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In 2006 the World Health Organisation coined a new term: “the Glasgow Effect”. It resulted from an analysis of life expectancy data in two neighbourhoods in Glasgow, Scotland. One, a prosperous upper-middle-class village outside the central city, Lenzie, had a life expectancy for a male child at birth of 82, up there with the highest in the world. In the other, a desperately poor and drug-riddled central city community called “the Calton”, a newborn boy could expect, on average, a lifespan of only 58 years (1).Read the rest “Life Expectancy I: How Far We’ve Come”

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(Microscopic image of C. elegans with Nomarski DIC optics: by permission, Prof. Sander van den Heuvel, Developmental Biology, Universiteit Utrecht. About 200x lifesize.)

How long can we expect to live in the future? The longest recorded human life is that of a French woman, Jeanne Calment, who died aged 122 and a half, in 1997. The eighth oldest, and currently oldest living person, is an Italian woman named Emma Morano, who will be 117 on November 29, 2016.… Read the rest “Life Expectancy II: It’s in the Genes”