R Li

An older person's handshake can say more about their education than a diploma on the wall. In three parts of the world, the US, China, and Europe, researchers had tens of thousands of people over fifty squeeze a dynamometer, and they saw that education works like a lever that lifts muscle strength, but the length of that lever depends on where a person was born.

A mouse gets food that is missing a single amino acid, and within five days it loses a fifth of its weight. Its white fat turns darker, as if tiny stoves had lit up inside it. This is not hunger and not exercise: cysteine was simply removed from the diet. Cysteine is a building block of proteins that our body can make on its own from another amino acid, methionine.