Waterfalls that had dwindled during an unusually dry January roared back to life this week in Oregon’s largest state park after days of heavy rain, delighting visitors eager to catch a glimpse of the cascades. The popular Trail of Ten Falls at the park, Silver Falls State Park, near Salem, sends hikers on a meandering, 7.2-mile journey through a lush forest. The trail’s 10 thunderous plunges were supercharged this week as water poured into the Cascade Mountains, and they were joined by a dozen new waterfalls that have popped up. “There a lot of ephemeral waterfalls that just showed up after the rain,” said Matt Palmquist, a ranger at the park. “It’s like walking through an enchanted forest.” Silver Falls State Park draws over a million visitors annually to its more than 9,000 acres in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. It’s an especially rainy corner of the Pacific Northwest as storms unleash heavy rain when they move up and over the mountain range. The park records about 80 inches of rain annually on average, Mr. Palmquist said. Salem, only 25 miles northwest, gets half that per year. This year, though, has been drier than usual across the Pacific Northwest, with few storms in January. “Most of the rain happened early in the month, and then we were basically dry,” said Hannah Chandler-Cooley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Portland, Ore. “We had some good stretches of sunshine in there.” February finally brought significant rain to the Pacific Northwest with a series of back-to-back storms. Several areas near the park broke or nearly broke same-day rainfall records over the weekend when an atmospheric river hammered the region. A second storm hit on Monday and brought more rain as well as strong winds that knocked out power to tens of thousands of people in Oregon and Washington. Silverton, a town close to the park, recorded only 3.26 inches of rain last month compared with the 6.70 inches it measures on average in January. It has recorded 5.6 inches of rain since Feb. 1. While most visitors go to the park in summer, Mr. Palmquist said winter was the best season because that’s when the waterfalls have the biggest flows. Many of the country’s biggest waterfalls, such as those in Yosemite, peak after the snow melts in spring, but the falls in Silver Falls State Park are fed by winter rains, because the park sits at a lower elevation, about 1,300 feet. In winter, after a storm like the one last weekend, the cascades of water grow so large that anyone who wants to take in the park’s most popular experience — that is, standing behind a waterfall — is bound to get wet. Of the park’s 10 big waterfalls, there are four, including the 177-foot-tall South Falls, that visitors can walk behind. “After these big rains, it’s like walking through a carwash,” Mr. Palmquist said. The big, gushing waterfalls make for spectacular photos and images, and videos of them appear all over social media. The ephemeral falls, the slight flows of water running down rocky hillsides blanketed in moss, feel like a secret. “They’re really difficult to photograph,” said Matt Vahle, a photographer based in California. “They’re smaller.” In some cases the fleeting falls are too far from the trail to capture without a special lens. Others are nearly right on top of you. “You’d be walking down the trail and you could stick your hand out and there would be a 15-foot waterfall right there,” Mr. Vahle said. Mr. Vahle visited the park Saturday during a photography trip to Oregon when the rain was pouring down. Walking along the Trail of Ten Falls, he saw the ephemeral falls forming right before his eyes. “These little falls popped up everywhere,” he said. “They were coming up out of the rocks. There’s a bridge you cross, and when you look out over the bridge you can see three or four of these little mini-waterfalls coming out.”
Just 50 years old and a nonsmoker, he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer four months earlier. The illness is terminal, and Dr. Lin estimated that he had roughly two years left before the drug he was taking stopped working. Instead of pulling back from work, he chose to spend the fall quarter teaching a course about his own illness. Registration for the class had filled up almost immediately. Now the room was overflowing, with some students forced to sit on the floor and others turned away entirely. “It’s quite an honor for me, honestly,” Dr. Lin said, his voice catching. “The fact that you would want to sign up for my class.” He told his students he wanted to begin with a story that explained why he chose to pursue medicine. He picked up a letter he had received years earlier from a patient dying of chronic kidney disease. The man and his family had made the decision to withdraw from dialysis, knowing he would soon die. Dr. Lin adjusted his glasses and read, choking up again. “‘I wanted to thank you so much for taking such good care of me in my old age,’” he read, quoting his patient. “‘You treated me as you would treat your own father.’” Dr. Lin said this final act of gratitude had left a lasting impact on him. He explained that he had created this 10-week medical school course — “From Diagnosis to Dialogue: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle With Cancer” — with similar intentions. “This class is part of my letter, part of what I’m doing to give back to my community as I go through this,” he said. Later, an 18-year-old freshman in his first week at Stanford caught up on a recording of the class, which was also open to students outside the medical school. The course had filled up before he could enroll, but after emailing Dr. Lin, he received permission to follow along online. He had questions that needed answers.
Around the world, the impacts of global warming are already being felt, as the Earth sees warmer than average temperatures. Last year was the warmest on record—and the first to see the average global temperature exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. As the warming trend continues, experts say the four seasons as we know them will change—and it stands to have drastic impacts on the environment. “The Earth’s system is a very precarious balance,” says Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami. “And so when the length of the seasons [starts changing], you can affect the Earth’s system in a way that is unanticipated.” How are the seasons being impacted by rising global temperatures? As Earth continues to warm, summers will get longer. “The length of the summer is going to extend,” says Akintomide Akinsanola, assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Looking at the end of the 21st Century, we are likely going to have about six months, half a year of summer.” This means that the spring and autumn seasons will grow shorter, says Kirtman. “The longer summers are going to be eating into the fall on the one end and the early onset of summer is going to be spring on the other end.” The winter months will also shorten—and bring more rain or snow to much of the United States, says Kirtman. “You have the possibility of a slightly warmer atmosphere able to hold more water, which then can produce more snowstorms.” What are some of the biggest impacts we will see? Warmer temperatures are expected in all parts of the world. “Irrespective of your locality or your county, the extension of the summer length is going to affect everywhere,” says Akinsanola. The impact will vary depending on where you are. A longer summer can increase wildfire risks in the West, while the Northeast and Midwest are expected to see an increase in winter precipitation, according to Akinsanola. Changes to the seasons will also have big impacts on the environment—altering the growing seasons for plants and changing migration patterns for animals. “If you shorten the spring, you're severely restricting the planting cycle,” says Kirtman. How will people’s lives be affected? Changes to the seasons will impact our lives, says Akinsanola. “This has implications for humanity.” Increase in precipitation could leave areas with aging infrastructure at greater risk of flooding—especially in regions that were not built to withstand rain or snow. And the agricultural industry will be forced to adapt to longer, warmer summers—and potentially less water. “If you extend the length of the summer, elevated temperature can also cause intensified droughts,” says Akinsanola. “This also has an impact on water resources, agricultural productivity and the overall economy.” Climate change also exposes people to greater health risks. Factors like air pollution and extreme heat have been known to increase risks for respiratory and cardiovascular disease and stroke. Low-income communities will bear the brunt of it. The climate crisis disproportionately impacts the lowest income countries, and within the U.S., low-income and communities of color face higher risks of illness and death from extreme heat, climate-drive floods and air pollution. “This risk is more high for regions that are already vulnerable,” says Akinsanola.
As the Trump Administration sets out to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government and private sector, a number of major companies have joined in the effort. Some others, however, have decidedly not. While companies like Google, Amazon, Meta, and some Wall Street banks have reversed course on DEI-related policies and pledges—many of which were made in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020—others, like Pinterest, have expressed caution over how the Trump-led backlash against DEI could impact their business. Still, others see an abrupt shift away from DEI to be short-sighted. On Tuesday, Apple shareholders rejected a proposal to abolish its DEI initiatives, after the company’s board of directors made the case that ditching its DEI programs would “restrict Apple’s ability to manage its own ordinary business operations, people and teams, and business strategies.” And earlier Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi told the Financial Times, “We think that building an employment group that is diverse, that is global, that thinks about all aspects of the business, that’s positive—that’s just good business,” although the company is adjusting its DEI-based executive pay incentives. Apple Apple became the latest major company to reject a shareholder proposal asking the company to abolish its diversity and inclusion programs, policies, departments, and goals. The bid was drafted by conservative think-tank National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), which has submitted a number of DEI-related proposals to companies even before President Donald Trump’s second term began. The proposal argued that corporate DEI programs expose the company to potential litigation, citing a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that reversed affirmative action in college admissions. But investors at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting on Feb. 25 rejected the measure, with 97% of votes cast against it. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who met with Trump last week, said at the meeting that Apple has never had quotas or targets. However, he added that the company may have to make adjustments “as the legal landscape around these issues evolves,” according to Bloomberg News. Ben & Jerry’s Ben & Jerry’s has never shied away from social activism—with campaigns around marijuana legalization, racial justice, and LGBTQ+ pride. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to DEI, the ice cream company told CNBC that it has no plans to roll back or slash its efforts. “We believe that companies that timidly bow to the current political climate by attempting to turn back the clock will become increasingly uncompetitive in the marketplace and will ultimately be judged as having been on the wrong side of history,” the company said in a statement. Ben & Jerry’s recently accused its parent company Unilever of trying to mandate its silence on Trump. The company is suing Unilever for allegedly threatening to “dismantle” Ben & Jerry’s independent board and stifling its social activism. Costco Last month, the board of directors for Costco Wholesale unanimously opposed a proposal filed by NCPPR, which asked the wholesaler to report the risks of maintaining its DEI policies. “Our Board has considered this proposal and believes that our commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary,” Costco’s board wrote in its recommendation to shareholders, who would vote on the proposal. “Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed.” The board added that its DEI policies are legally appropriate. Shareholders voted against the proposal at Costco’s annual shareholder meeting on Jan. 23, with 98% votes cast against it. Delta Air Lines Delta Air Lines maintained its line on DEI efforts last month. “DEI is about talent, and that’s been our focus,” Delta chief external affairs officer Peter Carter reportedly said on an earnings call in January. “We are steadfast in our commitment because we think they are actually critical to our business.” Francesca’s Clothing retailer Francesca’s affirmed its commitment to DEI in a LinkedIn post earlier this month. “DEI is not an abbreviation—it’s a Human Strategy, and respect and inclusion are good for business,” the post said. “At Francesca’s, we’ve built a culture where employees feel free to be you in all senses,” CEO Andrew Clarke said in an accompanying video. He added that as an openly gay CEO, he has faced prejudice, discrimination, and “even lost a job” over his identity. DEI is “not just part of the strategy,” Clarke said in the video. “It’s the human strategy.” JPMorgan Chase JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon reaffirmed the bank’s support of DEI in a Feb. 24 interview with CNBC. The bank—the largest in the U.S.—will continue its outreach to Black, Hispanic, LGBTQ+, veteran, and disabled communities, Dimon said. Dimon’s comments came after the bank’s latest annual filing earlier this month noted that it “has been and expects that it will continue to be criticized by activists, politicians and other members of the public concerning business practices or positions taken by JPMorgan Chase with respect to matters of public policy (such as diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives).” Lush Cosmetics company Lush wanted its message on DEI to be heard—and smelled—putting out three new bath bombs named Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Hilary Jones, global ethics director at Lush, told ADWEEK that the company is “not going to roll back on anything, and we wanted to make sure that we were visible in not rolling back.” The company, known for its colorful soaps with quirky names, has long been vocal about social issues: it launched a soap in the early 2000s called “Gay is Okay” and in 2014 supported its employees who staged a protest over police brutality at the Mall of America. After a complaint about the protest was posted on the company’s corporate page, Lush responded: “We are a campaigning company, and we support the right to free speech and peaceful protest. Standing in solidarity of fairness, justice and equality for all, regardless of gender, race, age, sexuality, and religio Microsoft Microsoft has not made any moves to repeal its DEI policies, according to Bloomberg Law. The company’s chief diversity officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre put forward the business case for supporting diversity and inclusion practices in a Dec. 20 LinkedIn post. “I’m thinking about the importance of continuing our diversity and inclusion work, expanding empathy, and anticipating the needs of all our stakeholders, both within Microsoft and beyond,” she wrote. “A workforce strengthened by many perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds is critical to our innovation.” Patagonia Patagonia told CNBC that it will not scale back its DEI policies. “We stand firm in support of our justice, equity and antiracism policies and practices,” the outdoor apparel company said in a statement. The company has been well known for its activism around climate issues. “We know that when we come together and push back, we can win,” Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert recently wrote in TIME, arguing against the Trump Administration leasing or selling 640 million acres of public lands. “As we have for decades before,” Gellert wrote, “Patagonia will mobilize our community and use our position as a business and supporter of grassroots conservation groups to protect public land and water regardless of who is in the White House.”
Extreme heat can be particularly dangerous for older people, putting them at increased risk for heat stroke and death. But could it also affect how their DNA functions, and accelerate the aging process itself? A new study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, suggests it could. The analysis of over 3,600 older adults in the United States found that those living in neighborhoods prone to extreme heat — classified as 90 degrees or above — showed more accelerated aging at a molecular level compared with those in areas less prone to extreme heat. The findings suggest that heat waves and rising temperatures from climate change could be chemically modifying people’s DNA and speeding up their biological aging. The study authors estimated that a person living in an area that reached 90 degrees or above for 140 days or more in a year could age up to 14 months faster than someone in an area with fewer than 10 extreme heat days a year. To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed three biomarker aging estimates, known as epigenetic clocks, which were derived from blood samples of people age 56 and older as part of a separate national population study. They then looked at these age estimates alongside six years of daily climate data, comparing them across geographies. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Epigenetic clocks measure biological changes that could predict the future risk of disease or death associated with older age. They estimate “how well the body is functioning at the molecular and the cellular level,” said Eun Young Choi, a postdoctoral associate at the U.S.C. Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and a co-author on the paper. While DNA is fixed at birth, external factors like stress or pollution can trigger molecular changes that turn genes on and off and affect how they operate. “DNA is like a blueprint,” Dr. Choi said, but these epigenetic changes are like the “switchboard that controls which part of the blueprint gets activated.” This is the first population-level analysis to establish a connection between heat exposure and epigenetic aging in humans, building on separate research finding similar changes in fish, mice and guinea pigs. “It’s important, suggestive work” that could offer a biological explanation for geographic health trends, said Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. Many of the places in the U.S. that the study found to have the most extremely hot days “are also some of the states that have the worst health profiles,” she said. But, Dr. Krieger added, heat likely isn’t the only factor. And the authors emphasized there’s not enough data to definitively conclude that heat exposure caused the acceleration in aging — only that the two appear linked. In addition, the data they analyzed didn’t contain details about individuals’ lifestyles, such as whether they had access to air conditioning or spent the majority of time indoors. There’s also some debate among scientists about whether epigenetic clocks are the best measure for aging, said Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. How to best measure biomarkers, and how to use them to predict future health, is an “evolving space in the scientific field,” she said. Epigenetic changes aren’t necessarily bad, either, and the study doesn’t clarify whether they could reflect positive adaptations to heat instead of negative ones, said Greg Wellenius, an environmental epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health. People in hotter areas may have acclimatized to the heat, potentially by spending more time indoors, he said. But just “indicating that there is a quantifiable change at the cellular level” is a step toward understanding heat’s effect on the body, he said. Experts say there are still many questions left to answer: How might things like air conditioning affect epigenetic aging? Can short visits to hotter areas cause you to age faster? Can moving away from hotter areas reverse it? Because the analysis was based on a single blood sample from each subject, “we don’t really have that kind of longitudinal data” yet, said Jennifer Ailshire, a professor of gerontology and sociology at the U.S.C. Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the other author of the study. This study may open the door to future research into how interventions, like air conditioning or more shade, could stave off the adverse effects of aging, said Mariana Arcaya, a professor of urban planning and public health at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Right now, the literature is very focused on, ‘Can you survive in extreme heat without medical intervention?’” she said. This study, in contrast, suggests that even if people aren’t at immediate risk of health crises or death because of the heat, “there may still be an effect.”
Earth may be home to the most glorious beaches in the solar system today, but 3 billion years ago, Mars might have claimed the crown. That’s the conclusion of a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on the work of a Chinese and American team of researchers working from data gathered by China’s Zhurong Mars rover. Where there’s a beach, the researchers suggest, there might well have been life. It’s long been all but settled science that Mars was once home to copious amounts of water. Its surface is stamped with ocean and sea basins and etched with ancient riverbeds, deltas, and alluvial fans. The water didn’t last long—just the first 1.5 billion years of the planet’s 4.5 billion year lifetime. Relatively early in its history, Mars lost its magnetic field, which allowed the solar wind to claw away most of its atmosphere; with that, much of the water sublimed into space. It’s in the sites of the vanished water that NASA and the Chinese National Space Administration have landed their rovers, studying not just the ancient geology, but the possibility of signs of ancient biology. One such formation, Utopia Planitia, a large plain in Mars’s northern hemisphere, was selected as the landing site for Zhurong, which touched down on Mars on May 15, 2021. The northern lowlands are believed to have been home to oceans that covered up to one third of the Martian surface. Zhurong has conducted some of its sleuthing into Utopia Planitia’s watery past with high-resolution cameras, which captured images of rocks that have the layered, pebbly look of sedimentary objects. But it is the rover’s ground-penetrating radar that has returned the most newsmaking finds. The instrument is capable of penetrating up to 330 feet below the surface, but Zhurong did not have to go nearly that deep to hit paydirt. Along a 0.8-mile stretch in Utopia Planitia, it discovered 76 geological reflectors—or discrete regions of rock that bounce seismic or radar waves back to the surface. Reflectors are hardly uncommon below ground; they’re what the shallow innards of worlds are basically made of. But these reflectors were special. For one thing, they were all sloping in the same direction, at an angle of six to 20 degrees. They also extended to depths ranging from 30 to 115 feet. That made them strikingly similar to the depth and inclination of underground beachfront formations on Earth. The researchers cited the Bay of Bengal as a close Earthly analog to the Martian reflectors, but they also matched them up against 21 other beaches on Earth, which incline at angles of four to 26 degrees. “We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geology at Penn State University and a co-author of the paper, in a statement that accompanied its release. “We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand—a proper, vacation-style beach.” It wasn’t a given that the angled reflectors were indeed formed by a vanished ocean. They could have been sculpted by wind, but the investigators ruled that out because there would have been more chaotic variation in the angles along the 0.8-mile stretch, rather than the gradual sloping that Zhurong documented. Rivers could have been responsible too, but the area Zhurong studied lacked the telltale river valleys that would have been left behind after the water evaporated. “Therefore,” the authors wrote, “we conclude that the dip reflectors under the Zhurong landing site are most consistent with those formed in a coastal environment.” Could that coastal environment have given rise to life? The authors do not rule it out. “This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water,” Cardenas said. “When we look back at where the earliest life on Earth developed, it was in the interaction between oceans and land, so this is painting a picture of ancient habitable environments, capable of harboring conditions friendly toward microbial life.”
It does not take long at lunch with Andrew Forrest for him to start seeming less like an Australian mining billionaire and more like a climate activist–meets–zealous prosecutor. His rugged features quickly appear not to reflect the arid expanse of Western Australia’s Pilbara region, home to the core operations of his $38 billion Fortescue iron-ore business. Rather, they appear the result of a succession of high-stakes court battles. When we meet at a luxurious Paris brasserie, he speaks passionately about a client that he’s been representing for several years: the planet. His case? Corporate bosses must act now—and act fast—to tackle climate change, an argument he delivers with force and the unrivaled credibility that comes from decades in the carbon-spewing industry. Then, his soup turning cold, he grabs me by my lapels and rattles off the facts as he sees them: fossil-fuel industry executives are “culprits,” doing all they can to resist a transition to a cleaner economy. In other heavy industries, bosses have been “lazy” and shortsighted, focused on quarterly returns while the world burns. It’s time for businesses to stop talking about long-term targets, he tells me, and completely ditch fossil fuels in the coming years rather than in the coming decades. “If you think you can’t go green, then you’re right,” he says of his industry colleagues. “It’s time for you to get off the stage and learn from someone with more talent, more conviction, or initiative than you who can lead your company.” Critically, this isn’t simply talk. At Fortescue, the mining behemoth he founded in 2003, Forrest has begun just such a transformation: he’s building renewable-energy projects, purchasing a fleet of electric mining trucks, and trying to catapult green hydrogen to market. “It’s about character. It’s about leadership,” he says. Central to Forrest’s pitch is a cutting dismissal of the corporate fixation on quarterly returns. His preferred yardstick is the medium term—a long enough time period to make meaningful change but soon enough so that he will actually be around to judge the results. Fortescue’s $6 billion green investment, for example, is meant to transform his company into an environmentally friendly powerhouse by 2030. “We’re taking long-term bets, which accrete value on the way,” he says. “I make it sound simple, but it is actually pretty simple.” And then, just as quickly as he had begun, our lunch still unfinished, he stops himself almost midthought: “Is this enough to start?” With his opening argument delivered and a slap on the back, he’s gone in a flash—off to his plane, which was waiting to whisk him to Munich for an engagement with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That was last February. In the year since, I’ve watched Forrest take his argument global, traveling with him to Las Vegas, where he announced a $3 billion investment in electric mining trucks, and catching him at conferences in New York and Switzerland where he cajoled other executives to come aboard his climate quest. The image that emerged is of a rare private-sector voice literate in both climate science and financial markets—and one willing to make the business case for climate to any audience. "If we want to solve the climate crisis, we need more leaders in business to act with the same dogged determination and sense of purpose as Andrew," says Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his climate work. The biggest challenge for Forrest isn’t one of technical feasibility. If all goes according to plan, actually decarbonizing Fortescue will be the easy part. To succeed, he must convince investors, employees, and, perhaps most importantly, other CEOs that going green is worth the risks—financial, reputational, and otherwise. The task couldn’t come at a more important time. A wave of populist sentiment has led political leaders to take a step back on climate action even as the effects of a warming planet become ever more apparent—and grow ever more dire. It is a complex needle to thread: companies can act on their own, of course, but to do so they need to be sure they will make money. If he succeeds, Forrest and his project to transform Fortescue, where he serves as chairman, would become more than a forceful case for saving the planet—they would become a powerful case study for generating financial dividends by decarbonizing. Failure, on the other hand, would discourage other business leaders already nervous about the current political climate. “The dangerous part about what we’re doing is that if we’re not successful, the inspiration for thousands of other companies won’t be there,” he says. “And if we lose money on this in the long term, people say, well, that’s philanthropy.” Forrest’s tale begins with a warning: “It’s not a pretty story.” We’re sitting at the dining table of his company jet en route to Las Vegas from New York last September, and I’ve just asked him to recount the story of how he became a climate advocate. Between bites of chicken wings, he rewinds the clock to 2016. He was hiking in a remote part of Australia known as the Kimberley when he fell off a cliff into a gorge. In gory detail, he described how his leg was reversed, stuck pointing in the opposite direction, when someone pulled him out of the water. He survived, but it would take years to recover. Forced to take a break from his hectic day-to-day CEO life, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in marine ecology. That opened his eyes to the alarming realities of how climate change is harming the oceans: the acidification that is killing marine ecosystems and the looming risk that oceans will not continue absorbing carbon at the same rates, meaning faster growth of carbon in the atmosphere. He says that the deeper understanding steered him to “do everything we can to stop global warming.” It was, in short, a sort of Damascene conversion, transforming a mining industry veteran into a climate campaigner. Since then it’s been a whirlwind. The Minderoo Foundation, founded in 2001 and co-led by Forrest and his wife from whom he is separated, has come to fund everything from efforts to address lethal humidity to climate migration. And he has committed deeply to the cause of protecting the oceans. While many of his billionaire counterparts buy yachts to party, Forrest bought one and turned it into a research vessel for ocean scientists. M. Sanjayan, the CEO of Conservation International, talked to Forrest as he fundraised for a new initiative aimed at protecting 5% of the world’s oceans. In their phone conversation, Forrest realized that he was soon going to fly over Sanjayan’s office in Washington, D.C., so he directed the plane to land. A few hours later they had dinner near the airport, and Forrest became a top contributor to the $125 million initiative. “He’s just larger than life,” says Sanjayan, reflecting on that first meeting. Forrest’s biggest climate initiative, though, is what he’s doing with his own company. Under the mantra of Real Zero, a play on the increasingly controversial phrase net zero, Forrest has said his company will ditch fossil fuels in its land-based operations entirely by 2030. To make it happen, in 2022 the company launched a $6.2 billion capital investment plan to decarbonize its primary mining operations in Australia’s Pilbara region. That money has funded everything from efficiency to renewable energy generation. When we arrived in Vegas, I saw the unveiling of the effort’s crown jewel. Shortly after entering the Las Vegas convention center, the exhibition area turned dark. Triumphant music blared as drummers and dancers performed. The curtain dropped to reveal a massive electric mining truck capable of hauling 240 metric tons of material. In Forrest’s phrasing, his plane could fit inside the truck’s bed. It wasn’t hyperbole: even at my height of 6 ft. 3 in., I had to look up to see the top of one of the truck’s tires. Forrest said Fortescue, which partnered with a Swiss manufacturer called Liebherr to develop the trucks, had already placed an order for 360 vehicles. The deal, valued at nearly $3 billion, sent shock waves across the industry. “It’s metamorphic for Fortescue, and it’s a turning point for the world mining industry,” Forrest tells me. “Shareholders are going to say this company’s going green and saving us money.” The cost savings switching from diesel fuel to electric mobility is expected to total in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The work has garnered the praise of big wigs in the climate community. In New York, I watched as Forrest traded compliments with leading climate scientists; in Davos, I sat in as he convened the likes of Gore and former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. “This guy is willing to make really big bets, and sometimes they pay off, and probably more often than not, they pay off,” says Sanjayan. “I’m glad he’s making it on something that could be transformative for the planet.” Yet many remain skeptical—and it’s easy to understand why. Mining is one of the dirtiest industries, contributing upwards of 5% of global carbon emissions. And then there are the local effects, including air pollution that harms nearby communities and concerns about land-use rights given mining often happens on Indigenous land. Forrest’s penchant for spectacle and disarming warmth can be helpful in making the climate case—but it has also raised some eyebrows in the wider environmental community. He’s the type of person who will greet you cheerfully, no matter who you are. In January, at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a right-wing provocateur chased him down to press him for an interview. Forrest gracefully put his arm around him and disarmed him, saying, “Get rid of that mic, and I’ll talk to you. I quite like what you’re doing.” He jumps on Fox News, keen to make his case even to the most incredulous of audiences. When we arrived in Vegas, Gene Simmons, the rock star and KISS front man, was there to greet him. From Vegas, Simmons joined Forrest on some TV hits to Australia. At the 2023 U.N. climate conference in Dubai, where companies rented out hotel ballrooms and event spaces to promote their climate programs, Forrest brought Fortescue’s 246-ft. ammonia-powered ship to the harbor and invited dignitaries on board for cocktails. Indeed, the man is so amiable, so good at making a splash, that it forces you to pause and ask, “What’s the catch?” When Forrest wanted to endorse an organization pushing for a “fossil-fuel nonproliferation treaty,” the organization’s leaders were unsure how the backing of a mining boss would be received. So they commissioned a study of Fortescue’s climate and environmental practices, assessing its plans and performance against 63 criteria, including its impact to local communities, laid out by the U.N. The report found the company to be exceptional, with quibbles so minor that explaining them here would require a crash course in the dense lexicon of climate reporting. “He’s the real deal,” says Tzeporah Berman, who runs the treaty initiative. If you follow Forrest around long enough, you’ll notice he returns to some of the same arguments and language. In settings with other business leaders, he likes to cite his company’s financial returns. “For those who don’t know me, my name is Andrew Forrest,” he said at a September climate forum. “I founded a company which has Australia’s highest shareholder return in history.” For climate advocates, Forrest citing his mining company’s financial performance might sound a bit crass coming from a billionaire who hops around the world on a private plane. But the message is a critical one: Forrest’s financial credentials signal credibility to the private sector. And it is precisely what makes Forrest so unique among his peers. Not only does he articulate a financial case for decarbonizing an industrial company, but he also emphasizes it will happen in the next five years. That’s not a goal, he says, but a hard deadline. He has told facilities managers that if they haven’t figured out how to ditch fossil fuels on-site by 2030, he will shut down their plants. And he has parted ways with many senior executives who paid lip service to his climate ambition but didn’t feel committed to executing it. “We had people that said they were for going green,” he tells me, “but actually thought it was the dumbest idea ever.” Let’s just be clear here. The 2030 deadline puts Fortescue in a class of its own. Apart from big technology firms (which are easier to decarbonize), large industrial companies that have engaged in the climate conversation have set mid-century targets. And it’s assumed these targets will be met with some reliance on offsets, where companies pay others to cut emissions rather than doing it themselves. Fortescue will not use offsets, Forrest says. And when I ask him what Fortescue will look like in 20 years, he rejects the question out of hand. “Twenty years, it’s really someone else’s problem,” he says, so brusquely that he later apologetically acknowledges his harsh tone. Making such a bold commitment to climate at a publicly traded company requires a bullish financial case, and there are several components to his argument. For his electrification drive—think of the mining trucks or mining-site operations—the promise is savings as the up-front cost reduces fuel usage over the long term. It also brings with it a knock-on financial benefit: creating “green iron ore” and “green steel” will give Fortescue a leg up selling its product, as its customers look to decarbonize their own products. And doing the legwork now in developing this technology will create a new revenue stream for the company as it sells it to others. The most significant of those technologies is green hydrogen, a fuel created by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using an electric current powered by renewable energy; this green fuel can replace fossil fuels in heavy industry and transportation. The company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to build out green-hydrogen production facilities in Australia, the U.S., Norway, and Brazil. More than any of his other green ambitions, its Fortescue’s hydrogen goals that attract the most attention of investors. Over the past five years, the hydrogen sector has been on a rollercoaster ride as companies committed billions to mega projects designed to bring green hydrogen to market. But a series of hiccups—from a lack of infrastructure to support it to policy challenges—have led companies to rethink their investments. Fortescue is not immune. Last year, the company laid off 700 workers as it downscaled its hydrogen ambitions. Many climate activists interpreted the hydrogen pullback as evidence that Forrest lacks sincerity. And yet, for better or worse, there is perhaps no better way to convince the financial community of a commitment to delivering a return than layoffs and reorganization. So how does the market assess Fortescue’s climate goals? In finance lingo, Fortescue has a price-to-earnings ratio similar to, if slightly below, those of its mining peers. That’s a standard metric that financial analysts use as a shorthand to assess the growth prospects of a publicly listed business. Fortescue does a little better than its peers on the price-to-net-asset-value ratio, a key mining-industry metric because it shows how much investors are valuing the core assets of a company, in this case mines. But there’s little to show that the company’s climate commitment is responsible for its financial performance. On earnings calls, analysts probe Fortescue executives about various green initiatives, but the traders whose actions determine the stock price are more concerned that they will make a profit in the short term. “The main thing driving share prices of mining stocks at the moment is their payouts,” says James Whiteside, head of corporate, metals and mining at Woods Mackenzie. And therein lies what is perhaps Forrest’s biggest challenge—more than the state of the hydrogen business, more than the staff turnover. To persuade executives to spend billions on bold bets to take their companies green, they will want to know that their valuations will be rewarded. And, right now, the market seems unsure, to put it mildly. You might even say it seems uninterested. When I last caught up with Forrest in January, the global mood around climate had shifted dramatically since we first met a year prior. Donald Trump was back in the White House, and the private-sector enthusiasm around all things climate—already tapering last year—had become even more muted. Driving down the promenade in Davos, Forrest betrayed some frustration with his counterparts who have used the zeitgeist shift as cover to change course. At many firms, climate and ESG—short for environment, social, and governance—strategies were being rebranded using more palatable terms like resilience or energy security, even as the core of the work continues. At others, those commitments have been walked back entirely to save money and face. “It’s letting the wolves out of the cages who never wanted to do anything for the climate anyway, and they’re saying that they now don’t have to,” he says. “Well, all right, let’s just see how that works out for you.” Forrest remains defiant. If the Republican-controlled government in Washington nixes clean-technology tax incentives, “you’ll see hundreds of billions of dollars extracted out of the U.S. economy, including ours,” he tells me. And he has the backing of political leaders in Australia, where Fortescue is headquartered. “It’s absolutely critical,” says Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Forrest’s climate efforts. But, while policy shifts may change the dynamics of specific projects, the direction of travel won’t change. Fortescue’s plan is rooted in sound economics, he says, and that’s not changing. “We’re staying the course,” he tells me. “Real zero is completely bankable.” No matter what President Trump does, global markets are changing, increasingly favoring products that are cleaner and resilient to climate risks—whether they are created by the physical world or by our response to them. But assessing the speed of those changes—and then shifting your business to reflect that speed—is a very challenging task even for the most climate-savvy executive. Forrest’s bet is that being first will pay huge dividends. It’s a simple concept, but few have been bold enough to spend billions to test it. For the sake of the planet and everyone who lives on it, let’s hope he’s right.
Diana Taurasi, the all-time leading scorer in WNBA history and a six-time Olympic gold medalist, usually starts preparing for her upcoming season on January 1. She gives herself four months to work on all facets of her game before training camp with the Phoenix Mercury begins. This New Year’s Day, however, hit different. “I just didn’t have it in me,” Taurasi, 42, tells TIME from her home in Phoenix. “That was pretty much when I knew it was time to walk away.” In an exclusive conversation with TIME, Taurasi reveals publicly for the first time that she’s retiring from basketball. “Mentally and physically, I’m just full,” says Taurasi, who played all 20 of her WNBA seasons for the Mercury. “That’s probably the best way I can describe it. I’m full and I’m happy.” Taurasi leaves the WNBA with a strong claim to the title of women’s-basketball GOAT. “I have a resume,” says Taurasi. “It’s not up to me to grade it.” Besides her record number of points (10,646 in the regular season, nearly 3,000 clear of the runner-up, Tina Charles), Taurasi hit more three-pointers than anyone in WNBA history and is fourth all-time in assists. She won a trio of WNBA championships (in 2007, 2009, and 2014), three in the NCAA, six Euroleague titles during her 12-year overseas career in Russia and Turkey, and the six Olympic golds, an all-time record for a basketball player. She was the 2009 WNBA MVP, a two-time WNBA Finals MVP, a three-time Euroleague MVP, and a three-time Russian League Player of the Year. “Until someone comes along and eclipses what she’s done, then yes, she is” the GOAT, says Geno Auriemma, who coached Taurasi in college and at the Olympics in 2012 and 2016. “My scoring record, or the six gold medals, someone’s going to come around that has the same hunger, the same addiction to basketball, and put those records in a different way, a different name,” says Taurasi. “That’s what sports is all about. That’s going to be fun to watch. Hopefully not soon.” She leaves a WNBA on stronger ground than when she entered. Her excellence played a key role in the league’s survival and success. “You can’t tell the story of the WNBA without Diana,” says NBA commissioner Adam Silver. “She helped build the league into what it is today and inspired generations of fans and players, including many who have gone on to play in the WNBA. Diana had an outsized role in the growth of women’s basketball.” During Taurasi’s peak years on the court, you couldn’t keep your eyes off her. She played the game with a confidence and fluidity that appeared unmatched in the women’s game. Every time she touched the ball, you expected her to make something happen: perhaps a no-look pass over a smaller guard whom the 6-ft.Taurasi towered over, or a spin move around a taller player who couldn’t keep up with her, or a three-pointer going to her left, to her right, off the dribble, standing still. “It’s just the full package,” says Sue Bird, the WNBA’s all-time assists leader and Taurasi’s teammate in college, on five Olympic teams, and for seven seasons in Russia. “You add on some swag to that, some sh-t talking to that–the more you piss her off, the better she plays, people are entertained by that.” “Just seeing her transcend the game, watching little girls want to play like her, her style, her flair, her bravado, you know, her swagger, it's been an unbelievable treat,” says the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, LeBron James. “She's one of the all-time greatest, and she will leave her mark on the game of basketball the moment she ties those shoes up and throws them over the pole line. It’s been an honor. All love.” Taurasi carried a cool quotient that the WNBA needed in its formative years. “Dee is the one that did have street cred,” says Bird. “You walk around airports, you’re in different cities, you’re over here, there, people knew Dee everywhere you go.” Bird has her biases in the whole GOAT discussion, but when she makes her best effort to disassociate her close relationship with Taurasi in the debate, she still lands on her friend. “There are players that have full games,” says Bird. “You can talk about Maya Moore in this conversation, Candace Parker, Lisa Leslie. You could talk about all these great names. The difference is the way she makes her teammates feel. The way she raises the level of her teams. That, to me, is the separator.” Taurasi’s boisterous personality was clear from her earliest days, growing up in Los Angeles and in Chino, Calif., where she moved when she was 8. The daughter of immigrants—her mother Liliana is from Argentina, and her father Mario was born in Italy and raised in Argentina—Taurasi hung up bullhorns in her house that her parents brought back from their home country. She used the open end as an indoor hoop. “I don't know how many times my mom was like, ‘Go outside, stop bouncing the ball,’” she says. “As a little kid, being a kid of immigrants coming to this country, basketball always made me feel a part of something,” says Taurasi. “It always made me feel comfortable. It brought me to a place where, you know, I could love others. I could love myself. It really is, to me, the one thing that always loved me back.” Her parents sacrificed for her pursuit of basketball, once skipping out on the light bill when she was in eighth grade to buy her a new pair of Nikes she so badly wanted. College hoops power UConn offered Taurasi, who starred for Chino’s Don Lugo High School, where she graduated in 2000, a scholarship. Before Taurasi’s recruiting visit, the UConn coaching staff gave players a scouting report. “The message that came through was, ‘This kid likes to have fun,’” says Bird, who is two years older than Taurasi and won a pair of championships as UConn’s point guard. “So make sure she has a good time. Wink wink.” Bird found Taurasi charismatic, and someone you felt like was already part of the team. The players took her to Huskies, a UConn bar. “She was a baby, but we got her in and she was in the middle of the dance floor doing all kinds of West Coast dance moves,” says Bird. “She had some sort of, like, robot situation happening.” Auriemma pushed Taurasi, and the two stubborn competitors could clash. Taurasi was loath to draw offensive fouls, so in one practice, Auriemma told Taurasi to stand in the lane: he ordered each player to dribble down from half-court and run into her, and for Taurasi to take the hit and fall to the floor and take a proper charge. “I didn’t fall once,” says Taurasi. “I was like, ‘Nah, I’m good.’” Auriemma tossed her out of practice. She told Auriemma she wanted to wear No. 0 at UConn. Auriemma objected; he didn’t like the negative implications of that number attached to a player of Taurasi’s caliber. “She goes, ‘OK, I’ll wear double zero,’” says Auriemma. “So that’s what we’re dealing with.” He called her a double dumbass for the wisecrack and pushed her to wear No. 3., because Auriemma believed she could be the Babe Ruth of women’s basketball. She wore that number throughout her college and pro careers, and delivered three straight national titles to UConn, from 2002 through 2004, while also winning back-to-back Naismith College Player of the Year awards and Final Four Most Outstanding Player honors. “I wish I had $1 for every time I heard a guy say, ‘She's the only reason I would ever watch a women's basketball game,’” says Auriemma. “And this was 25 years ago, right? Obviously, we've evolved as men. But she had the ability to bring people to the game that otherwise would not think about watching a women's basketball game.” And many of them stuck with it, giving some new thunderbolt—like, say, a Caitlin Clark—a solid base to expand. “If I had an opportunity to play basketball and compete, that's what I was doing,” says Taurasi. “At the end of the day, the work and being able to compete, those are the things that I love the most out of anything. Those are the only things that resonate with me. Even now when I watch sports, ‘Are you competitive? Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to evolve?’ Those are all the things that the game of basketball gave me.” The Mercury selected Taurasi with the top overall pick in the 2004 WNBA draft. She more than met the sky-high expectations for her pro career. That same year, she also began her storied Olympic odyssey, helping the U.S. win gold in Athens by providing punch off the bench. “She rolls up to the first game, we get ready, we're putting our stuff on to go warm up, and she brought two left shoes,” says Bird, who shared a Team USA backcourt with Taurasi in Athens, Beijing (‘08), London (‘12), Rio (‘16), and Tokyo (‘21). The team was staying on a cruise ship, the Queen Mary 2. “Somebody had to haul ass back to the boat and get her other shoes so she could play,” says Bird. “Just like, dumb sh-t. She did that a lot.” Taurasi won a lot too: she’s 42-0 in Olympic basketball games. “She can't wait for the big game,” says Bird. “Can't wait for the big moment. When you look next to you and see someone giving off that vibe, that aura, for a lot of people, it calms them. Because you’re like, ‘Oh, she’s going to play great.’” At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Taurasi spotted her hero, Argentine soccer icon Diego Maradona, in the stands at a men’s basketball game and asked Silver, then the NBA’s deputy commissioner, if he could help arrange an introduction. Someone escorted her to Maradona’s seat at halftime. “I think Diana was probably a little nervous,” says Silver. “But she would never let you know it, just like she never shied away from a big moment on the court.” She gave Maradona two kisses and a hug, told her she loved him, and snapped a photo with him. “That was the only person I've ever asked to get a picture with,” she says. During the 2016 Rio Olympics, the women’s and men’s U.S. basketball teams again stayed on a cruise ship. Players from both teams, a group of NBA and WNBA stars, were sitting around one night, having a few laughs, a few drinks, and talking some serious smack, as is the habit of super competitive and successful athletes. Draymond Green, a noted NBA rabble-rouser known more for his defensive instincts, physicality, passing skills, and penchant for drawing technical fouls and suspensions than his shooting and scoring ability, was going on about something. Taurasi said, “Hey, Draymond, how does it feel to be the only person in this room who’s never been double-teamed?” James and Taurasi spent time together at four Olympics, starting in Athens in 2004, the first for both of them. They’ve become good friends. “She’s just super-duper, down-to-earth, supercool, super witty, talks her sh-t too,” says James. “It's always fun being around her. She keeps you on your toes. She's just a super competitor. No matter men or women, she's one of the fiercest competitors that I've ever spent time with. She's a champion. She's a warrior.” Taurasi also won three World Cups, in 2010, 2014 and 2018. In the 2010 World Cup final in the Czech Republic, the U.S. faced the home team in the gold-medal game, and the Americans couldn’t quite shake off the Czechs. At one point Auriemma, the national coach for that tournament, ordered the team to switch from man-to-man into a 2-3 zone. A Czech player hit a shot from the corner. “We inbound the ball, we go down there, Diana stops like 32 feet from the basket and drains a three,” says Auriemma. “She turns around, runs all the way across the court to go past our bench, to look me in the face, in front of the entire Olympic team, and go, ‘Get the f-ck out of this zone.’” Auriemma started screaming “man, man.” The U.S. won by 20. “And the rest of the guys on the team, the look on their faces,” says Auriemma. “I had to go, ‘Yo, guys, don't get any ideas.’” Taurasi calls herself a “kind asshole,” a descriptor Bird insists fits. “In certain scenarios, especially on the court, that's really where it comes out,” says Bird. “She can be an asshole. She can poke fun at people and this and that.” She’ll also often make sure that there are no hard feelings afterward. “The kindness, it oozes,” says Bird. “You go to dinner and it's a big group, guaranteed she's gonna pay the check. There are just these ways in which she's incredibly generous and kind.” When Taurasi first went to play in Russia, she noticed right away that people there didn’t smile much. “Once you're in with them, you're in for life,” says Bird. "But they can give you a little cold shoulder at first.” Taurasi announced a goal—make a Russian smile every day. She’d give people nicknames or say silly stuff. “Spasibo,” pronounced “spa-see-ba,” means “thank you” in Russian. Taurasi would say “spa-see-ba deeba.” “Deeba is not a word,” says Bird. But Taurasi would "spa-see-ba deeba" to her teammates, the workers in the grocery store they shopped in almost every day, anyone she could. And they’d laugh. Mission accomplished. “It’s so stupid,” says Bird. Taurasi relished her time in Russia. These days, WNBA players have been afforded opportunities to make more money in the offseason, so they’re less likely to have to leave home to play professionally in far-flung places like Russia, Turkey, and China. For example, Unrivaled, the new 3-on-3 league launched by New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart and the Minnesota Lynx’s Napheesa Collier, whose inaugural season began in January, offers an average salary of $222,222. (The WNBA average salary clocked in at $119,590 last season.) “If you asked the 22-year-old me, ‘Would you rather play in Moscow or Miami?’ I think I would have picked Miami,” says Taurasi. “But you asked the 42-year-old me, and those 12 years I spent overseas, especially the 10 I spent in Russia, I learned lessons that you can't learn anywhere else. It made me know I can live anywhere in the world with anyone, get along with any type of person, whether there was a language barrier, a mindset barrier, a political barrier, you name it, you had to make it work. I'm really grateful I got to do that.” (This, of course, was before the arrest and incarceration of WNBA star Brittney Griner, with whom Taurasi played on both the Mercury and Russia’s UMMC Ekaterinburg—not to mention the last three Olympic teams—and the current political situation in Russia.) Taurasi even sat out the 2015 WNBA season, at the request of her Russian team, to rest. The team was paying her some $1.5 million; she was making $107,000, the league maximum at the time, in the WNBA. (The WNBA maximum was $241,984 in 2024.) “Russia was the place where I really dug in and changed where my career was going,” she says. “Not only did I want to be the best player in the world, I wanted to be the highest-paid player in the world. You can only do that in a free market. And that's what overseas gives us.” She’d sometimes, however, forget to bring her jersey to games. “One time I wasn't playing in the game, I had to f-cking go back to her apartment to get it,” says Bird. “You're like, What happened to your brain?’’ Taurasi had no use for a victory tour–you know, the thing where athletes go into a season announcing it will be their last and are honored and showered with gifts at their final games in arenas or stadiums. “I felt like 20 years of opposing arenas was enough,” says Taurasi. “All I need is another pair of sneakers.” So what’s next? “That’s the question that I still don't have an answer for,” says Taurasi. “I really enjoy taking my kids to school, being home when they're home, not leaving for a week at a time.” Taurasi and her wife Penny Taylor, a former teammate with the Mercury who played internationally for Australia and is member of the international basketball federation (FIBA) Hall of Fame, have two children, Leo, who turns 7 on March 1, and Isla, 3. Leo has started playing hoops. Penny coaches his team. “I’m the disgruntled assistant mom coach,” says Taurasi. She says she just needs a “sabbatical.” But when I point out that people return to their jobs after one of those, she clarifies. She’s not going to pull a Tom Brady. “I’m definitely retired,” Taurasi says. The game and all its fans will miss her. And vice versa. “I’m going to miss the competition,” says Taurasi. “I'm going to miss trying to get better every single offseason. I'm going to miss the bus rides, shootarounds. I'm going to miss the inside jokes. I'm going to miss the locker room, the things that come with being on a basketball team. All those things, I'll deeply miss.”
It’s impossible to predict when you’re going to die. But if you’re aiming for a long and healthy life, it pays to worry less about your genes—which you can’t change anyway—and more about your lifestyle and surroundings. That’s the conclusion of a new study in Nature Medicine that takes a broad look at the longstanding environment-vs.-heredity debate, and comes down firmly in the environment camp. The work was based on data from more than 490,000 people, all of whom are registered with the UK Biobank, a massive collection of participants' detailed medical histories including gene sequencing; MRIs; blood, urine, and saliva samples; family health stories; and more. Researchers used this rich data to study the influence of genetics and more than 100 environmental factors on the risk of 22 diseases that make up most of the major causes of death. To do that, they focused especially closely on a subset of 45,000 people whose blood samples had been subjected to what is known as proteomic profiling: an analysis of thousands of proteins that help determine physical age compared to calendar age. “We can get an estimation of how quickly or slowly each participant is aging biologically compared to their chronological age,” says lead author Austin Argentieri, a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. “This is referred to as the ‘proteomic age gap,’ since it’s the gap in years between protein-predicted age and chronological age. [It] is a very strong predictor of mortality…[and] it is also associated strongly with many important aging traits like frailty and cognitive function.” Enterprises eye China’s huge consumer market Branded Content Enterprises eye China’s huge consumer market By China Daily Just knowing that age gap, of course, is only part of the picture. Equally important is the cause of that gap. To help determine that, the researchers analyzed people's many environmental and behavioral exposures that contribute to disease and biological age. These factors include income, neighborhood, employment status, marital status, education, and diet, as well as whether people smoke or exercise regularly. To cover the genetic side, researchers analyzed people’s genomes, looking for genetic markers associated with the 22 key diseases. In addition, they noted which individuals had already developed any of those diseases. Read More: 12 Weird Symptoms Dermatologists Say You Should Never Ignore The results were striking. Environment and lifestyle accounted for 17% of people’s disease-related risk of dying, compared to just 2% for genetics. Of the various environmental exposures, smoking was the riskiest behavior, linked to 21 diseases; socioeconomic factors such as household income, neighborhood, and employment status were associated with 19 diseases; and a lack of physical activity was linked to 17 diseases. Environmental exposures had the greatest impact on lung, heart, and liver disease, while genetics played the greatest role in determining a person’s risk of breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers, plus dementia. Disturbingly, the study also revealed that the influence of environment begins early in life. High or low body weight as young as age 10 and maternal smoking around birth were found to affect health and mortality many decades later. The investigators looked not just at the factors that increase the risk of dying from one of the chronic diseases, but also those that decrease it. Of those, living with a partner, being employed, and being financially comfortable had the greatest effect on extending lifespan. “Our research demonstrates the profound health impact of exposures that can be changed either by individuals or through policies to improve socioeconomic conditions, reduce smoking, or promote physical activity,” said senior author Cornela van Duijn, professor of epidemiology at Oxford Population Health, in a statement that accompanied the release of the paper. The researchers do not see the current study, for all its sweep, to be the end of their work. In the future, they recommend looking more closely at multiple factors, including diet, exposure to novel pathogens such as COVID-19 and bird flu, and environmental factors such as plastics and pesticides. All of those are potentially powerful—but understudied—influences on lifespan.
