This week was full of encouraging news for midlife athletes determined to avoid the creeping decrepitude once considered an inevitable part of one's forties, fifties and the years beyond. Initially, I was cheered by 40-year-old swimming sensation Janet Evans qualifying for the Olympic trials in both the 800-meter and 400-meter freestyle events nearly a quarter-century after her heroics in the 1988 games in Seoul. But Evans' defiance of the supposed limitations of age was followed by other news dispatches that suggest the rest of us can emulate her example.

Case in point: University of New Hampshire researchers' surprising discovery that regular runners in their sixties can match the efficiency -- that is, economy at utilizing oxygen to maintain a given running pace -- of athletes 30 or more years younger, even though they take in less oxygen. The study also found that older runners tended to have weaker muscles and less flexibility, which explained why it seemed harder for them to run as fast as their younger counterparts. But UNH associate professor Timothy Quinn, lead author of the study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, explains that those problems can be improved with more time in the weight room and on the yoga mat. "It doesn't take a lot to maintain strength," he says. "We need to set up programs that enhance strength....they'll be better runners for it."

This week's World AIDS Day ceremony in Washington featured President Obama and Bono, and the theme was "The beginning of the end of AIDS."

The event highlighted the remarkable progress in fighting the HIV epidemic -- the rate of new infections worldwide has declined by 20 percent since 1997, and more people are living longer with HIV than ever before. It's likely that by 2017 -- and perhaps as soon as 2015 -- more than half of all Americans living with HIV will be 50 or older, Daniel Tietz, executive director of the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America, writes at the Huffington Post.

Baby boomers are concerned about many potential health woes associated with aging, but next to cancer, the worry that bedevils them the most is memory loss, a recent Associated Press-LifeGoesStrong.com poll (pdf) shows. More than half of boomers surveyed told pollsters they regularly do mental exercises such as crossword puzzles in an effort to stay sharp.

But experts say that you should take a more multifaceted approach to taking care of your gray matter. Here are a few tools and tips to try.

1. Put on your sneakers.

The Obama administration is abandoning the long-term care insurance that was included in the health-care reform package passed by Congress in 2010 after concluding that the program was financially unworkable.

In a letter to Congress, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced cancellation of the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program. The program would have enabled working adults to purchase government-administered insurance to cover their nonmedical costs if they became disabled and needed help with daily living activities such as bathing, dressing and housework. The insurance also could have been used to cover the cost of special technology and transportation for the disabled. (Here's a SecondAct column by Mark Miller on the program.)

There are 44 million men in the U.S. who are 50 and older, and 33 million of them already have had a Prostate-Specific Antigen test, or PSA test, which long has been touted as an important tool for early detection of prostate cancer. That's why it came as such a shock this week when news broke that a key government panel will recommend that men no longer routinely take the PSA test because, from a statistical standpoint, its use actually may do more harm than good.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has issued a draft report concluding that, based on five major clinical trials, the PSA test does not significantly reduce the mortality rate from prostate cancer, which kills nearly 34,000 men annually. Moreover, the panel found that the PSA test's routine use actually leads in many cases to tests and treatments that needlessly subject men to side effects such as impotence and incontinence.

What Boomers Want in a Retirement House: SmartMoney reports that we'll be shopping for homes with features that take into account our future possible mobility issues -- but that we don't want ones that are too obvious, such as wheelchair ramps. Also, fancy spas and kitchens are passe. "The goals seem to be more pragmatic and affordable," one builder explains.

Hillary as VP? In this NBC Today show interview, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shot down speculation that she might replace current Vice President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket with President Barack Obama in 2012. Clinton said that Biden has done "an amazingly good job" and that such a move was not "in the realm of possibility." The last incumbent president to change running mates was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had three different ones for the four times that he ran for the Oval Office.

It's that time of year again: Medicare open enrollment time. If you're newly eligible for Medicare, or if you want to make changes to coverage for yourself or a family member, now is the time to act. A few changes this year may make the process easier than ever.

Aside from the Libyan revolution, the big transition news of the week came from Apple founder Steve Jobs, 56, who announced that he is stepping down as chief executive for health reasons.

Jobs is the boomer visionary behind much of the innovative gadgetry that's transformed our lives. In the 1980s, he and then-partner Steve Wozniak helped make point-and-click graphical computing ubiquitous. More recently, he's churned up equally towering waves of technological and social change by introducing the iPhone, which put the internet in everyone's pocket, and the iPad, which presages a future in which desktop computers and laptops are museum antiques.

Just when it looked like an army of genetically altered apes would conquer the world, another big summer movie with appeal to adult moviegoers is charging to the rescue. The Help is based on Kathryn Stockett's bestselling debut novel about a young southern white woman's exploration of the hidden world of African-American household servants in 1960s Mississippi. (Here's a SecondAct post from last year about Stockett's arduous struggle to publish her novel.)

The movie, directed by Stockett's longtime friend and fellow Mississippian Tate Taylor, already has garnered a lot of glowing reviews, especially from newspapers in Southern locales that seem to find its evocation of the segregated past painfully true to memory. Memphis Commercial Appeal critic John Beifuss writes that The Help "is not only superior to the novel that was its inspiration, but it also may be the most surprising movie of the year," and praises its portrayal of the black maids as "subversive" activists for social progress, rather than passive victims who need the help of sympathetic whites to better their situation. Time's Glen Levy already is touting actress Violeta Davis, who plays domestic Aibileen Clark, for an Oscar. This insightful Miami Herald article looks at the delicate task -- especially for a white writer-director from the south -- of making  a movie about race relations.

Baby boomers grew up watching Jim Arness as Marshal Dillon tame the old West on TV, and can remember back when John Wayne tipped his 10-gallon hat and rode off into the sunset in scores of classic cowboy movies. But if we weren't watching Westerns, we were engrossed in sci-fi alien-invasion thrillers such as 1953's War of the Worlds. That's why director Jon Favreau's ingenious mash-up of the two genres, Cowboys & Aliens, which opens today in theaters, might be the rare summer action blockbuster that resonates with boomer audiences as well as teens and twentysomething moviegoers.

Independence Day meets High Noon? True, the concept of gunslingers in spurs in a showdown with extraterrestrial invaders is so outlandish that it may be challenging to get your head around it; audiences who saw the coming attractions trailer last year sometimes mistook it for a comedy, according to this New York Times article. But as the eminent critic Roger Ebert opines this week: "As preposterous moneymakers go, it's ambitious and well-made." Ebert praises Favreau for taking care to develop his human characters rather than just to rely upon bug-eyed monsters and computer-generated special-effects wizardry to carry the film. He's also favorably impressed by the two heavyweight lead actors, Daniel Craig, of James Bond fame, and Harrison Ford, who at age 69 is still convincingly rough and tough. (New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis calls Ford's performance "pretty swell.")