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There is just one secret to living beyond 100 years, says 101-year-old doc, and no, it is not food or managing stress

The world is full of tips and tricks on how to live longer—some say it’s about eating clean, others swear by cutting stress. But when someone who has crossed the 100-year mark speaks, the world listens. Dr John Scharffenberg, a preventive medicine specialist who lived a rich and active life into his 100s, offered a perspective that turns many popular beliefs on their head.

His message was simple, sincere, and backed by years of real-life observation. The secret, he said, isn’t food or relaxation—it’s something far more practical and often overlooked.

Triple equivalence for the emergence of biological intelligence

Characterizing the intelligence of biological organisms is challenging yet crucial. This paper demonstrates the capacity of canonical neural networks to autonomously generate diverse intelligent algorithms by leveraging an equivalence between concepts from three areas of cognitive computation: neural network-based dynamical systems, statistical inference, and Turing machines.

Human Brains Take Longer to Wire Up Than Simian Ones

Human brains make synaptic connections throughout much of childhood, and the brain’s plasticity enables humans to slowly wire them based upon experiences, contrary to how chimpanzees develop. Humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of the same genes, but scientists have been looking for what drives the unique cognitive and social skills of humans.

A new study, which was published today in Genome Research, that examined brain samples from humans, chimpanzees, and macaques, collected from birth up to the end of their life span, has found some key differences between the expression of genes that control the development and function of synapses, which are the connections between neurons through which information flows.

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