Couples Facing Fertility Treatments Should Beware of This

Couples Facing Fertility Treatments Should Beware of This

Couples facing infertility should be savvy about the add-on procedures offered by some fertility clinics.

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Caren Chesler
Caren Chesler is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, Slate, Salon, and Popular Mechanics. She has a blog called The Dancing Egg, about having a baby at 47 through IVF.
Fast for Longevity, with Less Hunger, with Dr. Valter Longo

Valter Longo, a biogerontologist at USC, and centenarian Rocco Longo (no relation) appear together in Italy in 2021. The elder Longo is from a part of Italy where people have fasted regularly and are enjoying long lifespans.

Valter Longo

You’ve probably heard about intermittent fasting, where you don’t eat for about 16 hours each day and limit the window where you’re taking in food to the remaining eight hours.

But there’s another type of fasting, called a fasting-mimicking diet, with studies pointing to important benefits. For today’s podcast episode, I chatted with Dr. Valter Longo, a biogerontologist at the University of Southern California, about all kinds of fasting, and particularly the fasting-mimicking diet, which minimizes hunger as much as possible. Going without food for a period of time is an example of good stress: challenges that work at the cellular level to boost health and longevity.

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Matt Fuchs
Matt Fuchs is the host of the Making Sense of Science podcast and served previously as the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org. He writes as a contributor to the Washington Post, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Nautilus Magazine, Fortune Magazine and TIME Magazine. Follow him @fuchswriter.
Silkworms with spider DNA spin silk stronger than Kevlar

Silkworm silk is fragile, which limits its uses, but a few extra genes can help.

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Story by Freethink

The study and copying of nature’s models, systems, or elements to address complex human challenges is known as “biomimetics.” Five hundred years ago, an elderly Italian polymath spent months looking at the soaring flight of birds. The result was Leonardo da Vinci’s biomimetic Codex on the Flight of Birds, one of the foundational texts in the science of aerodynamics. It’s the science that elevated the Wright Brothers and has yet to peak.

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Jonny Thomson
Jonny Thomson taught philosophy in Oxford for more than a decade before turning to writing full-time. He’s a staff writer at Big Think, where he writes about philosophy, theology, psychology, and occasionally other subjects when he dares step out of his lane. His first book, Mini Philosophy, is an award-winning, international bestseller, and has been translated into 20 languages. His second book, Mini Big Ideas, was published in 2023.