cohenaginglab
@cohenaginglab
Cohen Lab on Aging, Systems, and Statistics
Absolutely. Health isn't just avoiding disease—it's about keeping the body’s systems organized and information flowing clearly. Entropy quietly breaks that down over time.
This is a subtle but crucial point. Health is about maximizing information in biological systems, and entropy is the enemy of that. (We have little risk of too little entropy.)
Too much competition in science leads to over-optimizing the metrics of success (publications, funding, etc.) at the expense of actual good science. It's Goodhart's law. Here's a post I wrote on it before I heard of Goodhart's law: maketheworldworkbetter.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/wha…
Can we feel our mitochondria? We feel pain (nociception), internal sensations (interoception), and even our immune system (immunoception) How does the brain monitor our energy status? In this preprint, we propose that the brain feels the balance of energy demand (burn rate)…
Impressive innovation, but we should ask if it helps us break the cycle or just feeds it in disguise. The harder work is still behavioral change.
While this is cool work, the last thing we need is more ways to fake giving ourselves a sugar fix. Rather, we need to train ourselves away from sugar addiction and other societal and technological shortcuts to dopamine. nature.com/articles/d4158…
It's hard talking about health without coming off as political now. Isn't that crazy? As scientists, we need to both call out nonsense when we see it, and be open to good ideas wherever they come from.
Cells don’t have politics. But nutrition, metabolism, and health sciences are extremely political. How do we handle this discrepancy? How do we navigate towards objective science-based health information and practical solutions in a world where just four letters — #MAHA — can…
Exactly! Science has become driven by conformity, and funding mechanisms prioritize what is conservative, not audacious. Bold science can't happen without bolder funders! We need to rethink project-based research funding.
It takes real courage to prioritize originality over output - especially in systems built to reward conformity. Scientific progress demands more than rigor alone, it requires the freedom to think differently, take risks, and reimagine what’s possible.
Just dropped: Honored to have worked with the brilliant Laurent Hébert-Dufresne and an amazing team on this new paper. I give a quick overview of what we found.
Hear me describe our new paper in collaboration with the inimitable Laurent Hébert-Dufresne and colleagues! @LHDnets #Complexity #Physiology #Government nature.com/articles/s4426…
Excited to launch our new series: Join Dr. Cohen @cohenaginglab as he breaks down the fundamentals of health science in our first episode—making complex biology simple, one concept at a time.
New comment in Nature Aging. I think this is really important, hope others will too... nature.com/articles/s4358…
The Journals of Gerontology, Series A is seeking manuscripts for a new joint special issue, "Complex Systems Dynamics & the Aging Process." Alan Cohn, PhD, and Marcel Olde Rikker, MD, PhD, will be guest editors. The submission deadline is September 1. bit.ly/3ILLx7r
I'm organizing a Joint Special Issue of Journals of Gerontology Series A on complex systems and aging. Check it out and submit! tinyurl.com/bp7hvxvf
Particularly proud of this new article in Nature Aging. We need to stop thinking in purely reductionist terms about how our bodies age. nature.com/articles/s4358…
