Has universal ageing mechanism been found?

   A protein that causes yeast to age seems to have 
   a similar effect in mice too – the finding might 
   lead to drugs to reverse age-related diseases"

Heavy water is supposed to make harder for free radicals to do damage in the first place.

Sirtuins should help with switching on repair mechanisms after damage is done.

And then there are telomeres, our natural kill-switch. There is another article, linked from the sirtuins one, about a possible way to slow down telomeres shortening:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16035-elixir-of-youth-...

BTW All three anti-aging approaches have companies working on the products to commercialize the research (Sirtris was recently bought by GlaxoSmithKline for $720M).

Sort of strange, but if that and all of this really turn out to be true, extending the human lifespan might not be as difficult as we make it out to be.

Before you can actually produce such a study, this entire article is sensationalist and the editors at New Scientist should be embarrassed to publish it.

The article says that up to 35% of body water can be heavy, but after that point it becomes "lethal." What exactly happens to make it lethal, and why has the author assumed that it is "harmless" to drink small amounts? Where's the study showing that small amounts are "totally harmless?"

In particular, it seems that high levels of deuterated water inhibits formation of the mitotic spindle, thereby preventing cell division.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

I just think it's kind of irresponsible for a reporter at a science publication to make cavalier statements about things like this-- "It's completely safe..."-- without having any science to back them up.

That seems likely to alter chemical behaviour (as researchers found). I'm not a chemist, but it seems reasonable to consider compounds with such bonds as different compounds. Why should we think of carbon-12 and carbon-13 as variations of carbon, instead of distinct elements - if they have different chemical behaviour?

The blackbox testing tells us that 35% heavy water is lethal, but doesn't tell why. It's possible - and even likely - that it is the very bonds we wish to protect that become lethal if strengthened 80 times.

The final "heavy babies" grayed paragraph at the end is fascinating (in case you skipped it: babies have more carbon-13, and their mothers are unusually depleted with it around the time of birth.)

I'll make a bad analogy now.

The electronic structure is like a set of hooks attached to the atom. Hydrogen has 1 free hook, carbon 4, and these hooks form chemical bonds. Hydrogen and deuterium have the same set of hooks, as do C-13 and C-14. But deuterium is heavier than hydrogen, and this makes it harder to unhook it when it attaches to another atom, even if the set of hooks is identical.

It's like features vs. benefits, which I've been working with over a few weeks, to understand the need for my product, and the gaps left by existing offers in the marketplace. Quite possibly, I'm thinking too much in those terms :-)

(Side note: the current situation on our Planet is still that much more than 50% of currently living souls actually do believe in God/Good/Heaven/Paradise; and the already gone ones, actually already know exactly!)

To not believe in afterlife, you explicitly have to not believe it, so even the denying of afterlife is based on a (negative) faith.

Atheists don't seem aware of being their position a simple negative faith response to a positive faith.

But "weak" atheism is merely a rejection of theism. It is not a proposed hypothesis, but a rebuke of unsupported hypotheses.

All things that happen must have a cause.

Even Big Bang had its Cause. And since the exact definition of God is: "The only one not caused by anything, but simply 'cause' of Itself", there's no escape here...