A few weeks ago, a rare phenomenon slipped through the headlines. People of South Korea, at home or scattered all across the globe collectively - and in a single day - became a year younger than they had been the day before.
The change reaches back to a law past in December, which changed the way the East Asian nation counts the age of its population.
The law scrapped the "Korean age" system, which counts babies as being one year old on the day they are born and then adds another year every January 1 (regardless of actual birth dates), in favour of an international system which counts a person's age according to their birth date.
The change was expected to have a fairly minimal impact on the day-to-day business of running an entire nation, but the somewhat-philosophical impact of an entire population collectively becoming a year or two younger raises some intriguing questions about how we consider age at all.
In the annals of science, chronological age (or the number that you count on your birthday) is only one way we consider age; the other is your biological age, which can - depending on a slew of lifestyle and health factors - either speed ahead of our chronological age, roughly keep up, or (if you're lucky) lag behind a few years.
"The variables that determine biological ageing overlap with the ones that influence health more generally," according to the publication, Popular Science. "Smoking, obesity, and inflammation markers in your blood are all factors that causally increase your biological age."
So, it stands to reason that balanced nutrition, adequate physical activity, clean air and water, low stress, strong social support systems, and access to healthcare can help slow down the biological ageing process. Before we get too carried away, though, the brains trust note that while a healthy lifestyle is a good habit to get into, all this talk about our bio-age doesn't bode well for science fiction; unfortunately, there's no turning the clock back.
