Try this exercise: Put this book down [or just stop reading the screen] and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move. What is happening to the time gaps during which your eyes are moving? Why do you feel as though there is no break in time while you’re changing your eye position? (Remember that it’s easy to detect someone else’s eyes moving, so the answer cannot be that eye movements are too fast to see.)
Not only does our perception of time vary under different conditions, different sensory inputs do not slow down to the same subjective time:
Duration distortions are not the same as a unified time slowing down, as it does in movies. Like vision, time perception is underpinned by a collaboration of separate neural mechanisms that usually work in concert but can be teased apart under the right circumstances.
This is a fascinating and SF-mineworthy area of research.
“The only other known factor regulating longevity in response to diet restriction operates at the very end of the signaling cascade,” said Howard Hughes Medical Investigator and senior author Andrew Dillin, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory. “These two enzymes are further up the ladder, bringing us closer to the receptor that receives the signal for throwing the switch to promote a healthy lifespan.”
Identifying the receptor may allow researchers to design drugs that mimic the signal and could lead to new treatments for age-related diseases. This could enable us to reap the health benefits of calorie restriction without adhering to extreme diets in which the satisfying feel of a full stomach is strictly off limits.
The kind of medicine described is definitely near the top of my plausible future technologies that may emerge in my lifetime.
Writing of post-WWIII alternate histories, the UK government have declassified the War Book – detailed plans of how Britain would cope in the aftermath of a nuclear attack:
Although some of the plans have been revealed before – including earlier this year the scripts that would have been broadcast by the BBC in the event of a nuclear war, instructing the public not to panic – governments of the period left nothing to chance, including the censoring of private mail.
…
The country would have been divided into 12 regions, each governed by cabinet ministers with wide powers, aided by senior military officers, chief constables and judges and based in bunkers. Other senior figures would have retreated to a central government shelter under the Cotswolds.
As was pointed out in this article on Soviet invasions of the rest of the world far from the state collapsing in the event of a nuclear attack, the people would presumably become more dependent on whatever state remains. The War Book emphasises this point.
There are turbine jet-engine blades grown from a single crystal and designed to function in the most inhospitable places on the planet. There’s a swatch of the world’s blackest black, 25 times blacker than conventional black paint. There’s a lead bell that refuses to ring, a piece of bone with a saw through it, and the largest blob of Silly Putty you’re ever likely to see.
The philosophy behind the project is charming as well, an attempt to bridge the gap between the two cultures of science and art:
“It’s a way into science for arts people,” Miodownik says. “And for the scientists it’s a lesson in aesthetics and the sensual nature of what they’re doing. It’s a place for people to go to who have an idea floating around the back of their head that hasn’t bubbled to the surface yet.”
This map is a really a picture in macro-scale of the epic tank battle for the plains of Germany, that entire generations of Western and Soviet officers built careers around planning and preparing for. In the history of human civilization, the Soviet Western TVD invasion was probably the most researched, contemplated, and gamed out battle that was never actually to take place. Fifty years of voluminous strategic studies were compiled by both sides on this very subject, as both sides searched for advantages in a truly enormous field chess game.
I don’t know enough about the history to say if this is paranoiac or just horrific.
A powerfully engaging essay on the nature of mind and the perception of time over on Edge by David M. Eagleman:
Researchers 
Writing of 
A rather touching story of one man’s creation of a vast materials library of weird and wonderful substances, 
Alternate-history fans will appreciate