Pass the salt

[prog]

From rserocki: Biologists are making progress in isolating why calorie restriction extends animals' lifespans. This is encouraging news.

I thank the CR community for helping to keep life extension in the headlines, making news like this more visible, but their implementation is not one for most people. (Understatement.) My interest in CR stops at being mindful to avoid eating when I'm not actually hungry - which is good, but it isn't even scratching the surface of what its real practitioners do. (Which is, basically, to avoid eating when they are actually hungry.) I admire and support their commitment, and I am sure they're right about all the side benefits of their koo-koo diet (such as out-of-whack hormone generation giving them a feeling of continual elation), but still I think I'll hold out for the pill version.

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[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I recently read somewhere (alumni magazine, maybe) about somebody who is looking at tanning, melanin and skin cancer. He points out that recent studies show sunblock doesn't reduce the rate of malignant melanoma, though it does help with basal-cell and squamous-cell carcinoma. He thinks there has to be a better way.

He's looking into the signal that causes skin cells to produce melanin--it apparently does not require the actual melanin-producing cells to be exposed to DNA-damaging UV light directly, contrary to previous thought. He's got a cream which, when put on mice, causes them to develop natural tans.

If/when this stuff is approved for use on humans, it's going to make somebody a trillion quadrillion dollars, and white people will all look different.