Baby boomers who thought they dodged the deadly hepatitus C virus by avoiding needles, blood transfusions or high-risk sexual behavior in their youth may not be in the clear, the government warns this week.

The number of Americans dying from hepatitis C-related diseases nearly doubled from 1999 to 2007, prompting the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to call for anyone between 47 and 67 to get tested for the liver-destroying illness.

You don't need to be 24 and drink Red Bull to land a job as a software programmer or web developer, but you do need to know how to code.

Programmer jobs in tech havens like Silicon Valley may be dominated by younger employees, but there's plenty of work to go around, and plenty of training opportunities -- if you know where to look.

"Ahh, the Great Recession," we'll tell our grandchildren. "When we learned the real value of a twenty, refilled our inkjet cartridges, walked two blocks through snow to get to Starbucks."

It just doesn't work, does it? Surely the recession has had a huge impact -- an especially traumatic one for the 12.5 million American workers who are still unemployed. But it just doesn't feel like it's made the imprint on the national psyche that the Great Depression did.

Jennifer Lopez, who turns 43 in July, is at the point in her career where a lot of pop singers and actresses already are on a downward trajectory. Instead, the American Idol judge keeps expanding her horizons and growing in both popularity and wealth. That's evidenced by her top ranking in Forbes' latest list of the 100 most powerful celebrities on the planet.

Lopez, who displaced last year's No. 1, the much-younger Lady Gaga, earned an impressive $52 million over the past 12 months. In part, that's due to her $20 million salary as a judge on Idol, which heads to its season finale showdown on Wednesday.

Every May, I host a contest on my personal blog challenging both beginning and experienced bloggers to write every day of the month. Close to 250 people are participating in the fifth annual blogathon, many of them in their 40s and older.

SecondAct.com invited these bloggers to share posts this week about how they've reinvented themselves. Their stories about following passions to change careers, take up new sports, re-enter the dating scene, lose weight or become a parent for the first time are intimate, heart-felt and often inspiring.

Here are some highlights:

Stieg Larsson's story is a striking fusion of triumph and tragedy. The Swedish author's crime trilogy -- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- became a global phenomenon, with sales exceeding 50 million books, but only after Larsson died at 50 of a heart attack. He never got to savor the acclaim, and the wealth generated by the novels fueled a rancorous estate battle between members of his family and Larsson's longtime girlfriend, Eva Gabrielsson.

Gabrielsson eventually wrote a book of her own, "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me, offering glimpses of their relationship and of Larsson's writing life. Meanwhile, the clamoring of publishers to find "the next Stieg Larsson" has expanded the reach of other Nordic writers. So many are being translated into English, in fact, that there's a new nonfiction release, Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, by British author Barry Forshaw. He also wrote The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson.

The federal government revealed this week that it is moving quickly to test a potentially revolutionary new anti-Alzheimer's drug, the first treatment designed to prevent the aging-related brain disease from developing in people genetically predisposed to it.

Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama administration's secretary for Health and Human Services, announced that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be moving rapidly to test Crenezumab, a drug that attacks amyloid plaques, the fragments of abnormal protein that accumulate in the brain as Alzheimer's progresses. Although the buildup of amyloid during the disease is not yet completely understood, many scientists now believe that the process kills brain cells by interfering with their ability to use oxygen, and is the root cause of the degenerating of cognitive and memory abilities associated with the disease.

Negotiating a salary increase is part art and part science.

Let's tackle the science part first. You may think you're due more money, especially if you stood by an employer during the recession, picking up the slack after colleagues were laid off and forgoing salary increases because money was tight.

Brunch is a beautiful thing. Though going out to a restaurant for this delicious weekend tradition is always a treat, I enjoy having my friends and family over to my house. That way, everyone can bring something to pass around, and we can linger for hours on the sun-drenched back patio.

My favorite crowd-pleaser: I like to set up a Bellini bar where guests can add a splash of a variety of fresh fruit purees to glasses of sparkling wine. Italian Prosecco works best. (See this how-to from Giada De Laurentiis.)

Back in college, you may have read psychoanalyst and existentialist philosopher Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, in which he argued that having a purpose in life was what enabled him and others to survive in a Nazi death camp.

As it turns out, a raison d'être also helps protect your brain against Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study of about 250 people by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The study is featured in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.