Two people in Pennsylvania have died from measles, marking the first reported deaths from the disease in the U.S. this year. 

The Pennsylvania Department of Health said on Tuesday, Aug. 25, that the two people who died were unvaccinated and lived in Lancaster County, the epicenter of a statewide measles outbreak that has sickened hundreds. 

No additional information has been released about the two people who died. State health officials said the deaths are the first measles-associated fatalities in Pennsylvania in 35 years.

“Because measles was largely eliminated in the [state] for more than three decades, people are not familiar with this disease and don’t fully understand the potential severity of the illness,” said Dr. Debra Bogen, Pennsylvania’s health secretary, in a statement.

More than 2,700 measles cases have been reported in the U.S. this year—the highest number of cases since the disease was considered eliminated in the country in 2000. In just the past two years, the U.S. has recorded more measles cases than it did from 2000 through 2024 combined.

Measles is a highly contagious viral disease that can cause high fever, a tell-tale rash, cough, and other symptoms. The disease can be mild for some, but about one in four people sickened with measles is hospitalized. Young children, pregnant women, and the elderly are among those who are at risk of more severe disease.

No specific treatment for measles exists. The measles vaccine—delivered as a combination measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot series—is 97% effective at preventing the disease and lowers the risk of complications if someone is infected. 

“As a physician, I want to make sure that people understand that the MMR vaccine is safe and provides the best protection we have against measles,” said Bogen.

Within communities, a vaccination rate of above 95% is considered ideal for robust herd immunity against measles. The national MMR vaccination rate among kindergarteners surpassed 95% in the 2019-2020 school year, but it has been declining ever since, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. In 2025-2026, MMR vaccination coverage was just 92.4% nationally, and about 93% in Pennsylvania. In Lancaster County, home of the largest Amish settlement in the country, the vaccination rate was under 88%. An estimated 25% of the Amish population in Lancaster County is vaccinated against measles, according to the Association of Immunization Managers, an organization of state and local immunization officials. 

Vaccination rates began notably declining in the U.S. during the COVID pandemic and have continued dropping amid increasing anti-vaccine rhetoric and policy under the Trump Administration. On Aug. 10, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that called for U.S. children to receive fewer vaccines and ordered the MMR vaccine to be split into three separate shots, despite a lack of scientific evidence to back the changes.

“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the combined shot, which has been in use for more than 50 years and has a strong safety and efficacy record.   

Doctors and vaccine scientists said Trump’s executive order and comments were unscientific and misleading. "As measles cases reach a 35-year high in the U.S. and with cold and flu season quickly approaching, [the] executive order on vaccines is not only disheartening but dangerous,” Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), said in a statement at the time. 

The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that all children get two doses of the MMR vaccine, starting with the first dose at 12 through 15 months of age. 

An additional early dose of the vaccine can also be given to children aged 6 to 11 months under some circumstances, says Dr. Elizabeth Murray, a pediatric emergency medicine physician in Rochester, N.Y. “With the ongoing measles outbreak, make sure your children are immunized. If your child is under age 1, talk to your doctor. Depending on how much measles is circulating where you live, your doctor may recommend an earlier dose,” she says. 

The CDC also advises adults who haven’t been immunized against measles or who are unsure about their vaccination status to get the vaccine. The agency recommends that people who were vaccinated before 1968 with an older version of the shot get at least one dose of the vaccine in use now, which is more effective. 

For people fully vaccinated after 1968, however, there is no need to get a booster, the CDC says, as two doses of the vaccine should offer adequate, lifelong protection. 

Most people leave the monkey bars behind with childhood. Yet hanging from a bar—right-side up, don’t worry—may be one youthful habit worth picking back up, especially if you spend your days hunched over your desk and phone. (Guilty.)

“We look at kids on a playground—what are they doing?” says Australian physiotherapist Daniel Vadnal, owner of FitnessFAQs, who posts instructive videos on Instagram and YouTube. “They don’t need to be told to hang. They just intuitively do it.”

A few years ago, Vadnal persuaded his grandmother, now 93, to try a supported hang. That means gripping a bar overhead with straight arms but keeping your feet planted on the floor, rather than dangling your entire body weight. She was skeptical: She hadn’t even raised her arms fully overhead since she was a kid. But after just 30 seconds, she felt taller and looser—and found it easier to reach her kitchen cabinets.

Here’s what hanging can do for your body, how to keep your feet planted while you build strength, and why just 30 seconds is long enough. 

It gives your upper body a stretch

At its simplest, hanging means gripping a secure overhead pull-up bar—the kind that can be installed in a doorway—with straight arms while supporting some or all of your body weight. You remain right-side up: Your hands are above your head, and your feet point toward the floor or remain planted on it. Hanging upside down, known as inversion, is an entirely different exercise. “It’s fairly simple, but it’s not easy,” says Hazel Anderson, a physical therapist and faculty member at the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in Austin.

Whether your feet stay planted for support or lift off the floor, there are two ways to position your upper body. “The passive hang is, as the name suggests, just relaxed,” Vadnal says. “You’re letting nature, gravity, your body do whatever it wants.” Your shoulders move toward your ears, creating a stretch through the shoulders, arms, and trunk.

An active hang requires more effort. “You want to think of trying to bring your shoulder blades down away from your ears,” Vadnal says. That engages the muscles around the shoulders and back, creating more stability. Your elbows remain straight—and your feet can remain planted or off the floor—in either type of hang.

Vadnal considers passive and active hangs opposite ends of a spectrum. A passive hang still requires enough muscle effort to remain safely attached to the bar; an active one involves “really making a concerted effort” to hold yourself in position. He recommends choosing the amount of engagement that feels most comfortable for your body.

Reaching overhead may feel especially satisfying after all those hours slumped over your desk. Hanging “stretches all the tight muscles that we tend to have through the pecs, through the triceps on the back of the arms, as well as the lats,” Vadnal says. You’ll likely find it leaves you feeling a little taller—and less scrunched up through the shoulders.

That doesn’t mean 30 seconds on a bar will permanently correct your posture or treat back or shoulder pain; those claims haven’t been established in strong clinical trials. But hanging moves your upper body into a position it might not visit very often, which helps explain why people often step down feeling looser.

It makes your grip work

A hang might look passive, but your hands and forearms are busy keeping you attached to the bar. “First and foremost, it supports grip endurance,” Anderson says. “It’s helping with grip strength, but more with the endurance of being able to hold on to the bar.”

That endurance is useful for everything from carrying groceries to working toward a pull-up. “The hands, fingers, and forearms serve as a link to our back,” Vadnal says. Strengthening that link helps prepare you to support—and eventually pull—your body weight.

Research on short, recreational hangs is limited, and most studies involve climbers. In a small 2026 study, 11 climbers hung on until their grip gave out. As they got tired, their shoulders and other upper-body muscles increasingly pitched in to keep them on the bar.

Another randomized trial found that when experienced climbers hung by their fingers for eight weeks, with progressively more weight attached to the body, some measures of grip strength improved. The study involved extra weight and a climbing hold—not beginners attempting a relaxed 30-second hang—but it supports the idea that regularly asking your hands to hold you up can make them better at the job.

Grip strength is also widely used as a marker of overall health. “We do know that grip strength is correlated with longevity,” Vadnal says. In a study of nearly 140,000 adults across 17 countries, weaker grip was associated with a higher risk of death and cardiovascular disease.

That doesn’t mean hanging longer will make you live longer, Vadnal adds. Think of it as one useful signal—not a path to immortality.

Your feet can stay on the floor

Beginners don’t need to hover heroically above the ground. When you’re starting out, the bar is—quite literally—low. “I love the addition of a little step stool or platform,” Anderson says. Hold the bar with both hands, bend your knees slightly, and keep enough weight in your feet that the stretch feels manageable. You can gradually allow your arms to support more of you as you become comfortable.

“You definitely don’t need to jump straight to 30-second hangs all at once,” Anderson says. She recommends starting with a 10-second supported hang and repeating it three to five times, resting briefly between attempts. From there, work toward the 30-second goal. Vadnal likes three 30-second sets, but only after choosing a variation easy enough to complete with control.

Begin with your hands about shoulder-width apart. “That’s most comfortable for pretty much everyone,” Vadnal says, though you can move your hands wider or narrower based on what feels best. Wrap your thumbs underneath the bar to make your grip more secure.

If the typical overhand position bothers your shoulders, try a neutral grip, with your palms facing each other. Many gyms have parallel handles that allow for it, and gymnastics rings will rotate to accommodate your joints. Vadnal calls it “probably the most friendly position for the shoulders.”

Decide whether a passive or slightly more active hang feels better, and don’t worry about matching someone else’s position. Forcing your shoulders farther overhead than they can comfortably go may leave them sore or irritated, Vadnal says. Let your range of motion improve gradually instead.

Most importantly, remember to breathe. Anderson advises using “slow, controlled breaths” and making sure you’re not holding your air in, whether you’re a beginner or an expert. It’s easy to get so focused on staying on the bar that your whole body clenches up; a few steady breaths can help you relax into the hang.

“Don’t chase the clock,” Anderson says. If your form changes or you can no longer control the hang, put your feet down, rest, and try again.

Know when to let go

Hanging should feel like work—not like you’re about to injure yourself. “We should feel a stretching sensation; we should feel fatigued,” Vadnal says. “We shouldn’t feel pain.” Put your feet down if you experience sharp or persistent pain, numbness, tingling, or weakness.

Those symptoms are signs to stop, not to push through. Talk to a doctor or a physical therapist before trying again. Some people should seek guidance before they ever reach for the bar: Anderson recommends medical clearance for anyone who recently had shoulder surgery or an injury involving the neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, or trunk. The same applies to people with shoulder instability, pain when reaching overhead, cardiovascular concerns, or uncontrolled high blood pressure. 

Osteoporosis doesn’t automatically make hanging off-limits. But because a fall could have more serious consequences, Anderson says, it’s particularly important to keep your feet supported and get personalized guidance.

Anderson recommends practicing two or three times a week on nonconsecutive days, which allows the muscles to recover. There’s no need to progress from zero hanging to auditioning for Cirque du Soleil. Add time or body weight gradually, and take a day off if your hands, forearms, or shoulders remain unusually sore.

If you like hanging, Vadnal suggests keeping a bar somewhere you’ll regularly see it, like in your laundry room. “It’s like daily hygiene,” he says. “You brush your teeth; hanging is a good thing, too.”

Your therapist has probably encouraged you to have difficult conversations, advocate for your needs, and resist the urge to avoid things that make you anxious. That’s all well and good—until, one day, the difficult conversation is with them.

If therapy doesn’t feel useful anymore, or if you’ve realized that you and your therapist simply aren’t the right match, it can be tempting to outsource the breakup to the cancel-appointment button. Yet unless there’s an ethical, boundary, or safety concern, experts say it’s usually worth having a conversation with your therapist before ending the relationship. It might improve the therapy. It might also help you find someone better suited to you, or simply allow you to leave without feeling guilty about ghosting the person who knows exactly why you tend to ghost people.

Speaking up could also save you from having to begin the search from scratch. “Your therapist could be the gateway to your next great therapist,” says Ryan Culkin, a licensed professional counselor and chief counselor officer at Thriveworks, which provides therapy and psychiatry services. They might be able to adjust their approach—or recommend someone who would suit you better.

Even if you already know you’re finished, breaking the news doesn’t require a dramatic confrontation or an elaborate defense. Here’s how to decide whether it’s time to call it quits—and how to do it painlessly.

Figure out what kind of discomfort you’re feeling

Good therapy isn’t necessarily easy. “Sometimes therapy can be really uncomfortable, but it can be incredibly productive,” says Eli Kraiem, a clinical psychologist in New York. A therapist might challenge an assumption you’re attached to, point out a pattern you’d rather not see, or encourage you to do something that scares you. Feeling unsettled after a session doesn’t mean it went badly.

Michael G. Wetter, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, prefers this question: “What is the discomfort accomplishing?” Productive discomfort generally leads to insight, reflection, behavioral change, or progress toward goals you and your therapist have agreed on, he says. If it’s a poor fit, you might notice you leave therapy feeling misunderstood or have the same conversation week after week without much meaningful movement.

Juliann Siwicki, a licensed clinical professional counselor in Vero Beach, Fla., thinks about it this way: “Are you uncomfortable because you’re talking about something hard? Or because you feel like you’re having coffee with someone and not getting help? Those are two different things.”

You should be able to name what you're working toward—a pattern you're trying to break, a decision you're stuck on, a reaction you'd like to change—and to notice how much airtime your therapist is taking up. "A therapist can share something about themselves if it helps the client," Siwicki says. "It becomes too much when the client is spending the session listening to the therapist's stories, or feels like they need to take care of the therapist."

Kamran Eshtehardi, a clinical psychologist in Pasadena, Calif., has heard the far end of that spectrum. One client described a previous therapist who "thought it would be helpful to tell me about when they cheated on their wife"—including that his wife left him, and that he later saw an escort. "And I'm like, ‘What? Like, a therapist told you?’" Eshtehardi says. "Those are major red flags."

What was once a good fit can also change over time. A therapist who helped you through a crisis might not be right for your next stage. "A great therapist might not be great for you," Culkin says. "It's kind of like dating—you're not going to get it right the first time every time."

Even finding that “the therapist gets on your nerves” doesn’t necessarily mean you should quit, says Eshtehardi. A rupture doesn’t mean the therapy has “rotted on the vine,” he says, and progress sometimes develops “underneath the surface” before reaching a tipping point. But if you’ve explained what you need and nothing changes—or there’s no sense of progress—your frustration deserves attention.

Serious boundary violations, unethical behavior, or anything that makes you feel unsafe are different. You don’t need to attempt a repair before leaving, nor do you owe the therapist another session.

Say what isn’t working

If you’re open to continuing with your therapist, with the appropriate changes, describe what you’ve noticed and need—without turning the conversation into a performance review.

Try: “Our sessions have started to feel conversational, and I need more structure, feedback, and therapeutic insight. Can we talk about that?” Or: “I’m not sure what I’m working toward. Could we revisit my goals?” Culkin suggests language as straightforward as: “That didn’t land with me,” “I want to try something different,” or “I really liked when you did this.”

Eshtehardi recalls a client telling him that the usual sympathetic responses—“I’m so sorry to hear that” or “That must have been so hard”—didn’t work for them. “I just want to get stuff on the table and say, ‘OK, what’s going on here? How do we work with this?’” the client told him. That feedback helped Eshtehardi calibrate his approach. “I’m not saying it’s necessarily the client’s job to help train the therapist,” he says, but clients can explain what they’re looking for and how they prefer to work.

If you know you’re ready to leave 

Sometimes you’re not interested in recalibrating the relationship—you’ve already decided to end it. In that case, the goal isn’t to persuade your therapist that you have a good enough reason to go. It’s simply to communicate your decision in whatever way feels most manageable. 

You don’t have to deliver the news face-to-face. A call, email, or text is fine: “I don’t want therapy and the therapeutic relationship to be another source of anxiety for my clients,” Eshtehardi says. For someone accustomed to conflict or pushback, sending “I’m sorry, this isn’t working for me” and receiving a calm response can itself be therapeutic. You might realize, he says, that “maybe there’s a way to connect with people that doesn’t feel like I’m always doing the wrong thing.”

Eshtehardi also encourages clients who feel guilty to view the conversation as an opportunity to “practice trusting that someone else is going to be OK,” and trusting themselves to make the right decision. Your therapist’s response will provide useful information. A therapist who responds with openness and a willingness to adjust is giving you one kind of information; defensiveness or guilt-tripping gives you another. If the therapist acts wounded, Eshtehardi thinks of it as a “double whammy.” It might hurt, but it also “confirms that you’ve made the correct decision to stop therapy.”

You don’t need to build a case for your decision. “When it comes to trying to find the right fit, I don’t think clients should have to worry about having to justify their perspective,” Eshtehardi says. He suggests keeping the message simple: “I don’t think it’s the right fit. I’d like to stop sessions, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you.”

And try not to assume you’ve devastated them. Therapists are trained to handle patients leaving, Kraiem says. If yours can’t tolerate it, “then there’s a problem with the therapist, not with the patients.”

Make the transition easier on yourself

If you need consistent support, try to line up a new therapist before leaving your current one. Ask your therapist if they can recommend someone with a different style or specialty.

Before booking, confirm the new therapist accepts your insurance. “There’s nothing worse than getting through that first session” only to discover they don’t, Culkin says. You can also ask how they structure sessions, establish goals, and respond when a client disagrees. Be candid about what helped the first time around, what didn’t, and what’s important to you this time. Culkin encourages therapists to ask what clients appreciated about past providers and what they wish had been different. “Those are gold answers,” he says.

It’s not mandatory, but Kraiem recommends a wrap-up session, if you’re comfortable: “Let’s have one session to reflect on the experiences, process how you’ve improved, how you’ve grown through therapy, and maybe areas that still need improvement,” he says. 

Ask the practices about transferring relevant records. You’ll typically sign an authorization specifying what can be shared. Whether you want a direct handoff depends on why you’re leaving, Eshtehardi says. If you felt misunderstood, the former therapist’s perspective could “muddy the waters,” and you might prefer a clean start. If your therapist is referring you to someone with more specialized expertise, a conversation could help them get up to speed more quickly. In that case, Eshtehardi tells clients, “I’ll tell you everything I tell them so you know what they know.”

Finally, cancel future appointments and settle outstanding balances or other loose ends. Eshtehardi suggests asking: “Are there any last things we need to do?” If medication is part of your care, coordinate with your prescribing clinician about refills.

Changing therapists isn’t proof that treatment failed. Sometimes successful therapy means repairing a strained relationship. Other times, it means recognizing that the relationship has run its course—and using the difficult-conversation skills you’ve practiced to say so.

Jamie Justice admits she has no poker face. As executive director of XPrize Healthspan, a philanthropic and corporate sponsored competition, Justice oversees one of the most buzz-worthy science competitions today. The contest, launched in 2023, attracted nearly 200 applicants from groups around the world who think they can help people to live not just longer lives, but healthier ones.

When the 15-member judging panel met in early summer to pick the top 10 teams who would continue on in the seven-year competition, Justice excused herself. “I couldn’t be in the room because my face shows everything,” she says, since she became familiar with each of the teams and their various approaches to extending human life.

Read more: TIME's 2026 Longevity Leaders

Both in the scientific community and the commercial market, there is no shortage of ideas—from legitimate, rigorously developed approaches to more fantastical schemes—for a fountain of youth. XPrize Healthspan exists to bring some order to that chaos, and legitimacy to the process of developing and, most importantly, testing ideas in longevity. Applicants for the prize, which has a total purse of $101 million, allocated in segments throughout the seven-year competition, included teams from academic research institutes as well as biotech and startup groups. All had to follow a few basic rules; they had to show early promise in human studies that their approach could improve health in three critical areas: muscle function, brain function, and immune function. All teams were judged based on standard measurements of these three functions that XPrize committees of experts had specified, to ensure that all projects were evaluated using the same metrics. The judges announced the top 10 projects on Aug. 11.

“This is where I get the most excited, when things get really sort of dirty and ugly,” says Justice, who spent time researching geroscience at Wake Forest University before coming to XPrize. “You’ve got biohackers selling you this, and you have a bro guy over here that wants you to take so much protein that you’re going to die. What we need to do is have a strainer, a filter where everybody is held to the same standard. There may be something really worthwhile and useful out of some of these things that seem harebrained. What XPrize does well is invite everyone in, teach them how to do the science to get to a level of super credibility. It’s an alliance that comes together to set the frameworks for the start line, a finish line, and how to get there.”

The projects are as varied as you might expect approaches to longevity to be—ranging from the latest anti-aging trends in Asia involving extracellular vesicles, to stem cells and more traditional, well-established programs that include exercise and supplements. Two of the teams are from Japan, one from South Korea, one from China and six from the U.S. Two of the groups are studying repurposed drugs for their potential in extending life, while the Korean team is investigating a novel longevity drug. Four projects involve supplements and five rely on biologic compounds including extracellular vesicles, peptides, and antibodies.

Both teams from Japan are working with the vesicles, which carry a wide menu of molecules in the body, from enzymes to peptides, fats and genetic material. But the teams are taking very different approaches to optimizing what these vesicles can do to improve health.

Time Traveler Corp., a biotech startup launched in 2024 by Rieko Akiyama to bring ideas from her father's research in tumor biology and cancer research at University of Tokyo to longevity is one of the teams focusing on this approach. Tomoatsu Hayashi, a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo and co-CEO, started by studying human cells to find ways to make the vesicles at scale. Smaller versions of these vesicles, called exosomes, which are made when cell membranes fold inward, and pinch off tiny bubbles, are an increasingly popular component of anti-aging beauty products in Japan and Asia, but they remain untested from a longevity perspective, and Hayashi and his team were eager to study them in a more rigorous fashion.

Akiyama gave the team what turned out to be its XPrize-leading idea. She noted that during the COVID pandemic, there were more discussions about turning away from animal-derived materials in science, which are heavily regulated to ensure safety before they develop into products used in people, to plant-based sources, including for food products like mayonnaise. “I wondered whether human-derived exosomes could also be replaced by plant-derived exosomes, which might offer advantages in terms of safety, scalability, and ethical considerations,” she says through a digital translator during a recent interview near Hayashi’s labs at the University of Tokyo. “I brought this idea to my father and asked whether plant-derived extracellular vesicles could become a new approach for promoting healthy longevity. That conversation became the starting point of our plant-derived exosome business.”

Hayashi and his team started with edible plants and algae, assuming that those would have the strongest safety profile for eventual human use, and screened more than 140 species, including 95% of those that grow in Japan. While human exosomes were widely studied, those from plants were still a mystery, and “we didn’t know if plant exosomes would have the same effect in human cells,” he says. But starting first with mice and then with human cells, they showed that in fact, plant exosomes worked in very similar ways to human-derived exosomes, proving Rieko’s initial hunch correct. And of the species, it turned out exosomes from parsley showed the strongest effects.

In mice, the parsley-derived exosomes lowered inflammatory factors that are responsible for many aging processes in cells. Animals who were fed the exosomes in their water were able to maintain muscle strength, as measured by the longer time that these mice could hang from a wire cage compared to similarly-aged mice that didn’t get the supplement.

The team saw similar benefits in lowering inflammation in a small group of 40 people who started taking the supplement pill once a day. Anecdotally, the people reported sleeping more consistently and deeply and feeling more energy during the day. The animal and human data were enough to give the team a chance at testing their product further in more people in the next phase of the XPrize competition. That trial will evaluate volunteers on muscle function, walking, leg presses, cognitive tests, and tests looking at inflammatory markers in their blood.

The other Japanese team, also from University of Tokyo, is likewise banking on exosomes. But to address supply issues, instead of plants, they turned to stem cells. Keisuke Goda, professor of chemistry at University of Tokyo, decided to tackle the problem of getting exosomes to the cells where they are needed most. Relying on his chemistry and engineering background, he designed so-called super exosomes with specific molecules on their surface that can draw them to aging cells like a magnet. Because they are revved up to target aging cells, they can deliver the lipids, genetic material, and other compounds cells need to keep them acting like younger versions of themselves. “We knew from previous studies that exosomes secrete a range of molecules including growth factors, metabolic enzymes, lipids, and DNA and RNA, and previous reports showed that injecting young exosomes into aged mice rejuvenated the aged mice,” says Goda. “But there is a delivery problem.”

As part of the XPrize, Goda and his team will start testing the super exosomes in more than 100 people in a formal trial see how they affect muscle, brain, and immune cells.

He is confident that they will see similarly encouraging results as they saw in their mouse and human cells studies, which showed that older human cells in the lab treated with the exosomes had reduced markers of aging and appeared rejuvenated. “We know they work,” says Goda. “It’s exciting. When we saw the results, we doubted it was true. But the cells were rejuvenated, they were not dying.” About 25 months after they started studying the super exosomes in mice, the untreated animals are starting to die, he says, but the treated ones are not. “We of course want to see the actual effect in humans, assuming it’s safe,” he says.

Not all of the top 10 teams involve innovative or cutting edge scientific approaches. The group from Mount Sinai earned its spot by combining three, more familiar strategies: exercise and two supplements, one that’s been bandied about the aging community for a few decades now—rapamycin—and another, spermidine, that came out of work from one of the Mount Sinai scientists as a factor to control inflammation associated with aging. During the COVID pandemic, Dr. Miriam Merad, director of the precision immunology institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and her team noticed a strong connection between age and inflammation that made older people more susceptible to the effects of a COVID infection. That led to a hypotheses about the role that inflammation might play in a range of age-related diseases, including heart disease, respiratory conditions, and muscle loss. “What we realized was that the inflammatory response was contributing to age associated diseases,” she says. “It’s very established what happens with age when organs decline—they acquire somatic mutations from the exposures we have, and at the same time as all of our organs age, our immune system is also declining, and producing more inflammatory molecules. Age-associated diseases are aggravated, or precipitated by chronic inflammation.”

Addressing inflammation, then, might be a powerful way to control the aging process, and in further studies in mice and with human cells in the lab, Merad and her team zeroed-in on a compound that older cells weren’t making as robustly as younger ones—a polyamine called spermidine. By giving older mice the supplement spermidine, they saw improvements in the animals’ immune responses that tipped the balance away from the chronic state of inflammation associated with accelerated aging. “Once we saw the data in the lab, we all started taking it ourselves because [the data] looked so good,” says Dr. Thomas Marron, professor of immunology and immunotherapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the principal investigator of the team’s study of the compound.

The researchers also included rapamycin, a drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat rejection in kidney transplants, as well as certain types of cancer, in the study as well. Because some, but not all, studies showed rapamycin extended the life of animals, it’s been a controversial product in the longevity field, with some in the health community using the drug off-label in the hopes of a longer and healthier life, despite the lack of solid evidence in human studies that it can have this effect.

That’s one of the reasons the Mount Sinai team is eager to put it to the test, in combination with an exercise regimen and spermidine. Their rationale in combining the two supplements and physical activity lies in the fact that aging isn’t likely directed by a single compound or process, but the net result of a multitude of body processes, so slowing aging will likewise require a multi-pronged strategy. Marron also expects that given the biological differences among people, some may respond more to one supplement, while others respond to the other, and still others may respond best to the exercise regimen. Studying them together could provide the first hints about which components are contributing to slowing aging, and by how much. The researchers will be taking blood samples throughout the coming year, and looking at certain markers of inflammation and as well as conducting tests of hand grip and leg strength, respiratory function and evaluations of changes in fat composition with MRI images. The participants will also take standard cognitive tests to monitor changes in their processing speed and executive function skills such as planning, memory, attention, and impulse control.

“The goal of XPrize is to improve health span by 10 years, and ultimately by 20 years,” says Marron. “But that’s hard because there is no validated way to measure health span, or aging. So the real goal is to inject more science into this process.”

The top 10 teams earned $1 million each to test their ideas in a larger group of people over the next year, and hopefully show improvements in the three areas targeted by the XPrize: muscle, brain, and immune function. “I love to have a front seat and watch the next phase of this go from hype cycle to durable evidence if there is any,” says Justice. But she also acknowledges that aging is a varied process, and no single, uniform solution that applies to the widely diverse human species will likely emerge. “We age at different rates, we have different constellations of diseases and functional decline, so a one-size-fits-all is probably unlikely,” she says. “I expect a lot of failure, but the question is whether you can take that failure and make something useful out of it. Does it become compost to build something better? There needs to be a lot more work from the field within geroscience to really lean on learnings. This is what gets me excited.”

Americans continue to drink less alcohol than ever before, according to a new Gallup poll.

Only 54% of U.S. adults surveyed by the analytics firm in July said they ever drink alcohol—the same share as last year and the lowest recorded since Gallup began surveying Americans on this topic in 1939, says Lydia Saad, Gallup’s director of U.S. social research.

“We saw a significant decline in people’s use of alcohol last year, but whether that was a one-time reaction or a trend, we had to wait and see,” Saad says. “This year’s result tells us that whatever is happening out there is a sustained change. Drinking has gone down across all age groups.”

More public awareness of alcohol’s health risks could be prompting Americans to drink less, the poll results suggest. A little more than half of Americans surveyed this year said that alcohol is “bad for health,” compared to the less than 30% of people who said that a decade ago; and 86% of people polled said they had heard of recent studies about the long-term health effects of alcohol—a 7% increase from 2024. Drinking alcohol has been linked to several forms of cancer, as well as higher risks of liver and heart disease, among other health effects.

“The decline in alcohol use coincides with a sharp increase in concern about the health risks of drinking,” Saad says. 

https://x.com/Gallup/status/2090452609316335964?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

But researchers who study alcohol say the poll results don’t provide a complete picture of alcohol use in America. While drinking might be declining overall, alcohol remains the country’s second-deadliest drug, behind tobacco. Alcohol kills about 178,000 people yearly, and harmful drinking remains a challenge for many people. 

“Many people are changing their attitudes towards drinking and intoxication for health reasons, which means that the number of people who say they drink may be declining because lighter drinkers who are more health conscious and more capable of changing their drinking are maybe choosing to cut back or not drink at all,” says Thomas Babor, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine who studies alcohol and alcohol addiction.

“But the rates of drinking and drinking problems remain unacceptably high” among some groups, including college students and older people, Babor says. “The big picture is: alcohol consumption is one of the biggest risk factors for chronic diseases and many other health conditions.”

According to the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 44% of U.S. teenagers and adults who drank alcohol said they had engaged in binge drinking in the past month, and about 10%—about 14.5 million people—said they engaged in heavy drinking, defined as binge drinking on 5 or more days in the past 30 days. 

NSDUH results show that the numbers of binge and heavy drinkers declined overall since 2021. But percentages for binge and heavy alcohol use among underage drinkers didn’t change from 2021 to 2025. Among people aged 65 and older, about 10% in 2025 said they engaged in binge drinking, compared to about 12% in 2021.

In the new Gallup poll, people were asked if they “sometimes drink more alcoholic beverages than you think you should.” Some 13% of respondents said yes to that question, another record low, according to Gallup. 

More research is needed to better understand why people are drinking less, says Traci Toomey, a public health policy expert at the University of Minnesota who studies alcohol and cannabis. Health concerns are likely a factor, but there may be other reasons too, she says.

It isn’t clear if an increase in cannabis use, for example, is driving some of the decline. “We don’t know if it’s a substitution, but that’s a question we need to answer,” Toomey says.

Use of GLP-1 drugs, which studies suggest may help reduce alcohol consumption and craving in people with alcohol abuse disorder, along with higher alcohol prices and policies to curb harmful and underage drinking, may also be playing a role, she says.

Saad, of Gallup, says there could be political factors at play too. According to the new Gallup poll, alcohol use has declined significantly among Republicans and Independents, while Democrats’ alcohol consumption has remained virtually unchanged since 2023. 

“It could be worth looking into what kind of political messaging is going on, and if it’s more effective among Republicans and Independents than Democrats,” Saad says. 

She notes, however, that “we haven’t seen strong anti-alcohol messages out of the [Trump] Administration.” In January, the administration released updated dietary guidelines that no longer specified a daily limit for alcohol consumption. 

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said at the time that alcohol is a “social lubricant that brings people together.” 

“In the best-case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way,” he said. The World Health Organization, supported by emerging research, has asserted that no amount of alcohol is safe for health. 

In the town of Nipomo on the central coast of California, in Bill Waycott's fields, lettuces of the future are taking root. Red-furled or dark-leaved, these rosettes of crunchy goodness might someday make it to a store near you. 

Waycott is an independent plant breeder, one of the small community of dedicated folks who devote their time and effort to the reproduction of a given plant or plants. For decades, he's focused mainly on breeding better lettuces, and he spoke to TIME about what could be in America's salad bowls in coming years and just how damaging the recent Cyclospora outbreak, traced to a farm run by greens behemoth Taylor Farms in Mexico, has been for lettuce growers.

TIME: How did you intertwine your fate with that of lettuce?

Waycott: My introduction to agriculture occurred as a Peace Corps volunteer in India in the ‘70s. When I came back from that assignment, I wanted to dedicate myself to agriculture. It was the most amazing thing that could ever have happened to me—a California surfer goes to India and learns how to survive in a language, in a culture, in a food system that I had no clue about. I got a job at the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] and the first year and a half it was a sugar beet breeding project. When the lettuce position opened up, I jumped on it.

We were trying to slow down the process of early flowering in lettuce. You probably know that it doesn't last very long in a garden during warm temperatures. It goes to seed pretty quickly. But then we had George Bush Senior come across and clear the deck. I was laid off at that point with a lot of my colleagues back in the '90s, and that's when I went to work for a private breeding company.

In your decades of making lettuce better, what’s been the main focus? 

Well, you know it's 96% water to start with, so you don't have a lot to work with. My focus has been as much as possible on disease resistance—developing lettuces that can stand up to plant diseases that can wipe out a crop—and improved nutrition. Since so many people eat salads these days, even if we were able to improve the nutrition by 5 or 10%, that's a huge impact on the North American diet.

At Nipomo Seeds, which is a company my wife and I started in 2014, we’re working on a lettuce we have nicknamed “Spinach Lettuce,” because it resembles spinach both in the way it grows and also its taste (a softer, spongier, and slightly bitter eating experience). The nutritional values for most of the important nutritional components in lettuce are high in the Spinach Lettuce, especially when compared to iceberg; there’s a lot more fiber, protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, and vitamin A.

There are others; we have some new lettuces that we're hoping growers will take an interest in. We've been growing field trials, and Chef Dan Barber from Row 7 Seeds has come out to California and looked at them. I think in September we're going to have somebody from Whole Foods come over and have a look.

What’s the biggest challenge facing lettuce breeders these days?

I have to say, I am just flabbergasted by the number of diseases that have come in in the last five to 10 years, and the rapidity with which they're mutating and forming new races. Example: I have been testing for plants that can resist Fusarium oxysporum, which is a fungus of the roots and vascular tissue. The plant's growing along, it's getting close to harvest, and then it just sort of wilts. Pull up the roots, and you see this discoloration. I really did my best to come up with resistance to that issue over the last five or so years. But in the last two years, the disease has changed and formed a new what we call variant race. So all the seed that I produced for that particular issue is no longer interesting to my customers because it doesn't have the brand-new race resistance.

Right now we have three fungi, one bacterium, and one virus here in California lettuce that are wreaking havoc and making life very difficult. In the past, there was one major issue at a time that we could hopefully solve in five years of breeding. Now I'm working on five issues, six issues in tandem. 

How has the Cyclospora outbreak, linked to Taylor Farms’ operations in Mexico, affected the lettuce industry?

Oh, it's disastrous. I've heard sales are at least 30% down, and not just in lettuce. Anything that's green is suspect to some people. If you can't cook it, or buy it out of a can, it’s not on the list. There are fields of mature lettuces being plowed under constantly now that have no value because they can't sell. 

But this isn’t the first time. In 2006, there was a big E. coli outbreak with spinach. That started the whole system of trying to evaluate the product before it was cut. Nowadays, at least north of the border, there are companies that go into every field and sample methodically across the field. Maybe every 30th row or every 50th row, they sample and send these samples into a lab, and it's checked for pathogens. 

Is there a safer way to grow lettuce? Hydroponically, with filtered water?

The hydroponic systems are so expensive—if they were really going to change things, it would have happened by now. 

But there isn't really that much difference; the plant is exposed to the atmosphere, and whatever's in the atmosphere is going to somehow affect the plant. Open field production is the cheapest way to go. Using water, either from wells or from canals, is really the only system available. And when you're looking at production the size of what North America requires, there's nowhere [big enough where] you can filter that water and create a sterile environment for the plant to grow in. It's impossible. But you can at least sample all those components that are going into it, and try your best to avoid any major contamination. 

What are you looking forward to in the future of lettuce?

I hope that we can slowly get to the point where we're improving nutrition. The world right now is pretty chaotic. How does diet fit into all that? How do people make decisions about what they're going to eat? What is the ratio of home cooking to restaurant dining, and financial stability—how does that influence the diet that they choose to use? It is tough. So working on making things more nutritious is an important factor. Hopefully, the growers and the shippers and the marketers agree, and we will bring healthier food into the system, so that people don't even have to decide at the moment of purchase if they should or not, because it's already more nutritious.