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Middle-age spread isn’t down to metabolism, but we know how to beat it

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FEW of life’s milestones are as unappealing and unceremonious as arrival in middle age. Our skin becomes noticeably looser, grey hairs more numerous and, of course, our clothes typically start to feel a bit tighter – especially around the waist.

The last of these is known as middle-aged spread, the commonly accepted idea that we start to pack on the pounds around the abdomen as we get older. This excess weight is said to be easy to put on and harder to shift than when we were younger, the thinking being that our once-perky metabolism gets sluggish with age. We can no longer get away with as much, and our efforts to ditch the belly with diet or exercise become a losing battle.

So far, so miserable. But then, last July, a study of over 6000 people around the world blew the idea out of the water. It showed that metabolism stays remarkably stable as we age, at least until our 60s. “The amount of calories you burn per day from age 20 to 60 remains about the same,” says Herman Pontzer at Duke University in North Carolina. “We’ve shown that you have much less control over metabolism than we thought.” The idea that your metabolism is just as active as you approach your 60s as it was in your 20s should be welcome news for anyone nearing middle age – usually defined as the period from 45 to 65 years of age – and facing the dreaded spread. But it leaves a burning question: if metabolism isn’t to blame, then what is? And what can be done?

Middle-aged spread is more…

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March 9, 2022
Could ancient viruses from melting permafrost cause the next pandemic?

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Melting permafrost in Russia’s Yamal peninsula (pictured) has exposed nomadic reindeer herders (below) to anthrax

Elena Shchipkova/Alamy

IN NOVEMBER 2019, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine held a workshop to discuss an emerging disease threat. Not covid-19: they were a couple of months too early for that. Instead, they were trying to figure out what to do about microorganisms trapped in glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost, which will be released as the world warms and the ice thaws.

During the meeting, Alexander Volkovitskiy from the Russian Academy of…

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February 16, 2022
How to hack your stress and turn it into a positive force in your life

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Many of us have felt more than a little stressed over the past couple of years. For me, exhibit A is my teeth. A recent trip to the dentist confirmed that months of pandemic-induced jaw-clenching, product of the usual deadline stress amplified by the demands of two young children, had left four of them broken.

Crumbling teeth are small fry. Last year, the American Psychological Association found that two-thirds of people in the US reported feeling more stressed in the pandemic, and predicted “a mental health crisis that could yield serious health and social consequences for years to come”. Increased risk of diabetes, depression and cardiovascular disease and more are all associated with high stress levels. It’s enough to make you feel stressed just thinking about it.

Perhaps we just need to think about stress differently, though. That, at least, is the startling conclusion of researchers studying the mind-body connection. There are natural benefits to being stressed, they say, and if we change our “stress mindset”, we might be able to turn things around and make stress a positive influence on our lives. Fortunately, there are some simple hacks that will allow us to do this, and they bring with them the promise of better physical health, clearer thinking, increased mental toughness and greater productivity.

There is no denying that too much stress can harm both body and mind. It has been linked to all six of the main causes of death in the West: cancer, heart disease, liver disease, accidents, lung disease and suicide. It can weaken the immune system, leaving us more prone to infection and reducing…

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December 1, 2021
Cold-water swimming: What are the real risks and health benefits?

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Plunging the body into cold water stimulates the release of a cocktail of invigorating chemicals

Jacob Staedler/EyeEm/Getty Images

“IT’S like pressing Control-Alt-Delete on a computer,” says Cath Pendleton. “When I’m in the water, I’m so focused on my body, my brain switches off. It’s just me and the swim.”

Pendleton, an ice swimmer based in Merthyr Tydfil, UK, is hardier than most. In 2020, five years after discovering she didn’t mind swimming in very cold water, she became the first person to swim a mile inside the Antarctic circle. Part of her training involved sitting in a freezer in her shed.

She is far from alone in her enthusiasm for cold water, however. Thanks to media reports of the mental health benefits of a chilly dip and pool closures due to covid-19, soaring numbers are now taking to rivers, lakes and the sea – once the preserves of a handful of seriously tough year-round swimmers. An estimated 7.5 million people swim outdoors in the UK alone, with an increasing number swimming through the winter. Global figures are hard to come by, but the International Winter Swimming Association has seen a boom in registered winter swimmers around the world, even in China, Russia and Finland, where water temperatures can drop below 0°C.

But is there anything more to it than the joy of being in nature, combined with the perverse euphoria of defying the cold? According to the latest research, the answer is maybe. Recent studies have begun to turn up evidence that cold-water immersion may alleviate stress and depression and help tackle autoimmune disorders.…

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March 10, 2021
The hidden rules that determine which friendships matter to us

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FACEBOOK users used to have a lot more friends. The social networking site pursues a commercial strategy of trying to persuade people to “friend” as many others as possible. However, sometime around 2007, users began to question who all these people they had befriended were. Then, someone pointed out that we can only manage around 150 relationships at any time. A flurry of “friend” culling followed and, since then, the number 150 has been known as “Dunbar’s number”. Thank you Facebook!

Modern technology may have brought me notoriety, but Dunbar’s number is rooted in evolutionary biology. Although humans are a highly social species, juggling relationships isn’t easy and, like other primates, the size of our social network is constrained by brain size. Two decades ago, my research revealed that this means we cannot meaningfully engage with more than about 150 others. No matter how gregarious you are, that is your limit. In this, we are all alike. However, more recent research on friendship has uncovered some fascinating individual differences.

My colleagues and I have made eye-opening discoveries about how much time people spend cultivating various members of their social networks, how friendships form and dissolve and what we are looking for in our friends. What has really surprised us is that each person has a unique “social fingerprint” – an idiosyncratic way in which they allocate their social effort. This pattern is quite impervious to who is in your friendship circle at any given time. It does, however, reveal quite a lot about your own identity – and could even be influencing how well you are coping with social restrictions during…

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March 3, 2021
Is the universe conscious? It seems impossible until you do the maths

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THEY call it the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”. Physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase in the 1960s to encapsulate the curious fact that merely by manipulating numbers we can describe and predict all manner of natural phenomena with astonishing clarity, from the movements of planets and the strange behaviour of fundamental particles to the consequences of a collision between two black holes billions of light years away. Now, some are wondering if maths can succeed where all else has failed, unravelling whatever it is that allows us to contemplate the laws of nature in the first place.

It is a big ask. The question of how matter gives rise to felt experience is one of the most vexing problems we know of. And sure enough, the first fleshed-out mathematical model of consciousness has generated huge debate about whether it can tell us anything sensible. But as mathematicians work to hone and extend their tools for peering deep inside ourselves, they are confronting some eye-popping conclusions.

Not least, what they are uncovering seems to suggest that if we are to achieve a precise description of consciousness, we may have to ditch our intuitions and accept that all kinds of inanimate matter could be conscious – maybe even the universe as a whole. “This could be the beginning of a scientific revolution,” says Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany.

If so, it has been a long time coming. Philosophers have pondered the nature of consciousness for a couple of thousand years, largely to no avail. Then, half a century ago, biologists got involved. They have discovered …

Article amended on 4 May 2020

Correction: We have updated the campus of Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences at which Hedda Hassel Mørch is based, and changed the attribution of work on the effects of sleep or sedation on phi.

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April 29, 2020
We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time

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IN THE Antarctic, things happen at a glacial pace. Just ask Peter Gorham. For a month at a time, he and his colleagues would watch a giant balloon carrying a collection of antennas float high above the ice, scanning over a million square kilometres of the frozen landscape for evidence of high-energy particles arriving from space.

When the experiment returned to the ground after its first flight, it had nothing to show for itself, bar the odd flash of background noise. It was the same story after the second flight more than a year later.

While the balloon was in the sky for the third time, the researchers decided to go over the past data again, particularly those signals dismissed as noise. It was lucky they did. Examined more carefully, one signal seemed to be the signature of a high-energy particle. But it wasn’t what they were looking for. Moreover, it seemed impossible. Rather than bearing down from above, this particle was exploding out of the ground.

That strange finding was made in 2016. Since then, all sorts of suggestions rooted in known physics have been put forward to account for the perplexing signal, and all have been ruled out. What’s left is shocking in its implications. Explaining this signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same big bang as our own and existing in parallel with it. In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards. It is perhaps the most mind-melting idea ever to have emerged from the Antarctic ice – but it might just be true.

The ambitions…

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April 8, 2020
Don’t stress: The scientific secrets of people who keep cool heads

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YOU know that person. The one who uses a delayed train as an excuse to get stuck into a good book. The one who can make a joke 10 seconds after breaking their ankle. The one who loves giving presentations and never falters under pressure. They seem to float through life unfazed by the stress that can overwhelm the rest of us. What’s their secret?

Are they blessed with stress-resistant genes? Did their upbringing make them exceptionally resilient? Have they learned specific ways of coping with life’s challenges? Or do they just know how to avoid stress altogether? To answer these questions, researchers have been examining how humans and animals react and adapt to adversity, identifying those who are particularly resilient to stress and teasing apart the factors that contribute to this ability. It is a journey that has taken them from orphanages in Romania and interrogation chambers in North Carolina to fire stations in Indianapolis and humour classes in Austria.

This work is helping the military recruit candidates for high-stress jobs. It has also led to the first human trial of a “stress vaccine”, with the potential to inoculate us against its devastating effects, from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to depression. But there is a bigger pay-off to understanding the secret of stress-free living. Knowing why some people handle stress better than others, and the things we might all do to improve our resilience, won’t just help all of us manage life’s daily struggles better, it might also teach us how to use stress to our advantage.

One thing is for certain: whether you are running late for…

Article amended on 27 February 2020

We clarified when people suffered negative effects of stress.

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February 19, 2020