Greenberg also possesses the mental capacity of an infant, and has never learned to speak or eat on her own. According to a recent report on ABC:

Brooke hasn't aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa, says Brooke's body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why.

She has also suffered from several strange maladies, including burst ulcers, a stroke and a brain tumor, which healed after Greenberg appeared on the verge of death.

It's unclear whether her capacity to heal is related to her agelessness, but researchers hope to find out. ABC reports:

Geneticist Maxine Sutcliffe chronicled a baffling range of inconsistencies in Brooke's aging process. She still has baby teeth at 16, for instance. And her bone age is estimated to be more like 10 years old.

"There've been very minimal changes in Brooke's brain," Walker said. "Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected."

Greenberg sleeps in a crib, and attends school. Her teachers and family aren't sure how much she understands, but they say she recognizes people familiar to her and likes to play and laugh.

Currently geneticists are trying to isolate the gene or set of genes responsible for her bizarre aging process. There are no other known cases like Greenberg's, and it's possible that her genome could be the key to unlocking how our bodies know when to age. If a sixteen-year-old can look like a sixteen-month-old, then why couldn't a sixty-year-old look twenty-one? Of course, treatments based on Greenberg's condition might keep people's brains stuck at the same age as their bodies. So you wouldn't have a person with the wisdom of a sixty-year-old in a youthful package. You'd just have somebody whose mind remained twenty-one for decades on end. Which sounds cool until you really think about it.

via ABC

Researchers at the University of North Carolina have found a protein, called p16INK4a, that is tied to aging. In a forthcoming article in Aging Cell, the team describes this protein's presence in the human blood stream. Higher amounts of the protein are also tied to tobacco use and inactivity. Interestingly, the study found that inactivity contributed more to this aging marker than a high body mass index, which seems to show that activity slows down aging more than preventing obesity does.t

The research team says that this discovery could help with stabilizing organ transplants, recovery from surgery, or cancer treatment. As of now, it's a way to see just how far your body has aged molecularly, regardless of how you have aged chronologically. It also might lead to further development of age-prolonging procedures.

Aging is traditionally coupled with a process called "senescence," which is generally understood to be the wearing out and breaking down of cells over time. There are many theories of aging, but many biologists theorize that the effects of aging are a naturally evolved part of life. The corollary to this is that aging (or even death) isn't necessarily a requirement for life. It might be something we can prevent entirely.

The research into prolonging peoples' lives is expansive. A group called the Methuseleh Foundation is constantly working to cure aging, and a governmental agency, the National Institute on Aging, is working on the problem as well. This new research, which gives researchers a tool for documenting and measuring the aging process, could eventually contribute to longer lives for humanity.

Test detects molecular marker of aging in humans [UNC School of Medicine, via Science Daily]

Some aspects of peoples' cognitive skills – such as the ability to make rapid comparisons, remember unrelated information and detect relationships – peak at about the age of 22, and then begin a slow decline starting around age 27.

"This research suggests that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s," said Timothy Salthouse, a University of Virginia professor of psychology and the study's lead investigator . . .

Many of the participants in Salthouse's study were tested several times during the course of years, allowing researchers to detect subtle declines in cognitive ability.

Top performances in some of the tests were accomplished at the age of 22. A notable decline in certain measures of abstract reasoning, brain speed and in puzzle-solving became apparent at 27.

Salthouse found that average memory declines can be detected by about age 37. However, accumulated knowledge skills, such as improvement of vocabulary and general knowledge, actually increase at least until the age of 60.

So you'd better hurry up and get all your good thinking done before you turn 30, at which point you'll have to go to Carousel anyway, so it won't matter what state your brain is in.

via Eurekalert

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• Massive quantities of helium were discovered leaking out of the ground in Nevada. This mysterious gas emission is even stranger because usually geologists only see this kind of thing near volcanoes. Is Nevada about to become a volcanic hellhole? [Discovery News]
• 10,000-year-old trees were discovered during a construction project on a farm in Michigan. They are among the best-preserved fossilized trees ever found, and scientsts speculate that they were crushed under the last glacier to stretch across North America. [Science Daily]
  

• A Japanese court ruled today that a grieving widow would receive compensation from Toyota because the company killed her husband with overwork. The 30-year-old man died after working 60 hours/week for a month, and then 70 hours/week for an additional month. In Japanese, there is a word for death from overwork: karōshi. [Autoblog]
  
• Scientists have just announced a "map of genetic aging" in mice. The map shows a series of genes whose behavior changes as the mice age. Since human and mouse genomes are fairly similar, researchers hope to use this map to find similar "aging genes" in humans, and perhaps tinker with those genes to reverse the aging process. [PLoS Genetics]
  
• If you're thinking of getting a genetic test, think again. Most experts say the tests are a total waste of money and tell us next to nothing. Even though there are more and more genetic tests every day, they aren't getting any more accurate or reliable. [Reuters]