Once, I was at my son's school during recess and noticed that (other than a few exceptions) it was mostly boys playing kickball and girls sitting in small groups around the jungle gym chatting and playing cats cradle. At the time, I didn't think much of it, but I was reminded of it the day when I read an article about how young and old females aren't as active as males.

Researchers from Liverpool John Moores University followed 10 and 11-year-old children during recess and found that boys tend to engage in more active play than girls. On the flip side of the coin, another study found that women over age 70 are less likely to be active than men.

It's important for everyone to be active. But it's certainly important for girls (during the formative years when their bones are growing) and older women (who need to maintain bone density) to be physically active.

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Forget anti-aging creams, plastic surgery, and time machines. The only thing you need to live like you're 10 years younger is exercise.

Studies show that the most physically active folks show signs of being as much as 10 years younger on a cellular level. How can this be? Well, exercise keeps telomeres long and healthy. Telomeres are the caps on your DNA in all of your cells. Over time, they shorten, stop regenerating, and eventually die. Shortened telomeres cause us to age, and they also leave chromosomes vulnerable to damage, which can lead to diseases such as cancer. Exercise and you'll keep these buggers fit for a young life.

Pretty basic stuff. Exercise = healthy telomeres = younger cells = younger you. Got the formula? Good.

Here, more tips on how to keep your telomeres alive and well.

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There are certainly a million plus reasons to quit smoking: the smell, the cancer risks, the heart disease, etc ... But now there is a new one! If you want to have plastic surgery on your face (and if you've smoked for a long time ... you probably want to), your doctor may insist that you quit before she'll do the procedure. Smoking interferes with the healing process.

This article tells the tale of a woman who repeatedly tried to quit smoking with no success. Until! That is ... her purpose for quitting was vanity. Hooray for that! I don't honestly care what she does with her face, I'm just grateful to have one less smoker in the world. I'm also thrilled that doctors have found a legitimately convincing way to get people to stop.

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I always had good skin. The kind of skin people complimented. And, really, who bothers to compliment skin? And then I turned 30 and all those years of good skin and doing nothing to deserve it came back to bite me. All of a sudden a wrinkle appeared in between my eyes where I have the unfortunate habit of furrowing my brow. And my pores? Well, let's just say if they got any bigger small families might be able to camp in them. So I was pretty happy to see Prevention's list of 100 Ways to Look Younger.

Check out the gallery for some of my favorite tips:

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Younger siblings with older brothers may have an increased propensity to become more aggressive with time as opposed to siblings with older sisters, according to a recent study's results.

451 sibling pairs were studied by California researchers (ages nine through 18), and such factors like aggressive behavior, family economic pressures and the hostility of the parents towards the kids were observed.

The conclusions showed that the younger males with older brothers exhibited more aggressive behavior over time, as well as older siblings with younger sisters becoming less aggressive over time. Quite naturally, another conclusion to the study said that parents' hostility also played a role in the aggression development in their kids.

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We all tend to assume that as we age, our body slows down, alongside our metabolism, our stamina and our strength. But that assumption is wrong, according to the Fitness Guru at eDiets, and it's leading up to become more and more unhealthy as we age. Aging is inevitable, but it's what we do with our aging bodies that counts. Aging doesn't mean we have to give up on being fit -- in fact, it means the opposite; we should be just as hard to maintain our bodies.

Getting regular exercise and eating well won't stop the aging process, but these two important steps can slow it down -- by a lot. Don''t you think?

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Straight white teeth: a universal sign of beauty and good health. And thankfully both can be come by fairly easily if you aren't lucky enough to have them naturally, or if you've ruined them somehow in the process of living (smokers!). Of course you'll have to see your dentist to straighten out crooked teeth, and although you can go there for whitening too there are fairly effective ways to do it yourself at home. From cheap to expensive there quite a few options out there, like whitening toothpaste, whitening strips, and whitening gels -- and then of course the professional options available in the spa or dental office. What works for you? eDiets gives their opinions here, share yours in the comments!

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The quest for the "fountain of youth" of age treatments to keep ourselves looking our youngest is not something new, but it's not going away anytime soon either. And although cosmetic surgery procedures are getting more and more advanced all the time, going under the knife isn't an option for many people for obvious reasons. So here's a list of some of the latest and greatest in non-surgical age-erasing treatments, ranging in price from free (quit smoking!) to upwards of $2500 (ArteFill injections).

• Artefill is a wrinkle filler injection for small lines.
• N.V. Perricone, M.D. Cosmeceuticals' Advanced Eye Area Therapy is a topical treatment that will be available this fall at Sephora, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus.
• Affirm laser treatments.

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Okay, so you should grow old gracefully (it's just tacky to try to look 20 again), but to me gracefully means doing what you can to look as good as possible every step of the way. There's nothing wrong with putting up a little fight and giving those wrinkles a hard time of it.

There are many many things you can do to help slow the appearance and severity of natural aging, but according to this list by Clinique's dermatologist for iVillage, some of the first things on the list are to wear sunscreen diligently, wear sunglasses and avoid squinting, stop smoking (or don't ever start!), and eat a balanced nutritious diet. That's just the first 5 in a long list of tips, so see the article for 3 pages of just about everything else you can think of -- from getting enough sleep to exfoliating properly.

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When you hear that lifting weights helps people look younger you probably think along the lines of exercise and toning equals weight loss and a younger physique. And while that's obviously true, it's not the whole story. Strength training in particular can actually help you look younger from the inside out by encouraging your body to produce more of a particular growth hormone that is linked with age-related muscle loss and bone density changes.

As we age our bodies slowly decrease the amount of growth hormone produced, but strength training is a natural and healthy way to counteract this process. Just one more reason not to skip the gym!

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