Outpacing Death

Every heart runs on electricity, also yours! Tiny electrical waves travel through our heart tissue to keep every heartbeat in perfect rhythm. But what happens when that rhythm is disturbed? That’s what we call a heart rhythm disorder, or arrhythmia. What does that actually look like? How do these disturbances arise? And are shock paddles, like in hospital TV series, really the only solution? To answer these questions, let’s explore the heart from a physicist’s perspective. We’ll see how electrical patterns form, move, and sometimes (literally) spiral out of control. Together we’ll go on a journey from the basics to cutting-edge, almost science-fiction technologies where we might one day painlessly reset heart rhythms simply by literally shining light on the heart (say whaaat?!).

One of the few certainties in life is that, as time passes, we grow older. Aging is considered a deterministic, natural, and evolutionarily conserved phenomenon that governs human life and contributes to pathologies such as cancer and neurodegeneration. But is aging so inevitable as it seems? Can we intervene in this process and slow down, or even reverse some of its effects? In this Pint of Science talk, we will explore aging and its causes at the cellular level, trying to understand whether - and how - one day we might be able to make our cells live longer.