For every man older than 110, there are nine women. Before she died in August at age 117,  supercentenarian Maria Branyas — the world’s oldest verified person — credited her bonus years not to any high-tech interventions but to eating lots of plain yogurt.

Her successor is also a woman, 116-year-old Ethel Catherman. And the record for longevity is held by another woman, Jean Calment, who lived to see her 122nd birthday.

Scientists still don’t fully understand why women live longer than men. The aging process differs between the sexes, and in most mammals, females tend to live longer than males. Understanding the roots of these biological differences could help researchers better understand aging in both men and women — and perhaps even reveal new clues to slowing it down.

For example, it remains unclear why women who undergo menopause later in life tend to live longer — and stay healthier. The answer isn’t just relevant to women’s health: a man’s longevity also appears to correlate with the age at which his sisters undergo menopause. Scientists likewise don’t fully understand why women worldwide live, on average, a few years longer than men, yet are more likely to suffer from debilitating conditions such as arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease.

What researchers do know is that the human ovary follows its own clock and, unlike other organs, begins to age early. When women are still relatively young — in their late 30s and 40s — their ovaries undergo rapid aging, with cellular damage comparable to that in other organs decades later, in our 60s, 70s and 80s.

And yet, until relatively recently, research on aging — like most medical research — was traditionally focused on males.  Male humans and even male lab animals were long thought to be equivalent to females, just without the “complications” of fluctuating hormones or pregnancy. That bias began to shift in the 1990s when researchers started enrolling more women in clinical trials. Then, over the last decade, several new initiatives prompted the National Institutes of Health to require the use of more female lab animals and female cells in research.

“And surprise — it turned out there’s a huge difference based on sex, no matter what you do,” said Yousin Suh, a professor of reproductive sciences at Columbia University.

Pushing for the inclusion of female animals and humans has not only made medical research fairer to women, but it has also given scientists new insights into how the body works, insights that may be lost on the current administration, which is canceling research it deems connected to diversity initiatives.

That’s unfortunate for everyone — women and men alike. Suh is leading a study using the human ovary as a test case for anti-aging drugs. Scientists have had considerable success slowing aging in mice, but those same techniques have not translated to humans. Ovaries may offer a better model because they consist of human cells programmed to age faster than those in other organs.

Suh’s earlier research showed that ovarian cells undergo the same aging-related steps as the rest of our bodies: DNA accumulates mutations; the “epigenetic” system that activates and silences genes becomes scrambled; cellular “power plants” known as mitochondria lose function; and stem cells lose their ability to regenerate tissue.

She’s currently co-leader of a clinical trial enrolling young and middle-aged women to investigate the effects of a potential anti-aging drug called rapamycin. The drug, derived initially from soil collected on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), is currently approved to suppress immunity and prevent rejection of transplanted organs.

Multiple studies have shown that rapamycin can dramatically slow aging in mice, and while some researchers suspect it could extend the human lifespan too, proving it would take decades, given how long humans live.

A faster timescale is one big advantage of studying human ovaries. Researchers are monitoring the effects of rapamycin on various markers of ovarian health, aging and fertility, Suh said, noting that any improvements in fertility could reflect broader anti-aging effects.

Other lines of research are exploring why women, on average, live about five years longer than men. A 2020 study found that in animals with sex chromosomes, the sex with a matching pair — such as our XX — lived about 18% longer on average than those with mismatched chromosomes, such as our XY.

A study published last month in Science Advances reported that females have a higher life expectancy across most mammalian species. In contrast, males have a longevity advantage in most bird species, where they carry matching ZZ chromosomes and females have mismatched WZ pairs.

Another driver of sex differences in aging is the force of sexual selection — the evolution of traits that boost reproductive success, sometimes at the cost of survival. Males might die earlier, for example, if they’ve sunk lots of energy into developing physical traits for display or combat against rivals — such as bright coloration, large horns or antlers, or greater body size.

And then there’s the mystery of menopause — a rare phenomenon in the animal world. Most female animals remain fertile until they are nearing the end of their lives, while only humans and a few marine mammals experience an extended healthy post-fertile phase. In some whale species, males die around the same age that females reach menopause — yet the females go on to live almost twice as long.

For all the centuries that people have yearned to live longer, we’ve only just begun to understand why and how we age. Scientists still don’t know why nobody — male or female — lives beyond about 120 years, or what it will take to surpass that apparent barrier.

However, maintaining better physical and cognitive health as we get older looks both achievable and imperative with an aging world population. Only through more targeted and sustained research will we discover how to do that — whether with anti-aging drugs or even advanced probiotic formulations of something as simple as plain yogurt.

The Trump administration’s war on diversity and inclusion in science rests on the notion that helping or studying some groups necessarily puts others at a disadvantage. That logic falls apart in biology, where diversity is fundamental to how life evolves and thrives — and ignoring it isn’t good for anyone.

F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.

Should the U.S. and Russia resume nuclear testing?

The answer to that question must be a resounding “No.” Yet President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, eager to project strength, have raised fears that they may be moving to revive the dangerous practice.

While the significance of testing nuclear weapons dwindled over 60 years ago, the terrifying circumstances that brought that era to a close should remain top of mind, reminding leaders why using nuclear testing to gain a strategic advantage is a terrible idea.

Thanks to Hollywood, many audiences know something about the dawn of the nuclear age. Led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, a crack team of eccentric geniuses housed at Los Alamos, New Mexico, built and tested the first atomic bomb in 1945. It led Oppenheimer to recall a line from the Hindu sacred text, The Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Although the atomic scientists who followed Oppenheimer lacked his literary sensibilities, they took world-destroying quite seriously. Teams in the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed to build and test ever-larger bombs in a blatantly obvious effort at intimidating the other side.

The U.S. went first, forcing the indigenous people of Bikini Atoll to relocate so that it could detonate bombs in the Marshall Islands in 1946. Radioactive debris rained down on the sailors sent to watch the tests. They absorbed dangerous doses of radiation, as did many of the native islanders living in the area, inaugurating a multigenerational legacy of cancers and birth defects.

Nevada, where the military began above-ground tests in 1951, was no better. Here, too, the federal government confiscated land owned by indigenous peoples and placed soldiers far too close to the detonation sites. In subsequent decades, their bodies would be plagued by cancers and other maladies born of their fateful exposure.

Back in the Marshall Islands, the U.S. began testing a new generation of nuclear weapons that used conventional fission bombs to detonate a much larger, “fusion,” or hydrogen bomb. These experiments went terribly awry during the infamous Castle Bravo test of 1954.

The bomb in question was supposed to generate the equivalent of five to six megatons of TNT (a megaton is equal to 1 million tons of TNT). Thanks to some serious miscalculations, though, the explosion clocked in at 15 megatons, or 1,000 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion sucked up 10 million tons of sand and pulverized coral, creating a massive fallout cloud that fell on islanders, U.S. military personnel, and even Japanese fishing vessels 80 miles east of the test site.

This was what historian Alex Wellerstein has described as “the greatest single radiological disaster in American history.” It also holds the record of being the biggest nuclear test ever conducted by the U.S. And it might have remained the biggest test ever had it not been for the Soviet Union.

After World War II, the Communist nation worked desperately to build and test its own bomb, terrified of what might happen if it failed. Indeed, a Russian nuclear scientist who attended the Bikini test in 1946 claimed that the purpose of the demonstration had been “to frighten the Soviets.”

Thanks to atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, the Soviets managed to detonate their first atomic weapon in 1949. Still, they spent much of the next decade playing catch-up, countering progressively larger tests with their own demonstrations. Premier Nikita Khrushchev, eager to pull ahead, approved a top-secret project to build the biggest nuclear weapon in human history. It was known as “Kuzma’s mother,” an allusion to a Russian idiom that basically means: “We’ll show you!”

When completed in 1961, Kuzma’s mother — also known as the Tsar Bomba or the King of Bombs — was the size of a school bus and weighed 25 tons. It was too big to fit into any of the Soviet bomber aircraft, so the military removed the bomb bay doors on a Tupolev TU-95 and strapped it to the bottom of the plane.

On Oct. 31, 1961, the TU-95 left a Russian airfield bound for Novaya Zemlya, a collection of islands above the Arctic Circle; a separate plane containing a film crew accompanied it. They departed not knowing if they would return home: authorities had given the planes a 50/50 chance of surviving the shock wave.

When they reached the target location, the bomber dropped its lethal package. The bomb, fitted with a parachute to slow its descent and give the planes time to escape, floated downward until it reached 4,000 meters before exploding.

The blast, which could be seen more than 1,000 kilometers away, registered at 57 megatons, 10 times more powerful than all the bombs and ordnance used in World War II. Had any human been within 62 miles of the epicenter (there weren’t any), they would have been immediately vaporized or have suffered third-degree burns. The shock wave shattered windows 560 miles away.

The test inflamed Cold War tensions, and a year later, the world came dangerously close to complete annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In its wake, saner heads began to prevail, and the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which moved nuclear testing underground, where it became less of a provocation. A complete test ban followed 30 years later, aided by the fact that computer modeling has effectively made nuclear testing obsolete.

Trump and Putin now seem inclined to take us back to the bad old days of nuclear testing out of some misguided belief that it’s an effective way to assert dominance over adversaries. History already shows how that story ends.

Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”

 

I write today about an epidemic. It’s not biological. It’s an epidemic of cowardly, immoral and unprincipled decisions by leaders across the political spectrum. Our last biological epidemic — COVID-19 — was a tiny invisible pathogen that made us physically sick. This epidemic of moral cowardice is right in everybody’s face and it’s eating away at the civic bonds that hold societies together.

Three examples preoccupy me personally: The Republican Party today has a neo-Nazi problem that it refuses to confront. The progressive left today has a pro-Hamas problem that it refuses to confront. And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.

While this may seem an odd grouping, its elements have more in common than you might think. The neo-Nazis in the Republican camp want a white Christian America from sea to shining sea — empty of as much diversity as possible. The radical settlers in the West Bank want a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — empty of as many Palestinian Arabs as possible. And Hamas jihadis also want an Islamic state in Palestine from the same river to the same sea — empty of as many Israeli Jews as possible.

What else they have in common

Those three examples have other things in common. One is they just don’t care anymore about hiding their excesses or their agendas. It’s all out there online or on YouTube. They are not embarrassed.

Another is how much they feed off one another — how each uses the worst behavior of the others as both justification and fuel for their own twisted views. Republican neo-Nazis exploit global condemnation of the Israeli settlers’ violent behavior in the West Bank — on top of Israel’s excesses in the Gaza Strip — as license to now openly flaunt their antisemitism.

Jewish supremacist settlers, and those in the Israeli government who support them, use Hamas’ savagery as a moral permission slip for their own lawless marauding against Palestinians in the West Bank. Lately, the Israeli right has begun a vociferous campaign to prevent the prosecution of Israeli prison guards caught on camera abusing a Palestinian prisoner.

Hamas, meanwhile, has cited what it claimed were Israeli efforts to take over Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — Islam’s third holiest site — as well as the abuse of Palestinians in Israeli jails and violence by the Israeli army and settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, as part of its justification for its mass murder of Israeli Jews on Oct. 7.

But what really makes me sick is the third thing they have in common — how much their behavior is now excused or normalized by adjacent members of their own political communities.

The uprooting of ‘mangroves’

Put them all together and it becomes obvious that we are watching a broad breakdown in the liberal, humanistic order that dominated Western democracies after World War II. It’s the wholesale uprooting of what I call our societal “mangroves” — the unwritten norms that are necessary to restrain, filter and buffer aberrant behaviors and hatemongering, even when technically legal.

Anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by Hitler’s henchmen shortly before his concentration camp was liberated by the Americans, is often said to have described the moral implications of this kind of behavior: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

But that is precisely what is going on today. Just look around — and listen to the silence.

I totally respect those on the left, right or center who have protested Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians as collateral — and sometimes seemingly deliberate — damage in Israel’s retaliation/revenge campaign against Hamas. Such protests are a sign of moral health.

But I am still shocked by the declaration signed by more than 30 Harvard University “Palestine Solidarity Groups” late on Oct. 7 two years ago. It stated: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” That was only hours after Hamas’ indiscriminate killing of some 1,200 men, women, children, soldiers and elderly people in Israel — including more than 360 people at a music festival, and the kidnapping of some 250 more. That Harvard declaration was issued well before Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation.

When pro-Hamas protesters blame everything on Israel and give Hamas a free pass for its murder, sexual abuse and kidnapping; when they ignore everything else that Hamas stands for — its anti-LGBTQ+, antidemocratic, antisemitic, women-subjugating Islamist ideology that should be anathema to everyone; and when they ignore past and current attempts by moderate, non-Hamas Palestinians to forge a two-state solution with the Jewish state, as an alternative to armed struggle — in my view they are essentially telling the world: It’s not Israel’s actions that motivate us, it is Israel’s existence. Therefore, the project of eliminating Israel must come before any critique of Hamas.

That is warped — and don’t kid yourself, it’s a view not confined to only a very few on the far left.

The pillars of Israeli security

Unfortunately, too many Israelis and diaspora Jews have put on similar blinders. A day does not go by without a report like this recent one from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

“The attacks of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent devastation of Gaza also ignited a lethal conflagration of settler violence in the occupied West Bank. Over the same two-year period that Israeli forces killed more than 68,000 Palestinians in Gaza, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. New settler outposts have been constructed with rapid speed, displacing entire Palestinian communities — a process often facilitated by Israel’s army. … In the face of this reality, there appears to be a concerted campaign on the part of the pro-Israel right to deny it.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his fellow travelers — and here I include the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which has flown air cover for Netanyahu in Washington, D.C., for his 18 years in office — have done more to undermine the long-term security of Israel and the Jewish people than any Hamas fighters.

Why do I say that? Because they have presided over and abetted the shattering of the three most important pillars of Israeli security. I speak of Israel’s national unity — Bibi has deliberately tried to govern by division not addition — as well as Israel’s long-standing commitment to democratic values and judicial independence and its commitment to fighting its wars, albeit inconsistently applied over the years, with a humanitarian ethos.

All three are being shredded by Netanyahu and his allies in pursuit of the insane obsession with annexing the West Bank. Israel is now in grave danger — and all those threats are from within.

Nothing to see here?

And then there’s us. Politico recently broke the story about what was being said in a Telegram group chat involving leaders of Young Republican groups in four states: “They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.” Plenty of antisemitism was stirred in as well.

Ho-hum, said Vice President JD Vance, nothing to see here: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes.”

Yes, teenagers will be teenagers, except that Mother Jones discovered that eight of the 11 Republican operatives who took part in the offensive chat appear to range in age from 24 to 35.

Of course, President Donald Trump also didn’t even whisper a hint of condemnation. Just as he had no problem with the recent lovefest/interview between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, promoting Fuentes’ white nationalist neo-Nazi sympathies.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s defense of Carlson centered mainly on his own ego. He’s “said good things about me over the years,” the president said of Carlson. So nothing else should matter?

Trump could have said that Carlson has a right to interview anyone he wants, something that should never be suppressed, but that he was very troubled by the open contempt being directed by Fuentes at Jewish Americans. But neither Trump nor Vance said that — because they undoubtedly know that a not insignificant minority of their voters hold these racist, antisemitic views and they don’t want to alienate them before the midterms, which are expected to be very close.

Dishonor will remain

How far we have fallen. We’ve had political movements in the past use antisemitism to try to get to the White House — for example, those who wanted well-known antisemite Charles Lindbergh to run for president in 1940 — but until Vance and Trump we have not seen it being normalized to try to stay in power. We have seen Jewish supremacists, like Rabbi Meir Kahane, get elected to the Israeli Knesset, but we have never seen them setting Israeli defense policy, until Bibi gave them the keys. We have seen pro-Palestinian demonstrations aplenty over the years, but never ones, as far as I recall, that gave such a complete pass to Hamas after its mass murder of Israeli civilians.

This is how norms collapse — and take their societies down with them.

So, to Trump, Vance, Netanyahu and the pro-Hamas protesters, I have one message. It’s the one offered by Liz Cheney to her fellow GOP House members who turned a blind eye to Trump’s stoking of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

 

The Bloomington Police Department is reporting that a federal immigration agency employee based in the Twin Cities was among 16 men arrested in a child sex trafficking sting operation.

Alexander Steven Back, 41, of Robbinsdale, was arrested Nov. 13 when he allegedly attempted to meet up with who he thought was a 17-year-old girl, but was actually undercover law enforcement, according to a criminal complaint. Back is a non-sworn U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employee and one of four charged in the operation, according to Bloomington police.

According to the complaint, officers posing as a minor in a text message exchange said, “I am 17 and one guy got hella mad at me,” to which Back said, “I’m not going to be mad at you.”

In a second instance, officers said “Kk and u ain’t gonna flip ur s**t that I’m 17 right? One dude yelled so loud I thought the neighbors would call the cops.”

Back responded, “Are you with the cops?” Officers said, “Lol definitely not R U?” and Back said, “No definitely not. Ok send address, im chill,” according to the complaint.

In a post-Miranda statement, Back said he doesn’t know why he didn’t “bail” after “Bella” told him she was 17 and said, “I don’t really know if there is anything to say. It’s all there in the texts,” the complaint said.

The operation, dubbed “Operation Creep,” is similar to one Bloomington police conducted in March when former state Sen. Justin Eichorn, R-Grand Rapids, was arrested for allegedly attempting to solicit a minor for prostitution. He pleaded not guilty to federal charges in April, and his lawyer is arguing that he’s being unfairly prosecuted because of his status as a former state senator.

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