longlived

Centenarians, once considered rare, have become commonplace. Indeed, they are the fastest-growing demographic group of the world's population, with numbers roughly doubling every ten years since the 1970s.How long humans can live, and what determines a long and healthy life, have been of interest for as long as we know. Plato and Aristotle discussed and wrote about the ageing process over 2,300 years ago.The pursuit of understanding the secrets behind exceptional longevity isn't easy, however. It involves unravelling the…

Long-lived fungi are the latest organisms to go under the microscope in search of new understandings as to why they don't accrue life-limiting mutations, given their age.Researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands set out to compare "the peculiarities" of multicellular growth in filamentous fungi. What they ended up with was a new hypothesis explaining how certain types of fungi keep a lid on freeloading mutations that accumulate in their thread-like mycelia; the root-like structures of fungal colonies.The…

The earthquakes that happened before and during the eruption are primarily concentrated along the edge of magma reservoirs as pictured above. The observation of a double-reservoir magmatic system correlating with the two seismically active regions to the northwest and southeast of the volcano summit suggests that the two reservoirs interreacted with each other with alternating magmatic activities. Credit: Purdue University One…

“It’s probably one of the most extraordinary papers in immunology that I’ve seen, easily in the past decade,” says John Wherry, director of the Institute of Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “It tells us that immunity can be incredibly durable, if we understand how to generate it properly.” Andrew Soerens, a postdoctoral immunologist who inherited the project 21 immunizations in, didn’t expect it to become his main responsibility. “It felt like…

CHICAGO—Once upon a time, scientists believe, Mars was far from today’s cold, inhospitable desert. Rivers carved canyons, lakes filled craters, and a magnetic field may have fended off space radiation, keeping it from eating away the atmospheric moisture. As the martian interior cooled, leading theories hold, its magnetic field died out, leaving the atmosphere undefended and ending this warm and wet period, when the planet might have hosted life. But researchers…