Move your mouse back and forth along the timeline to learn what may happen to you
at that age.
Age 0
Parents of small children can estimate the final height of their offspring. By the
time a boy is two and a girl 18 months, they will have reached about half their
mature height.
Age 4
Until age ten, there is little difference in the size of boys and girls. All children
tend to grow twice as fast in spring as they do in the fall, but they gain more
weight in the fall.
Age 10
Are you 10 yet? Your scrapes and cuts heal four times as fast as those of a 50 year-old!
That's because your body heals by producing new cells, but over time cells lose
their ability to divide as often.
Age 12
If you're a girl, you're taller and heavier than most boys your age—12—but
it won't last. Puberty starts first for girls, but the boys quickly catch up in
height and weight.
Age 14
You're 14.5 years old—the average life expectancy during the Early Old Stone
Age! That doesn't mean everybody died that young, but the average life span was
low because lots of children died due to disease and poor nutrition.
Age 16
Sweet 16. If you're male, you've probably started growing facial hair and developing
a deeper voice by now. If you're female, you're probably as tall as you'll get,
your breasts are developing, and you're menstruating. These are secondary sexual
characteristics—signs that you are old enough to reproduce.
Age 18
By 18, males are testosterone factories. Testosterone is a hormone secreted by the
testes, and is responsible for the development of sperm and that beard and deep
voice. As far as your body is concerned, you're itching to have kids.
Age 20
You're 20 now, and your brain weighs a hefty 3 pounds. But your neurons—brain
cells that fire electrical signals—are dying off by the thousands, so in 60
years it will weigh about 3 ounces less!
Age 22
You're 22: the average life expectancy in Rome and Britain about 2000 years ago,
when the Roman Calendar was first used. (What's the Roman calendar? Think: what
year is it now?)
Age 25
At 25, you start to lose nerve cells, which will eventually lower your response
time and co-ordination. That, and your brain shrinking, may affect your bedtime;
you'll need less sleep when you are older.
Age 28
On average, dogs don't live as long as humans, but Bluey—a Queensland Heeler
born in 1910—was the oldest pooch who ever lived at 29 years, 5 months. The
oldest cat? A 36-year-old puss named... Puss.
Age 30
Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? As we age, cartilage continues
to grow. After age 30, your earlobes may begin to droop, and your nose may widen
and lengthen by more than a centimetre.
Age 32
At age 32, Orville Wright made the first self-powered airplane flight in history
at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. Wilbur won a coin toss to try
first on Dec. 14, but the plane stalled, the brothers repaired it, and Orville took
flight a few days later.
Age 35
You're 35, and you are losing calcium. Your bones are made of a tiny framework of
tissue, and some of the framework's supports are eroding and leaving holes in the
bone—the pores of osteoporosis. That makes the bones brittle and more likely
to break in old age, especially among women.
Age 39
Aging changes your body, but it doesn't mean you'll lose your sense of adventure.
Neil Armstrong was just two weeks short of his 39th birthday when he became the
first person to walk on the moon, on July 21, 1969.
Age 40
Hold your arms straight out. Your arm-span—the distance from fingertip to
fingertip—starts to decline now that you're 40, as your bones begin to shrink.
The spongy disks in the vertebrae of your spine are also getting thinner under your
weight, too, so over the past 15 years you may have shrunk an eighth of an inch.
Age 43
One Nobel Prize is impressive, but two?! Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist,
was 43 when she won her second Nobel Prize in 1911, for isolating metallic radium.
She shared her first Nobel Prize with her husband, Pierre Curie, in 1903 for their
discovery of polonium and radium.
Age 45
Galileo built the first telescope that could be used for serious astronomical studies
in 1609, when he was 45. The telescope allowed mankind to extend one of our senses
for the first time.
Age 47
Who knew that mould could do so much good? Alexander Fleming couldn't have guessed
that when he left a plate of Staphylococcus Aureus exposed to air for a few days,
and discovered that it failed to grow where some mould—penicillium—had
settled. He was 47 in 1928 when his discovery led to penicillin, a life-saving antibiotic
drug.
Age 50
You probably have some gray hairs by your forties. That's because you're producing
less pigment at the roots of your hair. By 50, at least half your body hair is gray,
regardless of what colour it was in your youth.
Age 51
If you're a woman, 51 is around the age you'll likely reach menopause, when you'll
no longer be able to have children. That's because women around this age produce
less of the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone, which help prepare a woman's
body for pregnancy.
Age 55
Those wrinkles on your face are caused by a decrease in collagen, the major protein
of all connective tissue, and an increase in the protein elastin. When you move
your skin, it doesn't snap back into place as easily as it used to a few decades
ago. Your sweat and oil glands aren't working as well any longer, so your skin is
getting drier and thinner.
Age 58
You're also starting to burn the fat beneath your skin—that's what kept your
cheeks plump—so your skin is getting looser and may start to sag. You may
get deposits of fat where there were none before—like bags under your eyes.
Age 60
By 60, you might find the skin beneath your chin sagging. You're not growing more
skin, though; that's just fat finding a new home on your face. If you've lost permanent
adult teeth, your jawbone is shrinking, which means more wrinkles!
Age 62
Your eyeballs might sink back into your skull, but you won't feel a thing. It's
just the fat that cushions your eyeballs disappearing. And your eyebrows may get
bushy—the protein structure in the hairs is changing, and the hairs are growing
longer.
Age 65
You're 65, and if you're a woman you'll start losing weight—part of the natural
shrinkage of early old age. When do men start losing weight? Usually 10 years earlier,
around 55.
Age 67
But don't think you have to stop working or playing. Grandma Moses, an American
artist, started to paint at 67, after her husband of 40 years died. She said she
didn't want to just sit back in a rocking chair. Her paintings made her world famous,
and her career lasted 34 years, until her death at 101 in 1961.
Age 70
By 70, you've lost about a quarter of the muscle mass you had at 20. That tissue
has turned into fat, and since fat weighs less than muscle, you've lost weight.
You've also lost a third of your taste buds. Which explains why you're putting more
salt and pepper on your food—less sensitive taste organs require stronger
flavours.
Age 72
Your hair has thinned over the past 50 years; it was thickest when you were 20,
but now it may be as fine as a baby's. If you're a man, you're making up for your
hair loss on top by sprouting it in exotic places like your nose and ears.
Age 75
You're now 75, the average life expectancy at birth for a Canadian male. It's the
beginning of primary old age, and your body fat is twice that of a young adult.
Age 77
But old age doesn't have to mean weakness and poor health. American ballerina and
choreographer Martha Graham didn't retire from dancing until she was 77, in 1970,
and she continued to create dances.
Age 79
You have some 'age spots' now. They're little patches of discoloured skin caused
by an uneven distribution of melanin (which determines your skin and eye colour),
and by exposure to the sun, which damages the skin's elastic fibres and makes you
appear to age faster. Unless you are a nudist, the skin on your bum still looks
much younger than the skin on your hands.
Age 81
You're 81, the average life expectancy at birth for a Canadian female.
Age 100
About 9 in every 10 people who live to 100 are women, but no-one is quite sure why
that is.
Age 102
One male centenarian, American ragtime pianist Eubie Blake, said, "If I'd known
I was gonna live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."
Age 110
The oldest known person was a French woman named Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122.
She met Vincent Van Gogh when she was a girl, and played herself in the 1990 film
'Vincent et moi'. When she turned 120 in 1995, Calment said, "Aging suits me
rather well.... I had to wait 110 years to become famous and I intend to enjoy it
as long as possible."
|