Related papers: The human longevity record may hold for decades
We present, solve and numerically simulate a simple model that describes the consequences of increased longevity on fertility rates, population growth and the distribution of wealth in developed societies. We look at the consequences of the…
Current laboratory bounds imply that protons are extremely long-lived. However, this conclusion may not hold for all time and in all of space. We find that the proton lifetime can be $\sim 15$ orders of magnitude shorter in the relatively…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
In this article I review the main methods for determining the age of the Universe. I describe how to determine the age of the oldest known systems at z=0, the system of galactic globular clusters, using different techniques. I also describe…
Is cancer a disease that can be cured or a degenerative disease which comes predominantly with old age? We give an answer based on a two-dimensional representation of diseases. These two dimensions are defined as follows. In mortality…
Unlike most other laws of nature, the second law of thermodynamics is of a statistical nature, according to Boltzmann, meaning that its reliability arises from the vast number of particles present in macroscopic systems. This means that…
Correlations between high life expectancy and low lifespan inequality are frequently observed. A recent article seeks to explain this phenomenon by proposing that a mortality improvement maps to life expectancy and relative lifespan…
Metabolic energy consumption has long been thought to play a major role in the aging process ({\it 1}). Across species, a gram of tissue on average expends about the same amount of energy during life-span ({\it 2}). Energy restriction has…
Using new cosmological doomsday argument Page predicts that the maximal lifetime of de Sitter universe should be $t_{max}=10^{60}$ yr which is way too small in comparison with strings predictions ($t_f>$googleplex). However, since this…
Mammalian cells are restricted from proliferating indefinitely. Telomeres at the end of each chromosome are shortened at cell division and, when they reach a critical length, the cell will enter permanent cell cycle arrest - a state known…
Identifiability of evolutionary tree models has been a recent topic of discussion and some models have been shown to be non-identifiable. A coalescent-based rooted population tree model, originally proposed by Nielsen et al. 1998 [2], has…
If the human race comes to an end relatively shortly, then we have been born at a fairly typical time in history of humanity. On the other hand, if humanity lasts for much longer and trillions of people eventually exist, then we have been…
We build on the empirical finding that a human being's mental age is normally distributed around the chronological age. This opposes the frequent societal assumption "mental = chronological" which is known to be false in general but…
Georges Lemaitre gave a theoretical proof for his 1927 doctoral thesis in astronomy that the maximum spherical radius of our Universe can be computed from first principles to be 14.2 billion light-years (Lemaitre 1927a). That estimate,…
The lifetime of the 3d^2D_5/2-level in singly-ionized calcium has been measured by the electron-shelving technique on different samples of rf trapped ions. The metastable state has been directly populated by exciting the dipole-forbidden…
In 1998, Fields medalist Stephen Smale [S. Smale, Mathematical problems for the next century, The mathematical Intelligencer, 20(2) (1998), 7-15] proposed his famous eighteen problems to the mathematicians of this century. The statement of…
A new expression to the total age of the Universe is derived in terms of the average deceleration parameter. This kinematic result holds regardless of the curvature of the universe as well as of the underlying gravity theory. It remains…
In this paper a new long-term survival distribution is proposed. The so called long term Fr\'echet distribution allows us to fit data where a part of the population is not susceptible to the event of interest. This model may be used, for…
Consider a population of fixed size that evolves over time. At each time, the genealogical structure of the population can be described by a coalescent tree whose branches are traced back to the most recent common ancestor of the…
Growth in the global human population this century will have momentous consequences for societies and the environment. Population growth has come with higher aggregate human welfare, but also climate change and biodiversity loss. Based on…