The Clock Inside You

There is a clock running inside every cell of your body. It has been running since before you were born. It does not tick. It does not chime. But it is keeping time all the same, and a group of researchers at Harvard have just learned to read it.

What they did, in essence, was listen to the hum of 11,000 living things. Mice, rats, macaques, humans. Tissue from 25 different parts of the body. Transcriptomes, which is the word scientists use when they mean the full chorus of genes singing away inside a cell at any given moment. And when they laid all of this out and looked very carefully, they found something rather wonderful: aging sounds the same in all of us.

The patterns of gene activity that change as a mouse grows old are, in their essential shape, the same patterns that change in you. Evolution, it turns out, settled on a single strategy for wearing out its creations, and has been using it loyally across 80 million years of mammalian history.

From these patterns, the team built what they are calling molecular clocks. Not chronological age, mind you, the number of times the Earth has lapped the sun since your birthday, but biological age. The real number. The one your body is quietly keeping track of regardless of what your passport says. In humans, these clocks predicted time of death with an accuracy that matched the best epigenetic tools science currently has.

Somewhere in your cells, the count is running. Now we can read it.

Which raises a question worth sitting with for a moment.

If you could find out your biological age, the number your body actually believes itself to be, would you want to know? Would you book the test, open the results, read the number? Or would you, on reflection, prefer to leave the clock face turned to the wall?

Most people, when asked in the abstract, say yes. Of course they would want to know. Knowledge is power. Forewarned is forearmed. All of that.

But the abstract has a way of feeling quite different once it becomes an envelope on the kitchen table.

– Gandalv

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Two stone giants sit in the Egyptian desert.

Each was carved from a single block of stone, weighs 720 tons, and was dragged 420 miles from its quarry. They are so large that, three and a half thousand years later, you can still see them from more than 10 miles away…

They are called the Colossi of Memnon, and they were built around 1350 BC by the pharaoh Amenhotep III to guard the entrance of his mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile, opposite modern-day Luxor.

Each Colossus stands 18 metres (60 ft) tall, including its plinth. They were carved from a stone called quartzite sandstone, quarried at el-Gabal el-Ahmar, the Red Mountain, near modern-day Cairo. The southern statue is a single, unbroken block. The northern was cracked by an earthquake in 27 BC and partially rebuilt in the Roman era.

Quartzite sits at 7 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. The Egyptians who built the Colossi were a Bronze Age culture. Their chisels were made of copper and bronze, which register around 3 to 4 on the Mohs scale. They could not have cut the stone directly. The mainstream answer is that they did it by abrasion. According to archaeologists, they used small handheld stones harder than quartzite, mixed with sand and water, and slowly ground the figures out of the block by hand…

Each finished statue weighs 720 tons, roughly the weight of a hundred adult elephants. They were quarried near Cairo and installed near Luxor, 420 miles south. The Nile flows northward, which means a river journey would have required moving the stones against the current. Many experts believe that the stones are too heavy to have been transported upstream on the Nile. Some Egyptologists argue, instead, that the blocks were dragged overland on wooden sleds for the entire 420 miles.

Whatever happened in the desert thirty-four centuries ago, and however it happened, the result is harder to argue with than any explanation. The statues still stand. And I think that is the most astonishing thing of all: they have stood through every empire that has tried to outlive them.

The Colossi were already standing when Tutankhamun was born. They were standing when Alexander entered Egypt. They were standing when Cleopatra met Caesar. They were standing when Roman tourists climbed up to scratch their names into the plinth. And they are still standing today…

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– James Lucas

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Do it

– JBO

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