Related papers: Ultimate limit to human longevity
At some point in the future, if mankind hopes to settle planets outside the Solar System, it will be crucial to determine the range of planetary conditions under which human beings could survive and function. In this article, we apply…
Emerging empirical and theoretical thinking about human aging places considerable value upon the role of the environment as a major factor which can promote prolonged healthy longevity. Our contemporary, information-rich environment is…
The recent Covid-19 epidemic has lead to comparisons of the countries suffering from it. These are based on the number of excess deaths attributed either directly or indirectly to the epidemic. Unfortunately the data on which such…
The human electroencephalogram (EEG) of sleep undergoes profound changes with age. These changes can be conceptualized as "brain age", which can be compared to an age norm to reflect the deviation from normal aging process. Here, we develop…
A general multi-type population model is considered, where individuals live and reproduce according to their age and type, but also under the influence of the size and composition of the entire population. We describe the dynamics of the…
We consider a model of asexually reproducing individuals with random mutations and selection. The rate of mutations is proportional to the population size, $N$. The mutations may be either beneficial or deleterious. In a paper by Yu,…
The concept of random deaths in a computational model for population dynamics is critically examined. We claim that it is just an artifact, albeit useful, of computational models to limit the size of the populations and has no biological…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
We consider the evolution of large but finite populations on arbitrary fitness landscapes. We describe the evolutionary process by a Markov, Moran process. We show that to $\mathcal O(1/N)$, the time-averaged fitness is lower for the finite…
We show that the dynamics of the number of deaths due to Covid in different countries is to a large extent universal once the origin of time is chosen to be the start of the lockdown, and the number of death is rescaled by the total number…
We report the results of a detailed numerical study designed to estimate both the absolute age and the uncertainty in age (with confidence limits) of the oldest globular clusters. Such an estimate is essential if a comparison with the…
In this article, we consider the infinite dimensional linear control system describing the Population Models Structured by Age, Size, and Spatial Position. The control is localized in the space variable as well as with respect to the age…
Recently it was found, in a broad class of models, that the dark energy density may change its sign during the evolution of the universe. This may lead to a global collapse of the universe within the time t_c ~ 10^{10}-10^{11} years. Our…
We consider branching processes with interaction in continuous time, both with values in the integers and in the reals (in the second case we restrict ourselves to continuous processes), which model the evolution of the size of a…
The early start to life naively suggests that abiogenesis is a rapid process on Earth-like planets. However, if evolution typically takes ~4Gyr to produce intelligent life-forms like us, then the limited lifespan of Earth's biosphere…
Countries like Poland with a recent sharp drop in birth rates still have some time to prepare for the problems of an ageing society. Ater the year 2030 they can become increasingly serious.
The Healthy Life Years Lost Methodology (HLYL) is introduced to model and estimate the Health Expenditure in Japan in 2011. The HLYL theory and estimation methods are presented in our books in the Springer Series on Demographic Methods and…
Does bearing children shorten a woman's life expectancy? Several demographic studies, historic and current, have found no such effect. But the Caerphilly cohort study is far the most prominent and frequently-cited, and it answers in the…
Models of many-species ecosystems, such as the Lotka-Volterra and replicator equations, suggest that these systems generically exhibit near-extinction processes, where population sizes go very close to zero for some time before rebounding,…
The concept of progress has characterized human society from millennia. However, this concept is elusive and too often given for certain. The goal of this paper is to suggest a general definition of human progress that satisfies, whenever…