173 Fun Facts About Aging & Elderly

By United Nations estimates, about how many people aged 100 or older were alive worldwide in 2020?

About 600,000. The UN's 573,000 for 2020 keeps climbing as more people survive into their nineties: its 2024 figure was 722,000, and it projects nearly four million by 2054.

What is a person who has lived to the age of 110 or beyond called?

Supercentenarian. So few people reach 110, and so many claims to great age prove unreliable, that researchers check each case against birth and other records before accepting it.

Who, in a 1922 tale, is born looking like an old man and grows younger every year?

Benjamin Button: F. Scott Fitzgerald said his 1922 story grew from a remark of Mark Twain's that it was a pity the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst at the end.

Falling levels of which hormone are thought to help explain why older adults often sleep more lightly?

Melatonin. The pineal gland releases it in darkness to set the body clock, and it makes less with age, which may play a part in older people's broken sleep.

Which protein, the most abundant in the human body, is made more slowly with age, leaving skin wrinkled and sagging?

Collagen. It makes up about 30% of the body's protein, and smoking cuts its production as well, which is one reason smokers' skin tends to wrinkle sooner.

Which painter did Jeanne Calment, the oldest person ever verified, say she met as a girl in a family shop in Arles?

Vincent van Gogh. She was 13 when he moved to Arles in 1888, and a century later she told reporters he had been ugly, bad-tempered and reeking of drink.

At 90, Jeanne Calment sold her flat to a lawyer for a monthly payment for life; how did the deal end?

He died first. André-François Raffray paid for 30 years and died in 1995, two years before her, so his family had to keep paying; in all she received more than twice the flat's value.

What did Jeanne Calment, the oldest person ever verified, do in 1985, at about the age of 110?

Moved into a nursing home. She had lived on her own until then, was still walking unaided at 114, and recorded her rap CD, Time's Mistress, about a decade after moving in.

What reportedly killed the husband of Jeanne Calment, the oldest person ever verified, in 1942?

Cherry poisoning. Fernand Calment, 73, is said to have been poisoned by spoiled cherries, and his widow went on to outlive him by 55 years.

According to a disputed 2018 theory, who took over Jeanne Calment's identity when the real Jeanne died in 1934?

Her daughter Yvonne, the theory ran, which would have made the woman who died in 1997 only 99. The researchers who validated her age answered with the original records and said the claim fell short of scientific standards.

Jiroemon Kimura of Japan, who died in 2013 aged 116, holds which verified record?

Oldest man ever. He outlived every other man of his era: by his 116th birthday he was the last man alive who had been born in the 1800s.

Which habit did Japan's Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, credit for his long life?

Eating small portions. He kept his helpings modest, got up early and read the newspapers every day with a magnifying glass.

In Oscar Wilde's novel, what grows old and ugly in place of the ever-youthful Dorian Gray?

His portrait. Dorian wishes aloud that the painting would age instead of him and offers his soul for it, and the canvas goes on to record every year and every sin while his face stays young.

Which honour did Kane Tanaka, then the world's oldest person at 118, give up in 2021 over fears of COVID-19?

Carrying the Olympic torch. She had been due to take a leg of the Tokyo relay in Fukuoka, but she and her family feared bringing the virus into her nursing home.

Which disease, first described in 1817 as 'the shaking palsy', usually begins after the age of 60?

Parkinson's disease. It is named after James Parkinson, the London doctor who wrote that essay, and its tremor and stiffness set in as brain cells that make dopamine die off.

Which member of the British royal family died in 2002 at the age of 101?

The Queen Mother. She died at Windsor with Elizabeth II at her bedside, only seven weeks after losing her younger child, Princess Margaret, who was 71.

Sarah Knauss, then the world's oldest person, died aged 119 just 33 hours short of seeing what?

The year 2000. She died on 30 December 1999, a day and a half short of it, but lived to see six generations of her family alive at once, down to a great-great-great-grandson.

In which US city was Maria Branyas, the world's oldest person until 2024, born?

San Francisco. Her Spanish parents had reached the United States only the year before and the family sailed for Spain in 1915, so the Spaniard who became the world's oldest person was American by birth.

In which country was Ethel Caterham living when she became the world's oldest living person in 2025?

United Kingdom. Born in Hampshire in August 1909, nine months before Edward VII died, she ended up as the last surviving subject of his reign.

Which card game did Ethel Caterham, who became the world's oldest living person in 2025, keep playing past 100?

Bridge. She was still playing in her hundreds, stayed behind the wheel of her car until she was 97, and at 110 caught COVID-19 and recovered.

Dutchman Geert Boomgaard, who was born in 1788 and lived to 110, is said to have soldiered in whose army?

Napoleon's. Records list the Groningen boatman in the Dutch-recruited 33rd Light Infantry of the Grande Armée, and when he died in 1899 he was among the very last of its veterans.

Which part of the brain, vital for forming new memories, is among the first areas damaged in Alzheimer's disease?

Hippocampus. Because the damage starts there, trouble holding on to new memories is usually among the first signs, before language and reasoning are affected.

Captain Tom Moore, aged 99, raised over £30 million for Britain's health service in 2020 by doing what?

Walking laps of his garden. He set out to raise £1,000 with 100 lengths before his 100th birthday; donations passed £30 million instead, and he was knighted that summer.

Which organisation, founded in Los Angeles in 1990, checks the ages of people who claim to be 110 or older?

Gerontology Research Group. Its researchers test each claim against birth and other records, and its list of the world's oldest people became the one Guinness World Records relied on.

A study finding that many centenarian counts are inflated by pension fraud won which award in 2024?

Ig Nobel Prize. Saul Justin Newman took the 2024 Demography award for showing that places famed for very long lives tend to be places with poor birth records and pension fraud.

What was the term 'blue zone' originally derived from?

Researchers' pen colour on a survey map. Demographers charting Sardinian villages with unusual numbers of centenarians marked them on the map in blue pen, and the nickname stuck.

Which Costa Rican region is one of the suggested blue zones?

Nicoya Peninsula. Its elderly men once clearly outlived other Costa Ricans, but a 2023 study found the edge had vanished among those born after 1930.

Which Greek island is counted among the suggested blue zones?

Icaria. It was one of the places added after the first zone in Sardinia, though critics say the idea leans on age records too unreliable to prove anything.

Which writer popularised blue zones in a 2005 National Geographic cover story and later built a company on them?

Dan Buettner. Two demographers had coined the name for a patch of Sardinia; his magazine story and books spread it, and Adventist Health bought his Blue Zones company in 2020.

Which Californian city, home to a large Seventh-day Adventist community, is counted among the blue zones?

Loma Linda. Its long lives are usually put down to its many Adventists and their healthy habits, though sceptics note that richer people tend to live longer anywhere.

Which painful rash, caused by the chickenpox virus waking up again in the body, is most common after the age of 50?

Shingles. The virus hides in nerve cells for decades after childhood chickenpox and returns in about one adult in three, which is why a vaccine is advised from the age of 50.

Normal human cells stop dividing after about how many divisions in a laboratory culture?

About 50, give or take ten. Leonard Hayflick found in 1961 that normal cells in a dish then stop dividing, and took it as a sign that ageing reaches down to the single cell.

Who wrote 'Do not go gentle into that good night', the poem urging the old to fight against dying?

Dylan Thomas. The poem's last verse turns to a dying father, but the poet never reached old age himself: he died in New York in 1953, aged 39.

What does the prostate gland typically do as men get older?

It keeps growing. The gland wraps around the urethra, the tube that carries urine out of the bladder, so as it slowly enlarges it can squeeze that tube and make passing urine harder.

Which Shakespeare play opens with an ageing king planning to divide Britain among his three daughters?

King Lear. He rewards the two daughters who flatter him and disowns honest Cordelia, only for the favoured pair to strip him of his followers and shut him out in a storm.

What are the protective repetitive DNA regions at the ends of chromosomes called?

Telomeres. They get a little shorter every time a cell divides, and once they are too short the cell can no longer divide at all, a countdown tied to ageing.

Which hormone do the ovaries make far less of at the menopause, bringing on symptoms such as hot flushes?

Oestrogen. Low levels also weaken bone, so women can lose bone mass quickly for several years around the menopause before the loss slows down.

People over 70 are advised to get more of which vitamin, because it helps the body absorb calcium?

Vitamin D. Older people often run short of it, which weakens their bones, so the recommended daily amount goes up from 600 to 800 IU after 70.

In Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, a faulty protein destabilises which part of the body's cells?

The nucleus. A single-letter change in the LMNA gene spoils lamin A, the scaffolding that holds the nucleus in shape, and cells with a buckled nucleus age and die early.

Children with progeria usually die in their teens from which condition more typical of old age?

Heart attack or stroke. Their arteries harden from early childhood, so most die in their teens of the same artery disease that normally strikes in old age.

Jessica Tandy became the oldest Best Actress Oscar winner, at 80, for which 1989 film?

Driving Miss Daisy. Four decades earlier she had created Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, only to see the film role go to Vivien Leigh.

Nobel laureate Ilya Mechnikov, a pioneer in the study of ageing, proposed which fermented food to hold off old age?

Sour milk. He blamed senility on poisons made by gut bacteria and argued that the lactic-acid microbes in fermented milk would keep them down, a diet that became a craze for a time.

Which medical specialty is devoted to treating illness in older adults?

Geriatrics. It took shape after Marjory Warren showed in 1930s London that bedridden patients written off as chronic cases could often be treated and sent home.

Which Japanese word, roughly 'a reason for being', is often credited with keeping the country's oldest villagers active?

Ikigai. It can be a craft, a field or grandchildren, whatever gets a person up in the morning, as with villagers still farming and weaving in their nineties and beyond.

Age-related hearing loss usually begins with trouble hearing which kind of sound?

High-pitched sounds. That is why the voices of children are often the first to become hard to follow; about one in three Americans aged 65 to 74 has some hearing loss.

Robert Butler, the psychiatrist who coined the word 'ageism', won which prize in 1976 for a book on growing old in America?

Pulitzer Prize. He also introduced 'life review', the idea that looking back over one's life in old age is healthy and can be used as a form of therapy.

Which federal body did psychiatrist Robert Butler lead as its first director in the 1970s?

National Institute on Aging. As its founding director he made research into Alzheimer's disease a national priority before leaving for Mount Sinai medical centre in New York.

Which US federal programme, created in 1965, insures mainly people aged 65 and over?

Medicare. It was signed into law in front of 81-year-old Harry Truman, who had asked Congress for national health insurance twenty years earlier and seen the plan defeated.

Which 1726 satire features the Struldbrugs, immortals who never stop growing older?

Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver envies the Struldbrugs until he learns that they keep on ageing for ever, and that at eighty they are treated as dead in law and lose their property.

Which chancellor brought in Germany's first state old-age pension, payable from the age of 70?

Otto von Bismarck. His 1889 scheme paid a pension only from 70; German workers were not given it at 65 until the First World War, long after he had left office.

As people grow older their arteries tend to stiffen, which typically pushes up what?

Blood pressure. It can creep up even in people with healthy habits who feel perfectly well, which is why high blood pressure is nicknamed the silent killer.

Which fast-food founder sold his roadside restaurant at 65 and took to the road to franchise his recipe?

Colonel Sanders. He sold his restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky, in 1956 and spent his late sixties driving from town to town signing up franchisees, then sold the whole company in 1964.

Despite their name, the flat brown 'liver spots' of later life are mainly caused by years of exposure to what?

Sunlight. The spots have nothing to do with the liver, and they turn up on the face, hands and arms because that is the skin the sun reaches most.

Which US president signed the Social Security Act in August 1935?

Franklin D. Roosevelt: unlike many European schemes paid for straight from government funds, his old-age pensions were financed by contributions from workers' wages and their employers' payrolls.

Which Washington Irving character dozes off in the Catskill Mountains and wakes twenty years later as an old man?

Rip Van Winkle. He wakes with a foot-long grey beard, having slept through the American Revolution: the inn sign that once showed King George now reads General Washington.

What does the acronym AARP originally stand for?

American Association of Retired Persons. It later dropped the words and kept only the initials, because many of its members are still at work and not retired at all.

Which Beatle wrote the tune of 'When I'm Sixty-Four', a song looking ahead to old age, as a teenager?

Paul McCartney. The Beatles finally recorded it in 1966, the year his father turned 64, then sped up the tape to make his voice sound younger.

Where did AARP's founder, Ethel Percy Andrus, find a retired teacher living, a discovery that spurred her to act?

In a chicken coop. The former Spanish teacher's pension could not cover a proper home or a doctor, and Andrus went on to win group health insurance for retired teachers.

In Pixar's Up, what was elderly widower Carl Fredricksen's job before he retired?

Balloon salesman. That is how he comes to lift his whole house into the sky under thousands of balloons, bound for the South American falls he had promised his late wife they would see.

Which income source earned AARP about three times as much as its membership dues in 2018?

Royalties for use of its name and logo. Insurers and other firms pay AARP to put its brand on the health plans and other products they sell to its members.

Which US president signed the Older Americans Act in July 1965?

Lyndon B. Johnson: he signed it on 14 July 1965 as part of his Great Society, and it went on to fund services for older people such as meals served in groups or delivered to the door.

Which mountain did Japan's Yuichiro Miura climb in 2013 at the age of 80, the oldest person then to reach its summit?

Mount Everest. It was his third time on top, after climbs at 70 and 75, and on the way down he was flown out by helicopter from Camp 2 instead of walking to the bottom.

Japan's Respect for the Aged Day sometimes lines up with other holidays into which long break, named to echo Golden Week?

Silver Week comes round only in some years, when the Monday holiday lands two days before the autumn equinox and Japanese law turns the day caught between them into a holiday as well.

What gift does the Japanese government give citizens who reach 100?

Japan gives new centenarians a silver sakazuki sake cup with a letter from the prime minister; as numbers soared the cups were later made silver-plated rather than solid silver to cut costs.

Which US president signed the proclamation creating National Grandparents Day in the late 1970s?

Jimmy Carter signed the 1978 proclamation making the Sunday after Labor Day National Grandparents Day, after a campaign by West Virginia housewife Marian McQuade.

Which country's Grandmothers' Day was launched in 1987 by a coffee brand called Café Grand'Mère?

France: the brand, from the northern town of Roubaix, set up an association to promote the day, and the first Sunday in March now appears in French calendars.

Americans aged 62 or over can buy a lifetime pass to which of these?

National parks: the Senior Pass admits not only its holder but everyone in the same car at sites that charge per vehicle, so one pass can take a whole family in.

Who was the first sitting US senator to reach 100, in December 2002?

Strom Thurmond of South Carolina turned 100 weeks before retiring; at his birthday party Trent Lott praised Thurmond's 1948 segregationist run for president, and the uproar cost Lott his post as Senate Republican leader.

Which Today show weatherman started the tradition of honouring centenarians on air in 1983?

Willard Scott began the salutes in 1983 after a viewer wrote in asking him to wish a relative a happy 100th birthday on air; requests poured in, and Smucker's later put each centenarian's picture on a jam-jar label.

Which traditional Polish birthday song wishes the recipient a hundred years?

Sto lat, 'a hundred years', does more work than Happy Birthday: Poles also sing it at name days, weddings, anniversaries and even state ceremonies, wherever someone is being wished a long life.

The Jewish blessing 'until 120' wishes a person the lifespan the Torah gives to which figure?

Moses dies at 120 in Deuteronomy with his eyes undimmed and his strength intact, so the blessing wishes a long life in full health; Genesis also names 120 years as the limit of a human life.

What do Irish centenarians receive with a letter from Ireland's president?

A cash bounty payment of €2,540, the Centenarian Bounty, comes with the president's letter; every birthday after that brings another letter and a commemorative coin, newly designed each year.

The British monarch's first wedding-anniversary card marks 60 years of marriage, known as which anniversary?

Diamond: more cards follow at 65 and 70 years and every year after, but someone has to apply for them, whereas 100th-birthday cards go out automatically from pension records.

As of 2025, roughly what is the ratio of women to men among Japan's centenarians?

7 women to 1 man: women were 88% of Japan's nearly 100,000 centenarians in September 2025, a group that has grown every year for more than half a century from just 153 people in 1963.

Who solved the Sphinx's riddle about a creature with four legs, then two, then three?

Oedipus answered 'man', who crawls as an infant, walks upright as an adult and leans on a stick in old age; in the best-known telling the beaten Sphinx then threw herself to her death.

What made US life expectancy fall about 12 years in 1918?

Influenza: the 1918 pandemic is estimated to have killed more people worldwide than the First World War, which is why the average fell so far so fast.

Which English scientist drew up one of the first life tables in 1693, relating the risk of death to age?

Edmond Halley, better known for his comet, used the records of the city of Breslau to work out the odds of dying at each age, and his table went on to shape the pricing of life insurance.

As of 2023, which European microstate had an even higher share of over-65s than Japan?

Monaco: about 36% of its residents were 65 or over against Japan's 30%; the principality levies no income tax, draws wealthy settlers and has one of the world's longest life expectancies.

The CDC credits most of America's 30-year gain in 20th-century lifespan to which field?

Public health: the CDC puts 25 of the 30 years down to it, and its list of the century's ten great achievements runs from vaccination and safer food to family planning and fluoride in drinking water.

Studies of which relatives suggest genes explain only about a quarter of variation in human lifespan?

Twins: comparing identical pairs with fraternal ones separates genes from upbringing, and a study of 2,872 Danish pairs put the genetic share at about a quarter, leaving most of lifespan to habits, surroundings and chance.

Which social factor did a 2010 review of 148 studies find to be as big a risk for early death as smoking?

Loneliness, in the broad sense of weak social ties: people with strong relationships were 50% more likely to survive, and lead author Julianne Holt-Lunstad later edited the US Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness.

Which vitamin do some people over 50 struggle to absorb from food, so that fortified cereals or supplements are advised?

Vitamin B12: the form found naturally in meat, fish and poultry gets harder to absorb with age, and a serious shortfall can damage nerve cells and cause memory loss.

Which short-lived worm had its lifespan doubled by a single gene change in a landmark 1993 ageing experiment?

C. elegans, a 1 mm soil worm that normally lives two to three weeks, lived more than twice as long in Cynthia Kenyon's experiment on the gene daf-2, part of the first pathway found to control the rate of ageing.

Which mental ability typically keeps improving until people are in their sixties or even seventies?

Vocabulary: older adults know more words, and more shades of their meaning, than younger ones, and in a large 2015 study word knowledge did not peak until the late sixties or early seventies.

The phrase 'long in the tooth', meaning old, alludes to the ageing of which animals?

Horses: their teeth look longer as the years go by, and a horse's age can be judged from its mouth, the same habit behind the warning not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Which of the first four women on the US Supreme Court revealed in a 2018 open letter that she had dementia?

Sandra Day O'Connor, the first of the four, wrote that she was withdrawing from public life and urged others to carry on her long campaign for better civics teaching.

A bone-density T-score of −2.5 or lower points to which condition?

Osteoporosis: the T-score compares bone density with a healthy young adult's, and a score between −1 and −2.5 is the milder osteopenia; it is called a silent disease because the first sign is often a broken bone.

What is the age-related loss of ability to focus on close objects called?

Presbyopia, from the Greek for 'old man' and 'eye', arrives for nearly everyone after about 45 as the lens hardens and stops flexing, which is why people start holding menus at arm's length.

What is the age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength called?

Sarcopenia can be slowed even very late: in a 1990 Boston study, frail care-home residents aged about 90 raised their leg strength by an average of 174% after eight weeks of weight training.

By age 80, more than half of Americans have had or have what eye condition?

A cataract is a cloudy patch in the eye's lens that slowly blurs vision and fades colours; surgeons treat it by removing the clouded lens and putting a clear artificial one in its place.

What causes hair to turn grey as people age?

A lack of melanin pigment: ageing follicles make less and less of it, and the colourless hairs that result only look grey or white because of the way they reflect light.

The supposed overnight whitening of a person's hair is nicknamed after which doomed queen?

Marie Antoinette's hair is said to have turned white overnight, after her capture in one telling and on the eve of the guillotine in another; one suggested cause is alopecia areata, which sheds the dark hairs and leaves the white ones.

What is the leading cause of injury, fatal and non-fatal, among Americans aged 65 and over?

Falls: more than one in four over-65s falls each year, and the fear of another often makes people move less, which weakens them and makes the next fall more likely.

People shrink about half an inch a decade after 40 as which cushions dry out and flatten?

Spinal discs: as they lose fluid and thin, the trunk shortens while the arms and legs stay the same length, which is why older people's limbs can look long for their bodies.

Adults caring for ageing parents while still raising their own children are nicknamed which generation?

The sandwich generation is squeezed from both sides, and its burdens have grown as parents live longer and grown-up children take longer to become independent.

Which state beat retiree-heavy Florida to the highest median age in the 2020 census?

Maine: half its residents were over 45, and it even had a larger share of over-65s than Florida, 21.8% against 21.2%; Florida's median age ranked only fifth among the states.

In which Canadian city did Fauja Singh finish a marathon at a reported age of 100?

Toronto: he finished its Waterfront Marathon in 2011 in a little over eight hours, having only taken up competitive running at 89, and retired from racing two years later.

Which Arizona retirement town did developer Del Webb open in 1960, landing him on the cover of Time?

Sun City opened on New Year's Day 1960 and drew about 100,000 visitors in its first weekend, ten times the forecast; Del Webb's company went on to build copies across the Sun Belt.

Which nickname is given to people over 80 who keep the cognitive performance of someone much younger?

Superagers' brains look different too: Northwestern scans found their cortex as thick as that of people in their fifties and sixties, with one region tied to attention, the anterior cingulate, thicker still.

What kind of sea creature is the 'immortal' Turritopsis dohrnii, whose adult can revert to a juvenile polyp?

Jellyfish: when starved or injured, the tiny adult shrinks into a blob, settles on the seabed and regrows as a polyp that buds new jellyfish, though in the sea many are simply eaten first.

Which tortoise on St Helena, hatched around 1832, became the oldest known living land animal?

Jonathan's age is an estimate: he arrived on St Helena from the Seychelles in 1882 already fully grown, so at least 50, and a photograph from the 1880s shows him at full size in the governor's garden.

Which Arctic species is the longest-lived vertebrate known, with lifespans estimated at 250 to 500 years?

Greenland shark: its age was read in 2016 by radiocarbon-dating the lens of the eye; the oldest of the sharks tested was put at about 392 years, and the species may not breed until around 150.

Which Arctic mammal may be the longest-lived of all, reaching more than 200 years?

Bowhead whale: old stone harpoon points recovered from landed whales were the first clue that they can outlive their hunters, and later dating put one male at about 211 years.

Which rodent can live for more than 30 years, longer than any other?

Naked mole-rat: mouse-sized yet able to pass 30, and unlike every other mammal studied its risk of dying does not climb as it gets older, so by that measure it hardly ages at all.

What kind of tree is Methuselah, a living Californian specimen more than 4,600 years old?

Bristlecone pine: Methuselah's exact spot in California's White Mountains was long kept secret; an even older one in Nevada, Prometheus, was cut down in 1964 and found to have at least 4,862 rings.

In Genesis, Methuselah, who dies at 969, is the grandfather of which famous figure?

Noah was the son of Methuselah's son Lamech, and by the Hebrew text's own sums Methuselah, the longest-lived person in the Bible, dies in the very year of the Flood.

The immunosuppressant rapamycin, studied for its anti-ageing effects, is named after which place?

Easter Island, Rapa Nui to its people, gave rapamycin its name: the drug comes from a bacterium in a soil sample collected there, and it was developed as an antifungal before its effect on the immune system was noticed.

Which dietary intervention did Cornell's Clive McCay show could lengthen the lives of laboratory rats in the 1930s?

Caloric restriction, far fewer calories with full nutrition, stretched rodents' lives by up to 40%, but in monkeys the verdict is split: a Wisconsin study found they lived longer, a parallel US government one did not.

Which American founding father is credited with inventing bifocals, the split-lens glasses many people need as they age?

Benjamin Franklin sketched the design in a 1785 letter and said the glasses helped at dinner abroad: he could see his food and still watch the speakers' faces, which made a foreign language easier to follow.

Which ancient Greek writer told of a spring that gave an African people long life, an early fountain-of-youth tale?

Herodotus tells how spies sent by the Persian king Cambyses were shown a violet-scented spring whose water was too thin for wood to float on, to which the 'long-lived Ethiopians' owed their great age.

In 2022 a US expert panel advised against healthy over-60s starting a daily low dose of which painkiller?

Aspirin: the panel judged that for people of 60 and over with no cardiovascular disease the bleeding it can cause cancels out the benefit, and a large trial in older adults found it brought no extra years of healthy life.

Which generation began turning 65 in 2011, at a rate of about 10,000 Americans a day?

Baby boomers were born from 1946 to 1964, so the wave that began on New Year's Day 2011 lasts for 19 years, until the youngest of them reach 65.

The 401(k) retirement plan takes its name from what?

A tax-code section: subsection (k) of section 401 was added in 1978, and savings plans built on it have since largely taken the place of the guaranteed company pension.

After how many years of active duty can members of the US armed forces retire with a pension?

20 years: a recruit who enlists at 18 can draw a pension at 38, worth half of base pay under the classic formula of 2.5% for each year served.

David Snowdon's landmark study of ageing and Alzheimer's disease followed which group of American women into old age?

Catholic nuns: the sisters agreed to memory tests and to brain examination after death, and essays they had written at about 22 turned out to predict who would develop Alzheimer's some six decades later.

Despite the legend of wooden teeth, George Washington's dentures were carved mainly from which material?

Ivory, from hippopotamus and possibly elephant, was set with human and animal teeth on metal springs; no wood was ever used, and the legend may have grown because the ivory stained until it looked like wood.

Which ancient Italian people made partial dentures from human or animal teeth bound with gold bands?

Etruscans made dental bridgework in gold: bands of the metal held replacement human or animal teeth in place, a craft the Romans are thought to have borrowed from them.

Which folk artist began painting in earnest at 78 and made the cover of Time in 1953?

Grandma Moses, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, had embroidered pictures in yarn until arthritis made her switch to paint; she lived to 101.

Who became the oldest Nobel laureate ever at 97, sharing the 2019 Chemistry prize for lithium-ion battery work?

John B. Goodenough was in his late fifties when his cobalt-oxide cathode raised the lithium battery to four volts in 1980; Akira Yoshino built the first commercial lithium-ion cell on it, and the Nobel came almost four decades later.

Which Canadian actor became the oldest Oscar acting winner at 82, for Beginners?

Christopher Plummer earned one more nomination, at 88, as a last-minute stand-in, reshooting Kevin Spacey's finished scenes in All the Money in the World in about a week; Anthony Hopkins took his record at 83.

Denham Harman proposed in the 1950s that ageing results from cell damage caused by what?

Free radicals are the culprits in Harman's theory, yet the obvious test has gone badly: pooled trials of antioxidant pills found no longer life, and beta carotene, vitamin A and vitamin E may even shorten it.

In James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, people age extraordinarily slowly in which hidden mountain paradise?

Shangri-La slows its residents' ageing so that they live far beyond a normal span, but the gift does not travel: anyone who leaves its valley ages quickly and dies.

Which class of experimental drugs, many repurposed anti-cancer molecules, aims to selectively kill senescent cells?

Senolytics, from 'senescence' and '-lytic', destroying, clear out worn-out cells that refuse to die; in one Mayo Clinic study, old mice given a senolytic pair survived 36% longer than untreated ones.

In which pet species do the largest breeds live shorter lives than the smallest and reach old age years sooner?

Dogs of giant breeds such as Great Danes count as elderly at about seven, small terriers not until about eleven, and bigger breeds show more oxidative DNA damage even as puppies.

Which Chinese martial art has been shown to improve balance and stability in older adults, keeping them independent?

Tai chi is practised slowly partly to build awareness of the body, and in 2020 UNESCO added it to the list of humanity's intangible cultural heritage.

Psychiatrist Robert Butler coined the word 'ageism' in 1969 by building on the terms racism and which other 'ism'?

Sexism and racism were Butler's models for a word naming prejudice against the old, which he defined as negative attitudes, discriminatory practices and the institutions that keep stereotypes alive.

The United Nations declared 2021 to 2030 the Decade of Healthy Ageing and asked which of its agencies to lead it?

WHO leads the decade's work in four areas, and the first on the list is not medical at all: changing how people think, feel and act towards age and ageism.

About two-thirds of people over 85 never develop which condition, often wrongly seen as an inevitable part of ageing?

Dementia affects about one-third of people over 85, so most never get it; occasionally forgetting an appointment or losing your keys is ordinary forgetfulness rather than a warning sign.

Which Spanish explorer does legend, but no record from his lifetime, send to Florida to seek the Fountain of Youth?

Juan Ponce de León's royal contract dealt with gold and new lands and never mentioned a rejuvenating spring; the tale was attached to him only after his death, and most historians call it a myth.

Which cloned farm animal was put down at six, half the usual lifespan, stirring fears that clones age prematurely?

A sheep named Dolly developed arthritis at four and was euthanised with lung disease in 2003, but four clones from the same cell line were alive and healthy at nine, easing the fear.

Which of these common beliefs about older adults is a myth, according to US federal health guidance on ageing?

'They need less sleep' is the myth: older adults still need seven to nine hours a night, the same as other adults, even though the quality of that sleep often declines with age.

Resveratrol, a compound studied for possible anti-ageing effects, is extracted from grape skins as which drink ferments?

Red wine ferments with the grape skins, which is how the compound gets in; GlaxoSmithKline paid $720 million in 2008 for a firm built on resveratrol, then shut it down without a successful drug.

Which condition, wrongly thought a normal part of old age, do some studies find rarer in older adults than young ones?

Depression is not a normal part of ageing, and older adults may be less likely to experience it than young adults, though their symptoms can be less obvious and so go unnoticed.

A 2021 study in Science overturned the belief that what slows in middle age, finding it steady from 20 to 60?

Metabolism stays stable through our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s and only starts to decline after 60, so it is not what thickens middle-aged waistlines; pound for pound, infants burn energy fastest of all.

China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, may have been poisoned by immortality elixirs containing which toxic metal?

Mercury may have killed the emperor at 49, fed to him by court alchemists in his quest to live forever; probes pushed deep into his tomb have found abnormally high levels of it.

In Greek myth, which Trojan prince was granted immortality without eternal youth and withered endlessly with age?

Tithonus was loved by the dawn goddess Eos; in the best-known telling she asked Zeus to make him immortal but forgot to ask for agelessness, and later versions have him shrivel into a cicada.

'Old Tom Parr', an Englishman said to have lived to 152, was buried in 1635 on the king's orders in which church?

Westminster Abbey received Parr weeks after he was brought to London to meet Charles I as a curiosity; his birth record may have been confused with that of a grandfather of the same name.

Which sea creature is wrongly called immortal for barely seeming to age, yet dies of exhaustion while moulting?

Lobsters keep growing and may not weaken or lose fertility with age, but each moult takes more energy, until an old animal dies of exhaustion or its worn-out shell gives way.

At which North Carolina campus did Erdman Palmore devise the Facts on Aging Quiz, a 1970s test of ageing myths?

Duke University sociologist Palmore wrote the quiz to grab his students' attention on the first day of class, and it went on to be used in more than 90 studies of what people believe about growing old.

Which activist group did Maggie Kuhn found in 1970 after being forced to retire from a church job at 65?

Gray Panthers took their name as a nod to the Black Panthers and campaigned alongside the young; Johnny Carson once introduced Kuhn on air as a Black Panther by mistake.

Which 1976 science-fiction film imagines a domed city whose citizens are all put to death when they reach 30?

Logan's Run set the cut-off at 30, but the novel it adapts kills people at just 21; the screenwriter raised the age so that more actors could be considered for the leads.

Under a 1970 rule from Paul VI, Catholic cardinals lose which right when they reach the age of 80?

Electing a new pope became off limits overnight for 25 cardinals when the rule took effect in 1971; one of them, Alfredo Ottaviani, called it contempt for a centuries-old tradition.

Which US profession saw the mandatory retirement age raised from 60 to 65 by a 2007 act of Congress?

Airline pilots are an exception: forced retirement has been generally unlawful in the United States since 1986, except in a few regulated jobs said to demand unusual physical and mental skill.

In 2018 Dutch television personality Emile Ratelband, then 69, went to court in Arnhem seeking to do what?

Ratelband asked the court to lower his legal age by 20 years, arguing that people can already change their name and gender; the judges turned him down within weeks.

Which French existentialist philosopher wrote The Coming of Age, a 1970 book calling for a new understanding of old age?

Simone de Beauvoir built the book on the plan of The Second Sex, surveying biology, culture and history, and scholars now call her the godmother of age studies.

Which word describes rule by leaders far older than most citizens, as in the Soviet Union of the early 1980s?

Gerontocracy peaked in Moscow around 1980, when the average Politburo member was 70; three Soviet leaders then died in under three years before the younger Mikhail Gorbachev took over.

Miriam O'Reilly won a 2011 age-discrimination case against which broadcaster after it dropped her from Countryfile?

BBC bosses lost the case and O'Reilly was back presenting for the corporation within months; she later said dozens of older women presenters had their careers saved by her legal action.

One theory of ageing blames damage in which cell structures, descended from bacteria and carrying their own DNA?

Mitochondria sit right beside the reactive by-products of their own energy production, so their DNA is especially prone to damage, and mutations in it increase with age in the body's tissues.

In parabiosis experiments, old mice regained youthful function when surgically joined to young mice to share what?

Sharing their blood supply with a young partner reversed some age-related decline in an old mouse's brain, liver, heart and muscle, while the young mouse often showed signs of faster ageing.

Which immune organ behind the breastbone starts shrinking around puberty and is gradually replaced by fatty tissue?

Thymus tissue is where T cells mature, and the T in their name honours the organ; it peaks at up to 50 grams at puberty and then dwindles in a process called involution.

Yoshinori Ohsumi won a 2016 Nobel Prize for explaining which cellular clean-up process, thought to falter as we age?

Autophagy, from the Greek for self-devouring, breaks down damaged cell parts, and too little of it is thought to be a main reason damaged cells pile up with age; Ohsumi found its genes in yeast.

Shinya Yamanaka shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for showing that four genes can reprogram mature adult tissue into what?

Stem cells made this way behave like those of an early embryo, and researchers have since reported that old human cells given the same four factors might become nearly indistinguishable from young ones.

Which theory of ageing, developed by George Williams in 1957, holds that genes helpful in youth do harm late in life?

Antagonistic pleiotropy explains why evolution keeps such genes: natural selection weakens once reproduction tails off, so a gene that lifts early fertility survives even if it brings harm later.

Which inherited disorder, also known as adult progeria, brings grey hair and wrinkles to people in their early twenties?

Werner syndrome sufferers usually grow normally until puberty and then miss the teenage growth spurt; the disorder is named after Otto Werner, who described it in his 1904 dissertation.

Which university has tracked its students of the 1940s, John F. Kennedy among them, to see what predicts healthy ageing?

Harvard's study, begun in 1938, found that men who were thriving in their relationships at 50 were physically healthier at 80, while alcohol and cigarettes did the most to bring early illness and death.

Which Massachusetts town gave its name to a heart study that has followed residents and their descendants since 1948?

Framingham's study gave medicine the term 'risk factor'; the town was chosen over Paintsville, Kentucky, and the first volunteers' children and grandchildren later signed up too.

Which food, rather than rice, was the traditional staple on Japan's Okinawa islands, famed for long-lived residents?

Sweet potato supplied about 69% of the calories Okinawans ate around 1950, when they consumed less than half the rice of other Japanese; the tuber has since given way to rice and bread.

Mountain villages on which Italian island became the first proposed blue zone, noted for unusually long-lived men?

Sardinia's Nuoro province came first, in a study of 14 mountain villages where locally born men seemed to outlive other islanders, though no reason for the apparent longevity was established.

Which brain-training app's maker settled with US regulators in 2016 over claims its games could ward off memory loss?

Lumosity's maker agreed a $50 million settlement, cut to $2 million once its finances were checked, after regulators said the ads preyed on fears of age-related decline without scientific evidence.

The MIND diet, devised to slow cognitive decline, singles out which fruit for at least two servings a week?

Berries are the only fruit on the MIND diet's list of recommended foods; the plan blends the Mediterranean diet with DASH, an eating pattern originally designed to curb hypertension.

What is the medical term for regularly taking five or more medicines, a common source of harm among older patients?

Polypharmacy has no standard definition, though five medicines is the usual threshold; those most at risk include elderly people and anyone whose prescriptions come from several doctors and pharmacies.

In 2022 the FDA cleared which devices for sale over the counter, with no medical exam or prescription needed?

Hearing aids for mild to moderate loss can now be bought in shops or online and adjusted by the wearer, a change Congress set in motion with a 2017 law meant to widen access.

Alexis Carrel's doctrine of immortal cells, overturned by the Hayflick limit, rested on heart tissue from which animal?

Chicken heart tissue that Carrel began culturing in 1912 was kept going for over 20 years, but nobody could repeat the feat; fresh cells may have been added each day with the nutrient feed.

In which city, home of the Wistar Institute, did Leonard Hayflick show in 1961 that normal human cells stop dividing?

Philadelphia's Wistar Institute is where Hayflick grew suspicious on finding that every odd-looking culture in his notebook was an old one, while younger cultures in the same medium stayed healthy.

Which Australian Nobel laureate coined the name 'Hayflick limit' in a 1974 book on the genetics of ageing?

Macfarlane Burnet, who shared the 1960 Nobel for work on immune tolerance, named the phenomenon in his book Intrinsic Mutagenesis, 13 years after Hayflick first reported it.

WI-38, the human cell strain Leonard Hayflick isolated in 1962, has been used around the world to produce what?

Vaccines against rubella, measles, mumps, polio and rabies have been grown in WI-38, which replaced the monkey kidney cells then in use because it was free of contaminating viruses.

HeLa cells, which escape the Hayflick limit and divide for ever, were taken in 1951 from a patient with which disease?

Cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks became the oldest human cell line; once Hayflick had proved that normal cells are mortal, he was first to report that only cancer cells are immortal.

Leonard Hayflick found that normal cells 'remembered' how many times they had divided even after he did what?

Hayflick froze them, and on thawing the cells resumed dividing from the level at which they had been stored, a sign that an internal counter and not the culture conditions set the limit.

To confirm the Hayflick limit, old cells were mixed with young ones, told apart because they came from what?

The opposite sex was the marker: old male cells were mixed with young female ones, and after 20 more doublings only female cells remained, ruling out contamination as the reason old cells stop.

Besides the Hayflick limit, Leonard Hayflick is known for identifying the microbe behind which common lung infection?

Walking pneumonia was blamed on a virus until Hayflick showed the culprit was a mycoplasma, one of the smallest free-living organisms, which he grew on a medium that still bears his name.

Leonard Hayflick's inverted microscope for cell culture, the model for all later ones, was acquired by which museum?

The Smithsonian holds the instrument in its National Museum of American History; Hayflick built it in 1959, two years before the discovery that made his name.

In 2010, what did officials find at the home of Sogen Kato, who was listed as Tokyo's oldest living man?

His mummified body lay in bed among newspapers three decades old; he had probably died in 1978, and the discovery sent officials across Japan looking for other centenarians missing from the records.

Jack Weinberg, credited with the 1960s saying that nobody over 30 could be trusted, was protesting at which campus?

Berkeley's Free Speech Movement was at its height in 1964 when Weinberg, angered by a reporter hinting that Communists were directing the students, shot back with the line; it is often misattributed to the Beatles.