Why can you vividly recall the day your father took you to your first baseball game many years ago, but you can’t remember where you just put the car keys? We tend not to think about it much, but memory is the seat of consciousness. The process of how we remember, how we forget, and [...]

An infant born in the U.S. today will probably live to see his or her 78th birthday, a 20- year-plus increase over the average lifespan a century ago. As living well into our 80s and 90s becomes more attainable, how many more years can humanity expect to gain going forward? The two main physiological barriers [...]

Earlier this month, the World Economic Forum published its annual report on global risks, “Global Risks 2013: Eighth Edition.” At the 2013 WEF meeting at Davos, a session focused on emerging threats, called “X Factors: Preparing for the Unknown.” My colleague Philip Campbell, the editor in chief of Nature, and his colleague editors, identified these [...]

Do you get panicky in wide-open spaces? Tight, closed ones? What about in high places or—eek!—around arachnids? If these fears are frequent or debilitating, you might have a phobic anxiety. And you would not be alone—at least 8 percent of Americans have at least one. All of this psychological stress could be taking a toll [...]

Government declarations of war on drugs or disease often end in losing battles. That’s why the news that the Obama Administration’s drafting of a plan that targets 2025 as a goal for preventing or treating Alzheimer’s met with skepticism in some quarters. “No one set a deadline for the ‘War on cancer’ or in the [...]

As I was editing David Stipp’s article “A New Path to Longevity” for the January 2012 issue of Scientific American, Stipp told me about some intriguing research into unusually long-lived mammals. Investigators are studying such animals to better understand why the adult human body deteriorates with age and how to intervene in the process. David [...]

Weakening eyesight can be sharpened with lenses, and impaired hearing can be improved with aids. What about a failing sense of smell? Detecting and distinguishing the floral bouquet of fresh honey or the miasma of bad lunchmeat might not seem quite as critical for day-to-day existence as sight or hearing. But what the nose knows [...]

A nasty affliction sets into humans as they advance in years. The hair either disappears or thins into a fuzzy halo, the skin sags and bunches, while inside the brain, changes set in that slow our reaction times and cause our memories to fade. A steady, widespread thinning out of the brain’s cortex, the outermost [...]

As we age, all sorts of things may start to break down. Joints ache, or vision fails, and or maybe cognitive abilities falter. The leading known risk for getting Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia is simply getting older, followed, some studies suggest, by major illnesses, such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure [...]

Despite weighty concerns such as aging, planning for retirement or caring for older friends and family, people in the U.S. seem to get happier with age. A new study reports that these changes are consistent regardless of whether individuals were employed, had young children at home or lived with a partner. General well-being (characterized by [...]

NEW YORK—Almost five centuries after Juan Ponce de Leon’s legendary quest for the Fountain of Youth, a cure for aging continues to drive a multibillion-dollar biotech industry. But despite gerontology’s growing list of biological "breakthroughs," what it means to get old and how to best stave off the process remains a topic of heated debate. [...]