Click here to view the embedded video.

Sponsored by the Senate Special Committee on Aging, the fair brought together about two dozen groups — ranging from the Alzheimer’s Foundation to the SilverSneakers (you can seen them at work in the video above, promoting healthy and appropriate exercise) — for a three hour demonstration of their wares. AARP and the AARP Foundation were among those presenting.

Dr. Stephen Axelrod demonstrated his tabsafe medication dispenser (at left). You load the gizmo with pills, and it makes sure you take them on schedule. It has a lot of ways to remind you, and your loved ones, if medications are missed or if you don’t respond in a predictable way to its electronic signals. Microsoft and its Kinect were in the house; so was Wii. The National Institutes of Health promoted a major summit, scheduled for October, where they’ll bring together 50 top researchers to explore the connections between aging and chronic disease. And Christy Carter, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, described an ongoing project coordinated by its Institute on Aging, involving 1,600 older adults to determine whether physical activity or health education can prevent or delay major physical and cognitive  problems among those at risk. Listen to an interview with Carter below:

The National Association of Area Agencies on Aging presented its policy priorities, appropriately for a Capitol Hill event. “Tight budgets,” they write in their brochure, “demand wise investment.” Their plea? “Deficit reduction must not be used as an excuse to undermine the very programs that keep our nation’s older adults from falling into poverty, suffering ill health or otherwise struggling to live independently and with dignity.”

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The following is a guest post by Sid Kirchheimer:

Love don’t cost a thing?  Not according to the latest findings of the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. More than 10 percent of total financial losses in online scams reported last year — about $56 million out of the $525 million overall — involved romance ripoffs.

The biggest losers, in money and heartbreak: Women 50 and older, who lost $34 million, roughly two of every three dollars in romance scams. Similarly aged men were swindled out of nearly $5 million, more than half of the total reported losses by all male victims.

Keep in mind those figures are just from reports filed about various scams with the cybercrime-tracking agency. Older Americans are less likely than other age groups to admit to being victimized in any type of scam, say officials.

Read: Confessions of a scam artist

Romance scammers may be self-employed or part of overseas organized crime rings, sending hundreds of emails per day to members of online dating websites and chat rooms. Using stolen photos, they customize their phony identities based on targets’ profiles — you mention that you love dogs, they claim to volunteer at an animal shelter, for instance — and after a few weeks of sweet cyber-talk, the inevitable hook: Your new love needs your help — aka your money — for a personal emergency or plane ticket to meet.

Those who use online dating sites should educate themselves about how these scammers operate and how to look for warning signs of a sweetheart swindle.

Meanwhile, another report finds that “real” love has its own costs — at least come breakup time: risk of identity theft.

It occurs when a revenge-seeking ex posts details online of a former sweetheart’s bank accounts, Social Security number, email address and passwords. After Splitsville, such revenge leaks occur to at least one partner in one of 12 couples older than 45 (and one in eight couples of all age groups), reports online security vendor McAfee, after interviewing 1,200 Americans between 18 and 54.

And it’s not just details custom-made for identity thieves that warrant for cyber-posting concern. McAfee says that one in four boomer-aged interviewees admitted to sending risqué photos by email, text or social media to their partners (usually for Valentine’s Day).

Photo: Patrick Q/flickr

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I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. If a man of mature age loses interest in and abandons mathematics, the loss is not likely to be very serious either for mathematics or for himself.

Fortunately, though, a once-obscure University of New Hampshire math instructor named Yitang “Tom” Zhang didn’t conform to Hardy’s truism. Zhang, who reportedly is in his 50s, has written a paper that apparently provides a major step forward in solving one of the twin prime conjectures, a problem that was first pondered back in the third century B.C. by the Ptolemaic Greek mathematician Euclid.

If figures make your head spin, Nature explains that primes are whole numbers, divisible only by one and themselves. Twin primes are pairs of primes that differ in value by 2. Examples of twin primes range from 3 and 5, to really huge numbers such as 2,003,663,613 × 2^195,000 − 1 and 2,003,663,613 × 2^195,000 + 1. OK, we’ve probably confused you even more at this point. The key question is whether or not there is an infinite number of such twin primes.

Zhang didn’t quite answer that question. But he came up with what other mathematicians say is a key piece of the puzzle. In a paper submitted in April and recently accepted by the prestigious journal Annals of Mathematics, Zhang presented a proof showing that the number of primes less than 70 million units apart is infinite.Though 70 million seems like a huge number, Nature explains: “The existence of any finite bound, no matter how large, means that that the gaps between consecutive numbers don’t keep growing forever.”

One of the mathematicians who evaluated Zhang’s article called it a “landmark theorem.” Daniel Goldston, a number theorist at San Jose State University, marveled that Zhang had made a dent in “one of those problems you weren’t sure people would ever be able to solve.”

But what really was mind-blowing was that the advance had been made by a virtual unknown — a Chinese immigrant who, after earning his doctorate at Purdue University in 1991, reportedly had experienced such difficulty finding a job in his field that he’d been compelled at one point to make hoagies at Subway to support himself.

“The big experts in the field had already tried to make this approach work,” University of Montreal mathematician Andrew Granville explained in an article on the website of the Simons Foundation, a science and math organization. Zhang is “not a known expert, but he succeeded where all the experts had failed.”

So how did Zhang do it? Perseverance was an important factor. He told the Simons Foundation writer Erica Klarreich that even as he struggled for years to make ends me, he continued to follow developments and read papers in number theory, a field of mathematics that fascinated him, even though it hadn’t been his area of study at Purdue. “There are a lot of chances in your career,” he said, “but the important thing is to keep thinking.”

Zhang said that he spent several years contemplating the twin prime conjecture before suddenly having an epiphany while he killing time in a friend’s backyard in Colorado, before leaving for a concert. “I immediately realized it would work,” he explained.

Zhang, who recently was invited to give a talk at Harvard University about his discovery, says he doesn’t feel any resentment about having labored in obscurity for so many years, and has no desire to become famous. “My mind is very peaceful,” he explained.  Those are remarkably gentle words, coming from someone who’s struck a huge blow in the battle for respect for older intellects.

Photo: Lisa Nugent, UNH Photographic Services

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As Modern Healthcare reports, the data show enormous disparities in what hospitals charge for the same treatments — not just from region to region, but even among hospitals in the same metropolitan area. Treatment for kidney and urinary tract infections, for example, typically costs $40,902 at suburban Atlanta hospital, compared with just $7,682 at a neighboring medical center. And one suburban Los Angeles hospital charges $24,176 for treatment of septicemia, a life-threatening blood infection, while another hospital less than 20 miles away charges $216,438.

Related: 29 States Get an ‘F’ for Keeping Health Costs Hidden

Jonathan Blum, acting deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which gathered the data, bluntly told reporters: “There’s no relationship that we see to charges and the quality of care that’s being provided.” Even the American Hospital Association acknowledged that the systems by which hospitals decide what to charge for services “urgently need updating.”

But while the disparities are scandalous, the cumbersome manner in which the federal government provided the data — a downloadable spreadsheet — may only add to the frustration of consumers who want to make use of the information to avoid being fleeced. Fortunately, though, a new website, OpsCost.com, is now offering to crunch the numbers and allow you to compare the charges at various hospitals in your area.

All you have to do is type in the metropolitan area in which you live and select from a pull-down menu of 100 different health-care procedures. A search of 10 hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area, for example, reveals that the cost for implanting a pacemaker ranges from $13,101 at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va., to $22,390 at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Md.

The new website actually is a side project for the developers of RentMetrics.com, a site that compares real estate rental data for developers and investors.

“We saw the data get released and realized how important it was,” cofounder George Kalogeropoulos explained in an article on the Fiscal Times website. “But [we] also saw that it was only available in a relatively inaccessible format. The site has gained a lot of traction.”

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Factoring in health care costs changes poverty statistics

While 9 percent or so of all Americans 65 and older were below the official poverty threshold in 2011 ($10,788 for an individual), 15 percent were below an alternative threshold that takes into account spending on health care.

The alternative measure also takes into account variations in the cost of living, taxes, whether a person receives food stamps, and whether a person is a homeowner, for example.

Now comes a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation that takes a state-by-state look at the alternative threshold (formally known as the “supplemental poverty measure”).

It finds that the share of older Americans living in poverty is higher in every state under the alternative measure, and at least twice as high in 12 states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nevada, Wisconsin and Wyoming. In five states (California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Nevada, Georgia and New York) and the District of Columbia, roughly one of every five residents 65 and older are living in poverty, the report says.

Politico notes that there’s a political context to the Kaiser report: “The Kaiser brief says it’s meant to provide context for the many spending proposals being tossed around — particularly those that focus on shifting costs in Medicare and paring down Social Security benefits. It also notes that adopting ‘chained CPI,’ which slows the growth of Social Security benefits, would most likely make for higher poverty rates for older seniors across both census measures.”

Max Richtman, the president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said it’s proof that the safety net needs strengthening. “The Kaiser study validates that — for a larger share of seniors — the death of a spouse or serious illness is all it takes to push many older Americans into the indignity of a poverty-ridden old age,” he says. “That’s why we continue to tell lawmakers that it is wrong to cut benefits for the oldest and most vulnerable Americans who would be least able to afford it.  In fact, the decline of employer-sponsored retirement, and the recession’s erosion of retirement savings, mean that the percentage of Americans who depend on Social Security for most of their income will only continue to grow.”

Photo by thinkpanama, via Flickr

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“‘Retirement’” once connoted a lifestyle free from the demands of work, but also reliance on personal savings and Social Security,” Gallup noted. “Both of those impressions may change if Americans carry through on their intent to continue working, at least part time, after reaching retirement age.”

And that could be a good thing, according to Gallup.

“While this could be a disappointment to some retirees, it could have benefits both socially and health-wise for Americans, if staying in the workforce keeps seniors more physically and mentally active than they would be otherwise. It would clearly help them financially, particularly if the alternative is dependency on inadequate retirement savings and an uncertain Social Security system. This, in turn, could benefit the economy, with seniors contributing experienced labor as well as earning income that fuels consumer spending and, therefore, the economy as a whole.”

Only 19 percent of those polled in April said they would choose to retire. Some 40 percent want to keep working. And another 35 percent think they will have to keep working for financial reasons.

The results changed a little with age and a lot with income. The details:

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Jeralean Talley (center) at her 113th birthday celebration in May 2012.

That said, the oldest living American has been around for a long, long time.

When Talley was born in Montrose, Ga., William McKinley was President, Henry Ford was just getting started as an automobile maker, music was played on phonographs with big horns instead of speakers, and people paid for things with silver dollars. The Internet didn’t exist, but everyone was pretty excited about Guglielmo Marconi’s recently invented wireless telegraph. Women couldn’t yet vote, and African Americans were still subject to “Jim Crow” laws that legalized racial discrimination. The U.S. flag had only 45 stars. Quite clearly, Talley has lived through some gigantic changes and historic events in her 114 years.

But enough about that. Here are some fascinating facts about Jeralean Talley, brought to you on her 114th birthday:

• For an American, the odds of reaching Talley’s age are about one in five million.
• She has good genes. Several of her 11 siblings lived well into their 90s, according to a recent USA Today article on her.
• She’s always led an active life. As a child, she worked long hours picking cotton and peanuts, and digging sweet potatoes, and still exercises by waving her arms and kicking her feet.
• She bowled until the age of 104, and once rolled a 200 game.
• After growing up in an era in which African Americans often were denied the right to vote, she told an interviewer in 2009 that she was thrilled to be able to cast a ballot for Barack Obama for President.
• She still goes fishing a couple of times every year with a younger friend she met at church.
• She was married for 52 years to her husband Alfred, who died in 1988 at the age of 95.
• Her favorite foods are potato salad, honey buns, McDonald’s chicken nuggets, and Wendy’s chili.
• According to the Detroit Free Press, she drinks black coffee with sugar every morning.
• When asked in an interview about the secret of her longevity, she lifted her arm and pointed to the sky. “Don’t ask me, ask him,” she said. “That’s in the Lord’s hands.”
• She plans to celebrate her birthday by eating out with friends from her church.
• Her motto is, “Treat others the way you want to be treated.”

Photo: Courtesy of Michael Kinloch

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Just look at this 2009 retrospective, which includes just a small portion of the portfolio that he shot from the 1940s to the mid-1970s. There’s a dramatic photo of a wounded airman being lifted from a plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific during World War II, and a heartbreaking image of a elderly Japanese couple who survived the A-bomb blast at Hiroshima. Other images show grief-stricken mourners at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral in 1945, and the serene, closed-eyes visage of singer Lena Horne. There’s a sinewy African-American laborer, clad in a T-shirt, dungarees, boots and a incongruously rakish fedora, dragging cables across a Chicago train yard — part of a landmark photojournalism project, “The Way of Life of the Northern Negro,” that Miller undertook in the late 1940s. There’s also a jazz club hipster lighting up a joint, a man being nuzzled by his Italian greyhound at a dog show, and a woman modeling a brassiere fashioned from potato chips, taken at a snack-food maker’s convention.

But Miller’s most famous and influential photograph — included in the 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art — was the one that he took on Sept. 19, 1946, of his son David Baker Miller, a moment after Miller’s wife Joan gave birth to him. In the image, David Miller — eyes closed, grimacing, glistening with amniotic fluid and attached to his mother by the umbilical cord — is being lifted upside-down by a masked obstetrician. Perhaps more vividly than any other photograph ever taken, it depicts the startling, tumultuous beginning of a human life. The image was so resonant that a panel led by astronomer Carl Sagan chose it to be included in a collection of human artifacts to be carried outside the solar system by the Voyager space probes, which were launched in 1977.

Oddly, the doctor delivering David Miller in the photo was his grandfather, Harold Wayne Miller, a prominent obstetrician at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago. “My father was proud of his work,” Wayne Miller recalled in a 2009 Smithsonian magazine interview. “So he was happy to have me in there with my camera.”

Photo: Copyright Joan Miller (courtesy of Magnum Collection)

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Those are some of the findings of a newly released Gallup poll that reveals glaring contrasts between how nonretired Americans from different income levels expect to fund their retirement years. The key takeaways:

• Among Americans with a household income of $75,000 or more, a solid majority of 65 percent expect to rely on their own retirement savings in IRAs, 401(k) plans and other tax-deferred savings vehicles, while another third are counting on a employer-sponsored pension. Only 17 percent expect Social Security to be their major income source.

• Middle-income Americans — defined in this poll as those with family incomes from $30,000 to $70,000 a year — are split more evenly, with 44 percent expecting to rely on tax-deferred retirement accounts, 33 percent counting on Social Security, and 26 percent expecting to support themselves with part-time work. Only 22 percent think that they’ll rely mostly on an employer-provided pension.

• Of those with family incomes of $30,000 or less, 42 percent envision that they’ll rely on Social Security benefits. Another 27 percent expect that they’ll get by primarily through part-time jobs, slightly more than the 26 percent who are counting mostly on IRAs or 401(k)s. Only 15 percent of the least-wealthy Americans are counting on employer-provided pensions.

The survey also reveals that many Americans probably haven’t come to terms with the economic realities of retirement. Overall, for example, about one in five Americans expect to support themselves in retirement primarily through part-time work. But according to the Social Security Administration, relatively affluent retirees must generate at least 65 percent of their pre-retirement income level to maintain their standard of living, while less-well-off Americans — who need to spend more of their income on necessities — may have to take in as much as 90 percent of what they made before retirement. What’s more, they’re likely to find it difficult to make that much, particularly if they’re at the lower end of the economic ladder, because Bureau of Labor Statistics research shows that workers in part-time positions usually earn significantly less per hour than full-time workers.

AARP Retirement Calculator: Find out if you’re saving enough

Additionally, about the same number of retirees — 20 percent — expect to live primarily on the home equity that they’ve accumulated. But that may require them to sell their homes and downsize to a condo or rented apartment, or move to a less-expensive part of the country.

As Louisiana-based financial planner John H. Gin notes, fluctuations in the real estate market can erode the value of that nest egg, and a homeowner with a paid-off mortgage may have to add rent to his or her monthly expenses. “If you plan to tap your home’s value to support your retirement, proceed with caution,” he writes. “Remember that the primary function of your home is to provide a roof over your head, and using equity to fund retirement requires careful planning.”

Finally, age also appears to significantly influence an individual’s retirement outlook. Have a look:

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