SUBJ: Walk faster and stay more youthful

SUBtitle: Get enough sleep

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SHORT NOTES:

1.. Walk faster and stay more youthful.

2a..You need at least 7 hrs of sleep

2b..Water in plastic bottles is bad. Use a Brita water pitcher and filter for drinking water.

3..The human genome encodes a new category of molecule, targets for future drugs.

4..Say hello to peptideins: a newly named class of molecules found within human cells.

5..The evidence shows acupuncture remains a reasonable intervention for chronic pain.

6..Male officers in the military are threatened by having female officers.

LONG NOTES:

I took the AARP age test, and was rated more than 22 years younger than my age 77.5.  However, men get their age rating 20 years younger simply by walking faster.  So please, walk faster and stay more youthful.

NPR reports 1/3 of people do not get enough sleep, including children.  You must get at least 7 hrs.  Less than that is correlated with dying younger.

So water in plastic bottles is bad. But what about tap water? What is your opinion on chlorine and other heavy metals in our tap water? The water in Toronto also has sodium as the lake it is drawn from also absorbs all the salt used on roads in our long winter.: I use a Brita water pitcher and filter for my drinking water.  It is inexpensive and convenient.  It filters out the atoms you are concerned about.

The Economist 9 May 2026 pg66 – The human genome encodes for a new category of molecule.  They may be useful targets for future drugs. In science, whether an anomaly is insignificant or the basis for a promising new field of study can boil down to the catchiness of its name. Pick the wrong one, and conferences are hard to organise and funding shrivels up. But pick the right one, and the publicity takes care of itself.

In that spirit, say hello to peptideins: a newly named class of molecules found within human cells that are similar to proteins but smaller and with vaguer purposes. As the authors of the paper that named them, published in the journal Nature this week, point out, they may still be important. Sebastiaan van Heesch, a protein specialist at the Princess Máxima Centre in the Netherlands who co-led the new study, has said that peptideins might “unlock new insights and drug targets across human biology”.  Some well-studied microproteins are already known to be biologically useful. One, called ASNSD1-uORF, is involved in the progression of the childhood brain cancer medulloblastoma. Another, humanin, protects cells from stress and may play a role in healthy ageing as well as the onset of neurodegenerative diseases.

The Economist 9 May 2026 Pg67- Does acupuncture work?

It seems useful for pain. The jury’s out on everything else. Models and influencers tout its anti-ageing effects, and athletes including Serena Williams, a former tennis pro, and Tom Brady, a retired American football player, claim the needles have helped them with muscle recovery. Today acupuncture is used to alleviate ailments ranging from anxiety and asthma to infertility and irritable bowel syndrome. But does it do any good?

            On some fronts, the evidence in favour is strong. In 2018 a study in the Journal of Pain analysed the results of 39 randomised trials on 20,827 patients with shoulder pain, chronic musculoskeletal pain, headaches or osteoarthritis. All the patients had undergone either traditional acupuncture, sham acupuncture (a range of placebo controls including the shallow insertion of needles) or no acupuncture at all. When patients assessed their symptoms more than four weeks after initial treatment, acupuncture users reported less pain than those in the other groups. The benefits had not faded by much a year later.

            Other studies conducted since then have supported these findings. But how might acupuncture achieve these results? Helene Langevin, retired director of the National Centre for Complementary and Integrative Health at America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), has a theory. Her research suggests the needles twist strands of connective tissue known as fascia, which in turn pull on nerve endings in a way that might reduce pain.  Some of the positive effects, however, might be due to the brain’s astonishing power to reduce pain when it believes a genuine intervention is being conducted. The more serious the apparent intervention, the greater this placebo response can be. A paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2020, for example, found no significant difference in pain relief between true and sham acupuncture. 

Beyond pain management, the benefits are less clear. A review published in Complementary Therapies in Medicine in 2022 (written by practising acupuncturists and funded by the International Society of Chinese Medicine) analysed 862 systematic reviews and meta-analyses. It found that acupuncture could reduce post-operative nausea about as well as some antiemetics. It also found benefits for migraines and tension headaches, cancer-related fatigue, female infertility (when used in addition to medical reproductive treatment) and chronic pelvic pain in men. But trials for 86 other conditions, including factors associated with muscle recovery, have not been sufficiently robust to demonstrate any positive effects, while for another six ailments no effect was found. 
     The balance of evidence means that acupuncture remains a reasonable intervention for chronic pain, particularly because it has far fewer side-effects than most drugs. But for everything else, the effects are hard to pin down. 

Science 7 May 2026 pg604 – Women combatting workplace perceptions – Male soldiers were fine with having women in combat positions.  However, male officers were threatened by having female officers.