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Fruit Flies

This story about fruit flies got me thinking about the contagious effect of bad news of all kinds. Lately, I have had more than my usual share of bad news about friends and family - folks of my age, people I have been close to. Apart from ongoing concern about them and wanting things to improve so we can all move on after the "false alarm" there is also a sense of foreboding - who might be next. On the bright side, it makes me want to try harder to hold on to what is good, acknowledge more regularly that those things exist. In the end what is true for fruit flies may be true for us humans too. 

Understanding more about how flies’ brains transform their physiology to accelerate the ageing process might pave the way for new treatments to slow ageing in humans, the scientists suggest. But one possibility is that all that death simply gets the flies down, and eventually becomes too much. “Given our findings,” the authors write, “it seems plausible that the sight of dead conspecifics elucidates a “depressive-like” state that results in decreased longevity.”

T and K have been best buddies for thirty years. We know them both and love how they keep each other motivated to stay fit. T has retired recently and K has a few years left to go. Recently K got ill and we hardly see T around. He seems to have lost motivation to do what is right for him without his best buddy to poke and prod him. So now instead of being concerned about the person who is ill we are worried about the effect on that illness on someone who is not. 

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