Fountain of youth

The human heart beats 100,000 times a day, more than 2,5 billion times in a lifetime. It pumps about five litres of blood a minute or about 7,500 litres every day – the equivalent of filling up an SUV’s gas tank 100 times a day.

But the human heart is also a machine that is not built to last. In the US alone, more than 600,000 people die from heart disease every year.

This week, contributor Kyle Hill meets two dedicated scientists whose journey has led to a groundbreaking discovery. GDF 11, a protein discovered in mice by doctors at Harvard University, has been proven to turn back the cardiac clock and make an old heart young again.

In western Montana, Rachelle Oldmixon takes us on a trip to Glacier National Park which is experiencing global warming at an alarming rate.

The area is warming at two to three times the global average, and climate change is affecting the Pacific fish, the Cutthroat Trout, which is the mainstay of the economy there.

Rachelle explores the threats facing trout in the area and finds out what ecologists are doing to fix the problem.

San Francisco, California is an earthquake-prone area. Engineers there are now developing new technologies that create structures that could abrsorb the impact of an earthquake, while leaving the rest of the structure in-tact.

The technology was inspired by car crash crumple zones, a safety feature, often at the front of a car. And the idea has inspired engineers to design the world’s widest bridge with sections that could absorb earthquake damage.

Marita Davison goes inside the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and also looks at an office building using similar seismic innovations.