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The Race to Live Forever

Ravichandran Harini, Jadetimes Staff

Can Science Slow Down Human Ageing?


For centuries, explorers chased legends of a fountain that could restore youth with a single sip. Today the search continues, not in hidden jungles but in gleaming laboratories, where scientists sequence genomes, engineer cells, and feed biological data into artificial intelligence in pursuit of the same ancient dream. The question has simply changed its language: can science actually slow ageing, or does immortality remain, as it always has been, just out of reach?


Ageing, at its core, is a slow accumulation of biological damage. Cells divide fewer times as they age, DNA accumulates errors, proteins misfold, and tissues lose their ability to repair themselves. One key culprit is the shortening of telomeres, the protective caps on our chromosomes, while another is cellular senescence, in which damaged cells stop dividing but linger, releasing inflammatory signals that harm neighboring tissue.


Researchers are attacking these processes from multiple angles. Studies of calorie restriction and metabolic pathways have revealed how diet influences longevity, while epigenetics, the study of how genes are switched on and off, is uncovering ways cellular age might be reversed rather than merely tracked. Stem cell and regenerative medicine aim to replace or repair worn-out tissue directly. A landmark 2024 study in Cell found that the diabetes drug metformin slowed multiple markers of ageing in primates, including inflammation and DNA damage.


Artificial intelligence has become an unlikely accelerant in this effort. By scanning enormous biological datasets, AI systems can flag promising drug candidates, predict disease risk years in advance, and tailor treatments to individual genetic profiles. Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine has used AI to help design an experimental lung fibrosis drug now in clinical trials, one of several attempts to translate machine learning into life-extending medicine. Longevity research funding has followed suit, with global investment surging roughly 220 percent between 2023 and 2024.


Yet the promise carries real tension. Extending healthy lifespan could ease suffering and reduce disease burden, but it also raises hard questions about who can afford such treatments, how healthcare systems will cope, and what a far older global population means for labour, pensions, and resources. The World Health Organization projects the number of people aged 60 and older will nearly double, from 1.1 billion in 2023 to 2.1 billion by 2050.


Science has not found immortality, and may never. But it is steadily redrawing the boundary between ageing and disease, offering future generations not eternal life, but potentially more years lived in health.

Why Do We Dream?

Ravichandran Harini, Jadetimes Staff

The Science Behind One of Humanity's Greatest Mysteries


She wakes at 4 a.m., heart pounding, certain she has just taken a final exam for a class she never attended, in a school that no longer exists. Within minutes the details dissolve, but the emotion lingers all morning. It is a scene replayed, in some form, in nearly every bedroom on Earth each night. Why does the sleeping brain conjure such vivid, illogical, emotionally charged worlds, and what, if anything, are dreams actually for?


Dreaming occurs throughout sleep, but the most vivid and narrative dreams arise during rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep. Roughly every ninety minutes, the sleeping brain cycles through lighter stages, deep slow-wave sleep, and then REM, when the eyes dart beneath closed lids, breathing quickens, and brain activity looks remarkably similar to being awake. Curiously, the body becomes temporarily paralysed during REM, a safety mechanism that stops us from acting out what we dream.


Neuroscientists have proposed several explanations for why this happens. One leading theory holds that dreams help consolidate memories, sorting the important from the trivial and weaving new experiences into existing knowledge. Recent sleep research published in 2024 and 2025 supports this idea, showing that REM sleep appears to refine and stabilise memory traces in ways distinct from deep sleep. Other theories suggest dreams regulate emotion, allowing the brain to process fear or stress in a low-stakes setting, while the threat-simulation hypothesis proposes that dreaming evolved as a kind of rehearsal space for danger. Some researchers argue dreams are simply the mind's attempt to make sense of random neural firing, a byproduct rather than a purpose.


Whatever their function, dreams clearly intersect with creativity and problem-solving. Writers, scientists, and inventors have long credited dreams with breakthroughs, and studies suggest sleep can help untangle problems left unsolved the night before. Dream life also changes across the lifespan: children report shorter, simpler dreams, nightmares peak in adolescence, and recurring dreams often reflect unresolved worries. Some people even learn to recognise they are dreaming mid-dream, a phenomenon called lucid dreaming, now studied as a potential therapeutic tool.


Despite decades of brain imaging and sleep labs, scientists still cannot say with certainty why we dream. It remains one of biology's most persistent puzzles.


What is clear is that dreaming reveals something profound about consciousness itself: a mind that, even at rest, keeps working to learn, remember, and understand.



Why Do Humans Rule the World?

Ravichandran Harini, Jadetimes Staff

What Makes Our Species Earth's Most Dominant Life Form?


A cheetah can outrun any human alive. An eagle can spot a rabbit from a mile in the sky. A lion can kill with a single swipe, and a dolphin can navigate dark oceans by sound alone. By almost every physical measure, humans are unremarkable animals: slow, weak-jawed, thin-skinned, and clumsy in water. Yet we build cities on every continent, fly beyond the atmosphere, and reshape entire ecosystems at will. If nature has produced so many superior athletes, why does one middling primate run the planet?


The answer lies not in muscle but in mind, and not in the individual mind but in the collective one. Roughly 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged with an unusually large, energy-hungry brain. That brain, paired with upright walking that freed the hands and a voice box capable of nuanced sound, set the stage for something no claw or fang ever could: cumulative culture. Early humans learned to make fire, craft tools, and read landscapes, then passed that knowledge to their children, who improved upon it further.


Language turned this trickle of knowledge into a flood. Where a chimpanzee can warn its troop of a nearby leopard, a human can explain how a leopard hunts, teach a child to avoid it, and write the lesson down for people not yet born. Speech, and later writing, let us store memory outside our skulls and transmit it across generations, a feat unmatched by even the cleverest crows, octopuses, or elephants.


That accumulated knowledge built agriculture, then cities, then science and industry, each layer multiplying human reach over the last. Chimpanzees fashion twigs into termite tools; elephants mourn their dead; dolphins call each other by name. But no other species combines symbolic language, abstract reasoning, and cooperation among strangers at continental scale.


That power now carries weight. WWF's 2024 Living Planet Report found that monitored wildlife populations have declined by an average of 73 percent since 1970, a warning that human dominance is reshaping the biosphere itself.


Our intelligence built the modern world, but wisdom, not cleverness, will determine whether that world remains livable. The species that learned to reshape nature must now learn to protect it.

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