Hitler quite possibly did only have one ball. This and some significantly more nuanced analysis of the strengths and limitations of polygenic risk scores from @adamrutherford.bsky.social:

It was a pleasure to attend the EHiN conference in Oslo this week and talk longevity with e-health experts. The second picture is me signing a copy of Ageless for the Norwegian Health Minister, Jan Christian Vestre! (I also signed a copy for Danish Ældreminister Mette Kierkegaard but no pic sadly!)

Today I’m at a big Norwegian medical conference, and they’ve bought a copy of my book for every speaker! Thanks, EHiN!

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

Very sad to hear about Jim Watson’s death. If you think he was always a racist you are wrong. He refused to support genes/IQ research in the 70s. He boycotted Greece because of the military coup in 1967 and he called for a boycott of meetings in Chicago after the police riot of 1968. 1/2

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

What was that, did Bill Gates say something about climate change? I’ve been too busy to read Gates’s piece, the counterpoints and the counter-counterpoints…so I was very happy to have @climateadam.bsky.social explain it all to me succinctly over breakfast. Thanks Adam, great video!

Great to chat to Phil for this piece! ‘Steele is happy to see billionaires investing in research, because there’s good reason to believe ageing can be slowed. “I think we could make some pretty serious progress against ageing for perhaps $100bn – peanuts for the billionaires, if they teamed up.”’

With the help of @statto.bsky.social and @erictopol.bsky.social (🙏) I have delved a little into the often bizarre efforts of tech billionairres to live forever. Is there anything at all in it? My column for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

What a terrible bit of journalism. Doesn't even address the topic of how these might enable covert surveillance. My favourite insight was this below...

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term www.gov.uk/government/p...

This is such a crying shame, and so short-sighted. But there it is.

I'm getting a lot of LLM-generated inbound. Someone pushed a button forcing me to spend more time reading the message than they spent creating it. Please, give me your authenticity, typos & bad grammar.

Fascinating—and one assumes the covid vaccine isn’t close to the optimal way to do this, just the first one we’ve happened across!

Very sad news. Gurdon shared the Nobel with Shinya Yamanaka for showing how we can turn the clock back inside cells through reprogramming—now one of the most promising potential longevity interventions.

And maybe save Science in Action from the axe? www.theguardian.com/media/2025/o...

Want a sub-15-minute introduction to longevity science? This is my new go-to video: the @freethink.com team did an amazing job cutting two hours of me chatting down to this gorgeous brief intro to longevity. Please share far and ultra-wide!

Want a sub-15-minute introduction to longevity science? This is my new go-to video: the @freethink.com team did an amazing job cutting two hours of me chatting down to this gorgeous brief intro to longevity. Please share far and ultra-wide!

@statto.bsky.social made a great video about aging. Enjoy www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pUy...

Interesting/depressing finding! Previous studies found that we get busier and less happy in middle aged but that reverses as we get fewer and more sage in retirement. This graph looks almost like the exponential risk of death graph but upside-down! We really need to do something about ageing…

Paris-Berlin sleeper: low carbon, 2 years old, constantly full, but currently losing SNCF a few million EUR/yr Intl Jet fuel tax exemptions are 80 years old and cost the EU 22 million EUR/yr for the Paris-Berlin route alone. And you're cutting... the sleeper? www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/...

Is it magic?

Ooof. “Miliband poised to overrule local opposition to build nuclear waste dumps” ☢️ Now this IS interesting, noting if I had one thing in my gift, it would be to remove the word “dump” from all reporting on a highly engineered geological disposal facility… www.yahoo.com/news/article...

Just got an email from a university based teacher trainer about “Why Don’t Things Fall Up? saying he has used it for “examples of good clear science communication, pitched to the right level for the right audience”. The audience is *you* and it is just 99p on Kindle for few more days (til end Sept)

This is one of those use-cases where AI is terrible: we should just create a standard format for flight times so app data are interoperable. AI makes baffling mistakes some significant minority of the time. If we'd invested the $00bns in standards instead of AI, the world would be a better place.

New ITP paper just dropped! 🧪 #longevityscience • Epicatechin, a flavanol found in cocoa, increased average lifespan by 5% in male mice. • Halofuginone, a compound that simulates protein restriction, +9%, again only in males. • Mitoglitazone, an experimental diabetes drug, also +9% in males only.

🎙️ Ep1 of @briancoxtalks.bsky.social A Question of Science is out & it's on ageing research! As @statto.bsky.social says “The single most important thing… is to campaign for more funding for ageing research!” Here's how 👉 bsra.org.uk/donate/ #BSRA #AgeingResearch #SciencePodcast

Here’s a taster of the new podcast from @crick.ac.uk. Do check out the full episode—it’s my dream panel of brilliant longevity experts, Profs Linda Partridge and Lynne Cox, Brian Cox hosting, and Paul Nurse who I think has a Nobel Prize or something? (And is also Director of The Crick.)

I had a lot of fun going back to The @crick.ac.uk (my old lab!) to record the first episode of their new podcast! Check it out at the link below (and make sure to watch @profbriancox.bsky.social’s teaser to the end…)

So…<does the maths>…the covid vaccines delivered somewhere between a 7200% and a 55,000% return?!?!? Fund science, kids.

There could be some exciting bark-throughs coming in canine longevity! From the @dogagingproject.bsky.social to companies developing longevity pills for pooches, it might not be long before we know how to get more time with our best friends—doggo and human. New by me in @sciencefocus.bsky.social:

Really enjoyed this piece from @adamjkucharski.bsky.social on the culture war between broad social improvements and targeted scientific understanding as ways to improve health. It’s frustrating because obviously both are important—but the former is often portrayed as somehow more worthy.

🎙️ New podcast series! In 'Beyond Curious with LCP' my guests and I will explore how changing demographic trends are reshaping our lives. We'll discuss impacts on pensions, healthcare, workplaces and the economy. 🎧 Listen here: www.lcp.com/en/podcasts/... #Longevity #Demographics #AgeingPopulation

On the same day in the Telegraph:

Will the absence of reliable automatic metro service in the United States mark the moment its citizens notice how far behind their country has fallen?

When I asked Google’s Gemini to ‘show thinking’ it seemed to be thinking the quiet part out loud…

So the raw milk thing is basically unpasteurised mansplaining?

If Xi and Putin want to live to 150, I would suggest they invest a decent fraction of their countries’ GDPs into longevity research.

I for one am very annoyed that I got chickenpox instead of the jab as a kid, and now have dormant herpesviruses hanging out in my neurons. Given that the shingles vaccine seems to reduce dementia risk, I can only assume that being immune to and therefore never having chickenpox would be even better

Besides the child suffering bit: If my child were to get chickenpox, they would be kept out of nursery until all sores scab. Potentially 5 days, meaning it's 5 days mum and I would have to fit childcare into work schedules. A healthy society is a working society.

Big props to MILES Car & Van Sharing—I got in touch with their customer support because the app didn’t work on @grapheneos.org, ended up chatting with someone who was considering the switch to Graphene (!!) and…the developers have now updated the app to work on secure phones!

earth science at NASA includes improving hurricane and wildfire prediction, just so you know

People commenting on my vid didn’t watch & assumed I’m bashing all AI, or blaming AI for human stupidity. The opposite: problem is that humans–even trained ones as in this case–have an automation bias that leads us to defer to machines. Organic imposter syndrome! Offload thinking > dull your mind

‘Since 2021, [longevity science] received €23 million, just 0.08% of the €27.9 billion Horizon Europe budget. For comparison, oncology has received €193 million so far, and the EU has launched an entire mission to tackle cancer.’ Essential reading for Europeans by @davidmjourno.bsky.social:

>>> 'blueberry'.count('b') 2 >>> datetime.fromtimestamp(1754353022).isoformat() '2025-08-05T01:17:02' Just because there exists a Birmingham screwdriver doesn’t mean you have to use it, even if they’re trying their best to make you.

NEW ANALYSIS: Wildfires have already scorched a UK-record land area in 2025, double the previous high – and 4x above average By Orla Dwyer, Ho Woo Nam + Tom Prater www.carbonbrief.org/...

Could Ozempic slow down aging?! A new study suggests yes—but, while they’re exciting preliminary results, there are a few caveats too. New Scientist asked me to send in a comment for their podcast—this is the full, uncut version of what I said! (reupload due to the original vid being cut short!)

Could Ozempic slow down aging?! A new study suggests yes—but, while they’re exciting preliminary results, there are a few caveats too. New Scientist asked me to send in a comment for their podcast—this is the full, uncut version of what I said!

Could Ozempic reverse the ageing process? Interesting preliminary study discussed here on the @newscientist.com podcast—with a cameo appearance from me, and a few people cycling home from work in Berlin!

Motherfucking wind farms…