Aging is associated with a dramatic increase in cardiovascular disorders, including blood clotting that causes heart attacks, stroke, and thrombosis. The Forsberg lab has discovered that aged blood stem cells produce platelets, the cells that produce blood clots, that are more prone to clotting. In this publication, Manso and colleagues compare and contrast how aging changes the blood stem cells and intermediate cell types that produce these aging-specific platelets. They identified new protein features that enables researchers to distinguish their regulation from youth-like platelet production, with the goal of enabling pharmacological control of their properties to prevent excessive blood clotting in the elderly without impairing normal wound healing and bleeding.