Apple is getting serious about longevity

Neko Health lands in New York

UCL finds a difference between loneliness and isolation

Lumosity maps the mood of half a million people

Michelin gives Schloss Elmau its 2026 Wellness Award

Apple has spent years counting your steps. Now it wants to tell you how you're aging. Health Age compares VO₂ max, resting heart rate, sleep and HRV with your chronological age, with the option to add blood results including LDL and A1c.

The redesigned Health app also gets a Longevity section and movement assessments using the iPhone camera and Apple Watch. In the US, users will be able to order more than 50 lab biomarkers through Quest Diagnostics for $119. The new app arrives later this year, initially in US English.

None of this is especially exotic, which is rather the point. Longevity has spent years living in private clinics, podcasts and expensive testing programs. Apple is about to put it in millions of pockets.

Twenty five thousand New Yorkers joined the waitlist before Neko Health opened its first American clinic in SoHo this week. The company was founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne and has already scanned more than 100,000 people across Sweden and the UK.

The $499 appointment takes about an hour. Neko scans and tests cardiovascular health, skin, blood and body composition before a clinician takes you through the results. No MRI, no radiation and, unlike the usual annual physical, no waiting several days for somebody to call about the bloodwork.

The number worth remembering is 75 percent. That's how many members Neko says book and prepay for their next scan. Miami is next, with Washington and San Francisco planned. Preventive healthcare is rarely something people queue to do twice.

Friends are good for you. More interesting is whether the body can tell when they're missing. Researchers including University College London followed 2,343 older Americans and compared different forms of social connection with measures of biological aging.

Ten years later, social isolation was associated with accelerated aging across several epigenetic measures. Loneliness showed a more limited association. The study is observational, so it cannot say that one caused the other.

The distinction is the good bit. Being alone and feeling alone are not quite the same thing, and the body may know the difference too.

Maybe don't make any major life decisions at 2am. Researchers looked at mood and sleep reports from 468,092 Lumosity users aged 20 to 79 and found a remarkably consistent rhythm. Mood tended to be lower late at night and in the morning, then better through the afternoon and evening.

People who reported sleeping longer also tended to report better moods. The data is self reported and Lumosity users aren't everyone, but nearly half a million people makes this an unusually large look at how mood moves through an ordinary day. If nothing else, sleep on it and see how things look after lunch.

Separately, Lumosity is moving from brain games toward brain health. LumosityRx, its prescription app for adults with ADHD, has been cleared by the FDA after a controlled study of 560 adults aged 22 to 55 found a statistically significant improvement in an objective measure of attention compared with a sham program.

Six spas should do it. Michelin has given its 2026 Wellness Award to Schloss Elmau, tucked into a valley in the Bavarian Alps. There are adults only and family spas, pools, yoga, Pilates, traditional Chinese medicine and enough mountain air to fill the weekend.

The reason we'd go is everything else. Schloss Elmau has concerts and literary festivals, a two Michelin starred restaurant and its own bookshop. It also holds three Michelin Keys.

A hotel where you can swim in the morning, spend an afternoon in a bookshop, dress for dinner and hear a concert afterwards sounds rather more appealing than spending three days discussing cortisol. Wellness is better when you occasionally forget you're doing it.