Wednesday, March 16, 2011

2011-03-15 Taller men are happier

There’s a pretty steady relationship between well-being and height for men. The taller we men are, generally speaking, the happier we are. (Remember, as always, correlation is not causation.) If I want to be really happy I stand on my toes. This seems to help.

On the other hand, the connection between height and happiness is less predictable for women. The very tallest women are happier than the very shortest women, but well-being levels bounce around quite a lot in between. Standing on your toes might not help you women much.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

2011-030-10 William Louis Thomas


I was thinking about my maternal grandfather, William Louis Thomas (known as Lou), who I never met. He died on Christmas day, 1947. Because of his addiction to alcohol he lost his family, and my mother never spoke about him, but she named my brother Bill after him. Fred was named after my paternal grandfather, Fred J. Heath. LaRue says she loved her father, but she remembers Granny spraying Lou with a hose when he came to visit after they divorced. It's too bad that addictions can prevent joy. Better not to start something that might lead to an addiction - this is why I have sworn off shopping.

2011-03-09 Flood repair


Back hoes and dump trucks are busy trying to repair the creek from the flood of last spring. In the process they have removed our fire pit and sandy beach. We'll have to wait to see what we are left with after the repair and the run-off coming in a month or two.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

2011-03-08 Teaching English in Xi'an China


We received the following e-mail from BYU International Studies:

Dear Tom and Paula,

Congratulations!
You have been recommended by Brigham Young University’s China Teachers Program to teach at Northwest Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China, for the academic year 2011-2012.

We are optimistic that the university will accept you. Many careful hours have been spent studying applications, working with our contacts in China, and visiting with potential teachers in order to match them with the needs of each Chinese university.

Now that you have been recommended, we will await the decision of the Chinese University to accept you. They will let us know of their decision us via email, hopefully by April 30th.


The photo is from the Xi'an city wall when we were there in November 2008

Update 3-10-2011: We have been accepted to teach in Xi'an, but our friends, the Thelers, were not. We had hoped to go together, but they expect to be placed in Beijing.

2011-03-06 LaRue and Louise turn 80


Louise Thomas Franke and LaRue Thomas Stauffer (Louise was always first, according to LaRue, because she was favored by Granny) turned 80 years old on February 22. Along with Granny, they took care of my family after my mother died in 1960 and were like second mothers to me. My mother, Marie, doesn't look very happy holding her twin sisters for the photo. Marie was 10 years older.


LaRue and Louise had a celebration on Sunday at LaRue's home.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

2011-03-04 I should have exercised more

This photo was taken before I had gray hair (and when Brian had braces).

Can Exercise Keep You Young?
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

We all know that physical activity is beneficial in countless ways, but even so, Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, was startled to discover that exercise kept a strain of mice from becoming gray prematurely.

But shiny fur was the least of its benefits. Indeed, in heartening new research published last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, exercise reduced or eliminated almost every detrimental effect of aging in mice that had been genetically programmed to grow old at an accelerated pace.

In the experiment, Dr. Tarnopolsky and his colleagues used lab rodents that carry a genetic mutation affecting how well their bodies repair malfunctioning mitochondria, which are tiny organelles within cells. Mitochondria combine oxygen and nutrients to create fuel for the cells — they are microscopic power generators.

Mitochrondria have their own DNA, distinct from the cell’s own genetic material, and they multiply on their own. But in the process, mitochondria can accumulate small genetic mutations, which under normal circumstances are corrected by specialized repair systems within the cell. Over time, as we age, the number of mutations begins to outstrip the system’s ability to make repairs, and mitochondria start malfunctioning and dying.

Many scientists consider the loss of healthy mitochondria to be an important underlying cause of aging in mammals. As resident mitochondria falter, the cells they fuel wither or die. Muscles shrink, brain volume drops, hair falls out or loses its pigmentation, and soon enough we are, in appearance and beneath the surface, old.

The mice that Dr. Tarnopolsky and his colleagues used lacked the primary mitochondrial repair mechanism, so they developed malfunctioning mitochondria early in their lives, as early as 3 months of age, the human equivalent of age 20. By the time they reached 8 months, or their early 60s in human terms, the animals were extremely frail and decrepit, with spindly muscles, shrunken brains, enlarged hearts, shriveled gonads and patchy, graying fur. Listless, they barely moved around their cages. All were dead before reaching a year of age.

Except the mice that exercised.


Half of the mice were allowed to run on a wheel for 45 minutes three times a week, beginning at 3 months. These rodent runners were required to maintain a fairly brisk pace, Dr. Tarnopolsky said: “It was about like a person running a 50- or 55-minute 10K.” (A 10K race is 6.2 miles.) The mice continued this regimen for five months.

At 8 months, when their sedentary lab mates were bald, frail and dying, the running rats remained youthful. They had full pelts of dark fur, no salt-and-pepper shadings. They also had maintained almost all of their muscle mass and brain volume. Their gonads were normal, as were their hearts. They could balance on narrow rods, the showoffs.

But perhaps most remarkable, although they still harbored the mutation that should have affected mitochondrial repair, they had more mitochondria over all and far fewer with mutations than the sedentary mice had. At 1 year, none of the exercising mice had died of natural causes. (Some were sacrificed to compare their cellular health to that of the unexercised mice, all of whom were, by that age, dead.)

The researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the impact that exercise had on the animals’ aging process, Dr. Tarnopolsky said. He and his colleagues had expected to find that exercise would affect mitochondrial health in muscles, including the heart, since past research had shown a connection. They had not expected that it would affect every tissue and bodily system studied.

Other studies, including a number from Dr. Tarnopolsky’s own lab, have also found that exercise affects the course of aging, but none has shown such a comprehensive effect. And precisely how exercise alters the aging process remains unknown. In this experiment, running resulted in an upsurge in the rodents’ production of a protein known as PGC-1alpha, which regulates genes involved in metabolism and energy creation, including mitochondrial function. Exercise also sparked the repair of malfunctioning mitochondria through a mechanism outside the known repair pathway; in these mutant mice, that pathway didn’t exist, but their mitochondria were nonetheless being repaired.

Dr. Tarnopolsky is currently overseeing a number of experiments that he expects will help to elucidate the specific physiological mechanisms. But for now, he said, the lesson of his experiment and dozens like it is unambiguous. “Exercise alters the course of aging,” he said.

Although in this experiment, the activity was aerobic and strenuous, Dr. Tarnopolsky is not convinced that either is absolutely necessary for benefits. Studies of older humans have shown that weightlifting can improve mitochondrial health, he said, as can moderate endurance exercise. Although there is probably a threshold amount of exercise that is necessary to affect physiological aging, Dr. Tarnopolsky said, “anything is better than nothing.” If you haven’t been active in the past, he continued, start walking five minutes a day, then begin to increase your activity level.

The potential benefits have attractions even for the young. While Dr. Tarnopolsky, a lifelong athlete, noted with satisfaction that active, aged mice kept their hair, his younger graduate students were far more interested in the animals’ robust gonads. Their testicles and ovaries hadn’t shrunk, unlike those of sedentary elderly mice.

Dr. Tarnopolsky’s students were impressed. “I think they all exercise now,” he said.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

2011-03-01 Connect to the i-device

Is it a good thing that we are all connected with our i-devices? There were times when all but Greta were looking at e-mails, talking on the i-phone, playing games on the i-pod, etc. Brian says that keeping up with work projects through e-mail allows him a less stress vacation. Natalie monitored the progress of her friend's baby adoption, Elsa took photos of animals at the Living Desert museum, and Ava was happy to play with a couple of different applications. Once I called Grandma on her cell phone while she was upstairs to tell her that she had a call on our VOIP phone.

An update - here's the Egbert children during some down time at Disney World