Daily Archives: March 1, 2005

Life Expectancy on the Rise

LifeSpanmedium.jpgThe CDC is reporting a 3.6-month increase in life expectancy for children born in 2003 over children born just a year earlier.

Those born in 2003 can expect to live 77.6 years on average, up from 77.3 years in 2002 and a record high for U.S. life expectancy, according to preliminary figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Life expectancy is a misleading concept. It is not a good predictor of whether a child born in 2003 will die at age 77 because it doesn’t predict the state of health care at that time (or in the intervening years). It is a picture of health care today. If health care were to remain static, no improvements (or new health challenges) for the next 75 years, then it would be a decent predictor.

Even Aubrey de Grey’s most impassioned critics don’t accept a static future. There are always new developments and new challenges. Historically, our advances have outpaced the challenges:

People of both sexes born in 1900 could expect to live 47.3 years on average…

That’s a 30-year improvement in the twentieth century. Two data points don’t equal a trend, but the 3.6-month improvement between 2002 and 2003 is consistent with the 30 year per century improvement. [3.6 * 100 = 360 ; 360 / 12 = 30]

Most of the improvement in life expectancy during the twentieth century came as a result of a decline in infant mortality.

Infant mortality [between 2002 and 2003] remained relatively steady at 6.9 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2003 compared with 7 deaths per 1,000 in 2002.

Since infant mortality remained steady between the 2002 and 2003, the 3.6-month improvement had to be made at other points in the life span. That’s good news for we non-infants. But should we think of an annual improvement of 3.6 months good news? That’s sooo twentieth century. I’m expecting better as we move further into the twenty-first century.

Cloaking Device?

Like time travel (at least the going back in time part) and teleportation (as it applies to anything other than photons), invisibility has been one of those standard plots devices of casual science fiction — that is, TV and movies — with very little theoretical grounding. But that may be changing:

The idea of a cloak of invisibility that hides objects from view has long been confined to the more improbable reaches of science fiction. But electronic engineers have now come up with a way to make one.

Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia say that a ‘plasmonic cover’ could render objects “nearly invisible to an observer”. Their idea remains just a proposal at this stage, but it doesn’t obviously violate any laws of physics.

“The concept is an interesting one, with several important potential applications,” says John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College in London, UK. “It could find uses in stealth technology and camouflage.”