The Stress of Cold Temperatures Extends Lifespans

In 1986, John Holloszy of Washington University immersed his lab rats in shallow, cool water for four hours each day. They burned so many extra calories that they ate half again as much as control rats, but weighed less. The cold rats lived 10% longer, on average. Holloszy framed his report on this experiment not as a hormetic effect of cold exposure, but as a refutation of the “rate of living” hypothesis. In 2006, Gordon Lithgow of the Buck Institute for Aging Research exposed lab worms...

 How the Adverse Affects of Stress Were Discovered

Lots of research has gone into trying to understand how maternal stress affects brain development. And we have begun to answer this question at the most intimate level possible: the level of cell and molecule. For this progress we mostly can thank the klutzy researcher Hans Selye. He is the founder of the modern concept of stress. As a young scientist, Selye would grind up “endocrine extracts”, which presumably contained active stress hormones, and inject them into rats to see what the ra...