Medicare for All activist Ady Barkan, left paralyzed and unable to speak by ALS, delivered a powerful indictment of the “fundamentally broken” for-profit U.S. healthcare system in his remarks at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday night, decrying a status quo that saddles Americans with massive costs while providing inadequate treatment.
Using a voice-generating device attached to his wheelchair, Barkan relayed his experiences navigating America’s fragmented and dysfunctional insurance system since his diagnosis in 2016 and said the Covid-19 crisis has shined a spotlight on “the tragic consequences” of the nation’s failure to guarantee healthcare to all as a right.
“In the midst of a pandemic, nearly 100 million Americans do not have sufficient health insurance,” said Barkan. “And even good insurance does not cover essential needs like long-term care. Our loved ones are dying in unsafe nursing homes, our nurses are overwhelmed and unprotected, and our essential workers are treated as dispensable.”
“We live in the richest country in history, and yet we do not guarantee this most basic human right,” Barkan continued. “Everyone living in America should get the healthcare they need, regardless of their employment status or ability to pay.”
Condemning congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump for continuing their push to strip healthcare from millions amid a global pandemic, Barkan said “we all have a profound obligation to act—not only to vote, but to make sure that our friends, family, and neighbors vote as well.”
“We must elect Joe Biden,” added Barkan, who has publicly challenged the former vice president on his failure to support Medicare for All. “Each of us must be a hero for our communities, for our country, and then, with a compassionate and intelligent president, we must act together and put on his desk a bill that guarantees us all the healthcare we deserve.”
Old age and forgetfulness seem to go hand in hand. But my colleagues and I found that memories actually becomes less precise, not entirely forgotten. Our study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, shows how the brain blends related experiences as you age rather than replaying the exact one you need.
Memory is a complicated process. Even when everything’s working as it should, the way people remember specific events has many parts.
Say you have a conversation with a friend. The first stage of memory is when you’re experiencing, feeling and perceiving details of an event as it happens. The second stage involves storing these details in your brain’s file cabinet. The third stage covers when you need to search that file cabinet for just the right file when, a week later, you want to remember that conversation with your friend. This last retrieval stage is what many people think of as memory.
Imagine that when your brain was retrieving information from that conversation with your friend, it accidentally combined details from that conversation with one you had with your spouse that morning. When you then try to remember the conversation with your friend, you actually pull the file for the conversation with your spouse instead. This kind of mix-up might be an example of what happens with the aging brain.
Why it matters
Remembering people and events is important for many social activities. Confusing people’s names can be embarrassing. The fear of confusing memories can even lead to social isolation.
Scientists already know that confusing memories happens more often than forgetting them altogether. What’s less clear is how the brain gets confused.
My team’s study tried to understand when in the memory process these mix-ups happen and how the brain’s memory center, called the hippocampus, plays a role.
The hippocampus is involved in all stages of memory. The patterns of neural firing that occur during the first stage of memory – the initial experience of talking with your friend – often recur while your brain is filing that memory away and later when retrieving it.
For our study, we scanned the brains of young, middle-aged and older adults while they went through those same three stages of memory. While in the scanner, they briefly saw images of a face at the top of the screen and an image of either a scene or an object, such as a forest or an apple, on the bottom of the screen.
We told participants to imagine the person at the top interacting in the scene or with the object. Each image pair served as a separate “event.”
They then relaxed for 20 minutes while we continued to record their brain activity. Finally, they took a memory test in which a face they had previously seen reappeared on top with four images below. Participants had to remember which of those images had previously been paired with the face. We repeated this test several times to gauge how well people remembered links between faces and scenes and objects across events.
We found that older people had more memory mix-ups than young adults. For instance, they were more likely to falsely remember a face that was initially paired with an apple as having been paired with a forest. Older people were also less likely to repeat the same brain activity patterns seen when they first experienced, stored and retrieved a specific memory. Surprisingly, even when older adults did repeat the original brain patterns, they were even more likely to confuse their memories.
Our study provides new evidence that the hippocampus is inappropriately changing memories between different memory phases as one gets older.
What still isn’t known
Research in young adults, including those in our study, suggests that the hippocampus is supposed to engage in the same neural firing patterns when remembering an event as when first experiencing it.
But the older adults who made more memory mix-ups than younger participants showed these same neural patterns. So what is the brain signature when older adults get a memory right? Are other brain regions outside the hippocampus helping? We did not get a good answer for these questions from our study.
What’s next
Researchers are still learning how different brain regions talk to one another. One of the next frontiers in neuroscience is understanding how electrically stimulating the hippocampus prevents memory loss or restores lost memories.
The modern workday unfolds largely indoors. Long hours spent commuting, sitting in meetings and staring at screens can make time outdoors feel like a luxury. Finding time for nature in an already packed workday can feel impossible, especially if you think nature only “counts” when it involves hiking boots and camping gear.
But a growing body of research suggests that nature’s benefits don’t require an exotic vacation getaway or weekend adventure. Even brief, routine interactions with green space can reduce stress, improve mood and promote overall well-being.
I spent the spring of 2026 teaching and studying urban landscapes in Denmark, a country consistently ranked among the happiest in the world. I expected to find thoughtfully designed parks, courtyards and bicycle paths. I did see those things. But what surprised me was how seamlessly people moved through those spaces as part of their ordinary lives.
These green spaces weren’t aspirational destinations, reserved for special occasions. They were places to eat lunch, meet friends, walk through on the way home from work, or just pause for a few quiet moments. Getting outside seemed a part of the natural rhythm of the day.
Denmark‘s outdoor culture stemmed not only from the creation of a meticulously planned network of parks, but also from the way green spaces were fundamentally woven into the routines of everyday life.
A wooden bench in one of Copenhagen’s forest therapy parks invites people to sit and soak in their surroundings. Todd Lookingbill
Everyday parks, everyday benefits
Evidence linking time spent in nature with health benefits has increasingly shaped public policy. In the U.S., for example, the National Park Service’s Healthy Parks Healthy People and ParkRx initiatives reflect a growing recognition that access to parks contributes to well-being.
For many Americans, however, the word “park” brings to mind iconic national parks such as Yellowstone, Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. Yet visiting parks of all kinds can improve your overall health. The greatest public health value may come not from the parks people visit once in a lifetime but from those close enough to visit again and again.
My own research on Civil War battlefield parks illustrates this point. These are parks that were established to commemorate historic conflicts that were frequently fought on the fringes of major metropolitan areas. Consequently, many of these landscapes preserve forests, grasslands and trails within easy reach of millions of Americans.
Because they’re accessible without extensive travel or planning, they can become places people return to repeatedly – such as during a lunch break or after work. Reframing the notion of “park” opens up millions of acres of land for everyday uses.
Designing for everyday nature
At the University of Richmond, where I work, a stream restoration projects became an opportunity to rethink how nature fits into campus life. Landscape architects designed an Eco-Corridor, as the project became known. It has walking paths, gathering spaces and seating areas for quiet reflection alongside flowing streams and native vegetation.
The result was a landscape that supports biodiversity and improves water quality while also creating places for students, faculty and staff to walk between meetings, eat lunch alfresco or spend a few quiet moments outside during the workday. Its ongoing care depends on an army of volunteers who spread mulch, remove invasive plants and tend the community garden. For these volunteers, stewardship between classes and meetings meant another opportunity to interact with nature.
Students walk through the ‘Eco-Corridor’ at the University of Richmond. Haley Herrmann
What we learned was that nature doesn’t have to compete with work, studying or everyday responsibilities. Thoughtful landscape design can make spending time outdoors, even if only for a few short minutes, feel like a normal part of the day.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest person lived to the ripe age of 122 years old. Such a lifespan is an incredible feat, but what if the average person could beat that record by 34 years? Recent research done in Russia has led scientists to believe that the average human lifespan could be up to 156 years.
The researchers at Skoltech Biomed Technologies Center developed a mathematical model that allowed them to “switch on” a variety of aging mechanisms. This allowed them to calculate a human’s lifespan where mortality risk never increased with age. After experimenting with different scenarios and conditions, they found the biggest barriers to longevity were caused by non-renewable tissues and somatic mutations.
What are these barriers against longer life?
Somatic mutations are DNA changes within a cell. They accumulate over time during a human’s life and cannot be reversed with any existing therapy. These DNA errors that pile up in our cells contribute to the aging process.
Many human organs like the liver and skin continually replace cells and regrow damaged portions of themselves. However, there are two organs that can’t do this: the brain and the heart. Brain tissue (neurons) and heart tissue (cardiomyocytes) cannot regenerate. This proves to be the most prominent biological limit that shortens our lifespans. This explains why issues like dementia and heart disease are prominent causes of death and morbidity later in life. Since those organs’ tissues don’t replace damaged cells, they’re prone to irrevocably decline over time.
“The key finding of the study is the discovery of substantial differences between tissue types. Neurons and cardiomyocytes, which lack the ability to divide, turned out to be the main limiting factors: when all other causes of aging are eliminated, somatic mutations alone reduce the theoretical median lifespan from 1,759 years (for a hypothetical non-aging human organism) to 156 years,” said Evgeny Efimov, a research intern at the Skoltech Biomed Technologies Center, researcher at AIRI, and one of the key authors of the study.
This suggests that somatic mutations and DNA damage is what ultimately prevents humans from living indefinitely, even if our brains and hearts regenerated cells like other organs.
So what’s next?
Now knowing these biological limitations, the researchers hope to study other areas of aging impacting the human lifespan that could plausibly be reversed. This includes mitochondrial dysfunction, telomere shortening, epigenetic drift, and loss of proteostasis.
The hope is to have a clearer priority list of issues for future therapies to tackle. This is not just to possibly extend life, but to improve lives in general. By developing a fully comprehensive theory of aging, Skoltech hopes to pinpoint which aspects of aging are within our scope to address. After all, thoroughly studying each puzzle piece that makes up human life gives us a better understanding of the whole.
Of course, other impactful factors in a person’s lifespan can be addressed today. As most know, things like diet, sleep, and exercise are among them. A person’s living environment can also negatively impact their lifespan if it doesn’t have clean air, access to clean water, and so on.
For now, the best method for living long is to follow instructions from your physician. Whether you make it to 156 years or not, living well is best for whatever time you’re given.
