Get those kids out of here. “Catwalk models may be getting younger, pop singers may be
pre-pubescent and the images of movie stars may be getting
more perfectly airbrushed but, in the world of modern dance,
wrinkles seem to be the coming thing… A surprising number of recent productions… suggest that
choreographers are finding themselves less entranced by the
perfect limbs of 20-year-olds than by the dramatic and physical
possibilities of bodies that have been lived in. The Guardian And: Worldwide Search on for Over-50s ‘Man
Band’ “Up to 5,000 hopefuls from all around the globe have applied to join an over-50s ‘Man Band’ and
prove to the record industry that pop fans are sick of endlessly cloned boy bands.

The London publicity company 15 Minutes has been deluged with applications from Tokyo to Sydney,
from Bangkok to New York.” Reuters But: The new principal dancer at the Royal Ballet is a 19 year-old wunderkind. BBC

I’m Sorry, I’m Not Apologizing, OK? “It struck many Americans as verging on the absurd that the return of the spy
plane crew hinged on protracted negotiations with China over the wording of a
(possible) apology.
If you think the subtle differences among carefully chosen expressions of
remorse are an arcane linguistic quirk of an ancient and hypersensitive exotic
culture, think again. We all play similar linguistic games every day when we
negotiate apologies in English.
The word ‘sorry’ sits right on that fine line between regret and fault.” LA Times

A matter of sex and death: “Ageing and our own mortality could be the price we pay for
human fertility”, says Professor of Medicine and theoretician of ageing Tom Kirkwood.

The distinction between germ-line and soma enabled such
amazing advances in the evolution of life that we might almost
forgive the terrible price we have paid. For it was this, not sex,
that caused us to age and die. … To understand why the soma/germ-line distinction is so
important for ageing, we should know that the germ-line
cannot be allowed to fail in its duty of keeping going
indefinitely. If it did — if, for example, it permitted damage to
build up in its DNA sequence — it would rapidly become
extinct. Some change to the DNA sequence must occur, or
evolution would be stalled, but the kind of damage that builds
up in the somatic cells of our bodies would be intolerable in the
germ-line… But with the soma, there is no
corresponding requirement for somatic cells to keep their DNA
in good shape indefinitely. It does not matter, biologically, if
our somatic cells eventually fall apart. The somatic cells
comprise the individual and that is all that they will be required
to do. Life in the natural world is brutish and short. All that the
organism needs from its somatic cells is that they can keep the
soma in good shape until an age when the likelihood of still
being alive is negligible. When we factor in that the care and
repair of somatic cells does not come cheap, it makes sense to
cut back maintenance of the somatic cells and to divert that
energy into helping with reproduction. The result was that the
soma became disposable, and with that came ageing. The Times of London

“Researchers in Chicago have built a cyborg, a half-living,
half-robot creature which connects the brain of an eel-like fish to
a computer and is capable of moving towards lights.

The device, developed at a research centre owned by Evanston’s
Northwestern University, consists of the brain stem from the
larva of a lamprey, a bloodsucking fish, attached by electrodes
to an off-the-shelf Swiss robot.” The Guardian