humanOS Radio

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Javier Gonzalez. Dr. Gonzalez is a professor at the Department for Health at the University of Bath in the UK. He and his colleagues recently published a hypothesis suggesting that carbohydrate availability plays a key role in the regulation of energy balance, and explains both why exercise increases hunger and (paradoxically) why people who are hi...

We live in an era of unprecedented access to information. Technology has endowed us with the ability to immediately retrieve whatever we want to see or whatever we want to read, just by tapping on a screen a few times. Perhaps even more importantly, we have never had so much immediate access to one another, even when we are very far away. In turn, other people - as well as our devices - have the a...

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Scott Byrne. Scott is a professor at the University of Sydney School of Medicine. He is a cellular immunologist who is studying how the ultraviolet part of the solar spectrum activates regulatory pathways that result in immune suppression and tolerance. When Scott and his team were investigating skin cancer development in mice, they happened to not...

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan welcomes Pankaj Kapahi to the show. Pankaj is a professor at the Buck Institute, an independent biomedical research institute that is devoted solely to research on aging. He and his team have begun to investigate the role of advanced glycation end products (also known as AGEs) in the aging process. Advanced glycation end products are compounds that are formed...

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Dan Siegel. Dr. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and is the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He is a pioneer in a field known as interpersonal neurobiology (sometimes referred to as relational neuroscience). Interpersonal neurobiology characterizes human development a...

Why do we sleep? This is a question that has bedeviled researchers for decades. But we think one major reason may be to facilitate DNA repair. In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Lior Appelbaum. Dr. Appelbaum and colleagues have performed some elegant studies elucidating the molecular mechanisms that underlie sleep, using zebrafish as a model organism. In a recent study, the team eng...

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan welcomes Ben Miller to the show. Ben is a principal investigator in the aging and metabolism research program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. In his study, Miller and his team randomly assigned 53 participants to consume either placebo or metformin for 12-weeks, while completing a supervised aerobic exercise program. This exercise regimen elicited...

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Richard Lin. Like all too many of us, Richard became personally invested in his health when he developed a problem that failed to respond to conventional medical interventions. He eventually realized that a disruption in the gut microbiota was the likely cause of his illness. This inspired him to start Thryve Inside. Thryve helps consumers test and...

We associate getting older with a loss of energy. On the molecular level, this is quite literally true, because one of the hallmarks of aging is mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria are often referred to as “the powerhouse of the cell,” because they convert nutrients from the food we eat into usable energy, in the form of ATP. But as we age, mitochondria become less effective at generating the...

We tend to think of age in terms of the number of years we have been alive - meaning our chronological age. But the year that you were born is not necessarily an accurate measure of your health or your life expectancy. We are coming to realize that a better predictor is your biological age - and that can be quite different from your chronological age. So how do you learn your biological age? And w...

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with John Newman. Dr. Newman is a geriatrician (a physician who specializes in the care of older people) at UCSF, as well as a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. He is chief investigator at the Newman Lab, where he is exploring ways to harness metabolic signals to promote health and resilience, particularly in older adults. Dr. Newma...

Why do we age? The fundamental causes of aging at the molecular level are relatively well established. But the question of why aging happens in the first place is a more challenging one, one which has bedeviled evolutionary biologists and philosophers for years. You might think, intuitively, that the process of natural selection would gradually eliminate senescence. Aging increases mortality, and...

For the vast majority of human history, our species lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles. We can therefore learn much about how humans probably once lived by studying preindustrial societies. Research on preindustrial societies has consistently shown that these people have exemplary metabolic health. And when we consider that modern humans are succumbing to chronic diseases at an alarming rate, we cle...

Do smartphones really affect the timing and quality of your sleep? In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Associate Professor Jeanne Duffy from Harvard Medical School on her most recent research investigating this question.

Stress is something we all experience all too frequently. The effects of different stressors accumulate, and when the resultant load is excessive, we are at increased risk of a range of diseases. So, to avoid the amount of stress we experience exceeding our bodies’ capacities to cope, it would be useful to have a way to monitor how we’re responding to stressors. In the last few years, numerous wea...

Nutrition is perhaps the most emotionally charged of all of the applied sciences. It’s not hard to see why. For one thing, all of us eat, meaning that every single one of us is personally invested in this topic, and we interact with it all the time. We all develop a sense of expertise, in a way that we might not for something a bit more removed from our daily life, like robotics or civil engineeri...

In this podcast, Greg Potter speaks with James Hewitt, who has a particular interest in how people can achieve sustainable high performance. In addition to his role as Chief Innovation Officer at Hintsa Performance, James is doing a PhD at Loughborough University, where his research focuses on how workers’ lifestyle and work patterns influence their wellbeing and performance. In this interview Jam...

Brain injury is more pervasive and problematic than many people think. Every day, about 150 people die from traumatic brain injury-related deaths in the US alone, and whether you participate in a contact sport, work in the military, or simply travel on roads, you may at some point suffer the kind of event that incites brain injury. The problem is that brain injury is associated with numerous negat...

Whether you want to look great at the beach, perform better at sports, or ward off disease, it’s important to optimize your protein intake. This brings us to the latest episode of humanOS Radio, in which Dan speaks with Professor Stu Phillips from McMaster University. Tune in to find out more!

Aging is arguably the leading risk factor for chronic diseases in the modern world. We have historically thought of aging as an inexorable decline of function, driven by the passage of time - something that we simply have to accept, and that cannot be changed. But what if aging were actually a modifiable risk factor? Your chronological age, meaning the length of time that you have been alive, obvi...

Why is it so hard for us to make healthy lifestyle changes - even when we have the knowledge to do better? Most of us have a list of things we would like to change. Maybe you’d like to lose thirty pounds, or be able to do fifty pushups, or run a marathon. But each of these comes with a long list of associated behaviors - many of which aren’t intrinsically rewarding - that are required to achieve a...

Why do we need to sleep? Part of what makes sleep so fascinating, as a field of research, is that it is such an enigma. Sleep is a profoundly vulnerable state, leaving us at the mercy of predators and the environment, and unable to defend ourselves or our possessions. It's also largely unproductive. Yet we spend about a third of our life in slumber. Moreover, sleep also seems to be nearly universa...

All of us know that lack of sleep impairs cognitive performance. But we are now realizing that sleep quality, and how long that you spend in deeper restorative sleep, also plays an important role in brain function. Today on humanOS Radio, Dan talks to Kristine Wilckens. Kristine is an assistant professor in the Sleep and Chronobiology Center in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pit...

The subject of alcohol and health is complex. There is evidence that alcohol can be health-promoting, but more recent evidence has suggested it isn't healthy for humans in any amount. The ancient Greeks only drank their wine diluted. They believed that only barbarians would drink unmixed or undiluted wine as it would bring out a type of behavior that would cause mayhem. In this episode, Dan speaks...

About 40% of people worldwide will get lower back pain at some point in life, and on any given day roughly 12% of adults are experiencing lower back pain. This crippling condition strongly influences quality of life, often affecting relationships with loved ones, impairing performance at work, and leading to substantial costs – not only healthcare ones but also expenses due to absenteeism and so o...