Ponce de León himself, ever mention such a fountain.
Only later did Spanish and U.S. writers connect the two, thereby turning Ponce de León into a poster boy for gullibility.
News that researchers at the Salk Institute have found that an experimental drug candidate aimed at combating Alzheimer's disease has a host of unexpected anti-aging effects in animals.
Says the article: The Salk team expanded upon their previous development of a drug candidate, called J147, which takes a different tack by targeting Alzheimer's major risk factor–old age.
In the new work, the team showed that the drug candidate worked well in a mouse model of aging not typically used in Alzheimer's research.
When these mice were treated with J147, they had better memory and cognition, healthier blood vessels in the brain and other improved physiological features.
"Initially, the impetus was to test this drug in a novel animal model that was more similar to 99 percent of Alzheimer's cases," says Antonio Currais, the lead author and a member of Professor David Schubert's Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory at Salk.
"We did not predict we'd see this sort of anti-aging effect, but J147 made old mice look like they were young, based upon a number of physiological parameters."
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