Home grown mathematician points torch towards cure for death.

Man was created by the Earth, and lives by virtue of the Air, for there is in the air a secret food of life

- 1604, a Polish Alchemist

Jeff Hajewski is a simple man. Called 'Haj' by his friends, he's a mathematician by training, a skier/runner by bent, and a romancer of the stone. Haj's expert analysis on the effects of that 'elixir of life' - oxygen -, and him directing the publics gaze to its life preserving properties (perhaps) is the lead story.

Inhale – breath out – ahh, yes air. But so shitty is the air with oxygen, only 20% of those molecules we call the air are actually o2 (boo). But going into an environment with less of it may actually lead to brain cells communicating with germ line cells to prevent cell death – another support for that mystery of mysteries in which the brain is a phantom which constantly watches out for us while we are ‘along for the ride – unaware’.

Fun:The man who coined the name Oxygen was a gentlemen by the name of Lavoisier - he was beheaded in 1796. He was a part of the ruling class prior to the french revolution, made enemies, and was accused of "watering the soldiers tobacco"

Mechanism:Poetic contemplations aside, a study was performed on the famous c elegans (“cheap date” as an old professor called it, only because it’s very sensitive to alcohol) –basically if you took a c elegans worm, then put radiation on it, nerve cell jelly would come to life and some how start transcription factor proteins to dance near cells in the c elegans tum tum (really its germ line cells) – and basically these guys would stop another transcription complex from starting the destruction of these cells.

an image of a general overview article with the diagram of how the process works

Relation to death? One of the big riddles for why everything is collapsing in front of us (6 billion people will die in the next 100 years) is that the atom oxygen is susceptible to these types of 'redox' reactions - somehow or other it can easily steal electrons from neighboring atoms, causing them to become themselves electron hungry. This is a theory for why the body degrades with time (along with the 'shortening telemores idea' and also the 'insulin pathway' idea)

See for more mysteries:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7298/full/465554a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7298/edsumm/e100603-03.html