Are you always careful to apply sunscreen before a day outdoors, but find yourself getting burned anyway? It might be due to your application technique. Dermatologists say that most people don’t put on a thick enough layer sunscreen, and new research—in which scientists put varying amounts of sunscreen on volunteers’…
Drugs that can lengthen life have long been a hallmark of speculative science fiction—many hope for an invention that could extend average lifespans well into the triple digits in the distant future. But the timeline of these drugs could be shorter than we think. A new clinical trial published Wednesday in Science…
The older we get, the greater our likelihood of dying. Or at least that’s what we thought. New research suggests mortality rates level off after we turn 105, and that no upper limit exists for the human lifespan. It’s an extraordinary conclusion—one that’s not going over very well with other aging researchers.
Scientists think they’ve stumbled upon a newly discovered mechanism that could explain why some people’s hair turns gray and others become afflicted with patches of unpigmented skin, a rare, stigmatized condition called vitiligo. Their research, published Thursday in PLOS Biology, suggests a gene that regulates the…
People age at different paces. If you went gray before all your friends, or found wrinkles creeping along your forehead in your 20s, you might already be well aware of the inequalities bestowed by the passage of time. But it’s not just our appearance that changes at a varying rate. This difference in how our bodies…
Two decades of healthy growth, followed by four to eight decades of slow-motion physical and mental collapse—that’s life, for most of us, despite the efforts of various deluded cranks and tech billionaires. Time spares nothing, and seems particularly to have it out for our faces, paying just as much attention to…
Immortality may be a gift reserved only for the mole rats of the world. But staying highly active into your golden years might just offer the next best thing: a robust immune system that looks decades younger than expected. That’s the finding of a new study published Thursday in the journal Aging Cell.
A popular theory about how the human brain works—one that’s inspired both neuroscience research and sketchy health fads alike—is just plain wrong, suggests a new study published Thursday in Nature. The adult brain might not be able to naturally restock its supply of neurons after all.
New research shows that many young children, prior to reaching the age of six or seven, mistakenly believe that birthday parties cause aging. It’s a truly adorable finding, but the study also offers an important glimpse into the developing brain and our early tendency to seek out causal explanations for the unfolding…
An international team of researchers has uncovered tell-tale signs of Alzheimer’s disease in dolphins, marking the first time that the age-related disorder has been detected in a wild animal.
Indole, an organic chemical compound that’s found in our gut and contributes to the smell of poop, increases the healthy lifespan of worms, flies, and mice, according to new research. Scientists say this likely applies to humans as well, and that this stinky substance could eventually be used to delay age-related…
Humans are the only animals known to develop Alzheimer’s disease, an age-related brain disorder that causes impaired cognitive functioning and other behavioral problems. Or at least, that’s what we thought. For the first time ever, researchers are claiming to have found signs of the disease in the brains of elderly…
Humans don’t like dying, they don’t like the idea of dying, and most have made not dying an important part of their life. Lots of folks are interested in making us not die for longer, so it was a real bummer last year when a team of researchers said that the maximum human lifespan has plateaued at around 115 years of…
For just about his entire life, Ron Smith has been a subject of a scientific inquiry. At birth, in 1972, he was studied by scientists, and then assessed again at age three to document his physical fitness, mental health and intelligence. Every few years after that, he has returned to be poked, prodded and tested in…
Humans start getting ready to die as soon as they are born. But for some, that process takes a whole lot longer than it does for everyone else.
Over the course of seven years, Sezenia Tzeni endured seven rounds of in vitro fertilization. Typically, women undergo only three or four IVF treatments before either getting pregnant or giving up. But for Tzeni and her husband, conceiving a child was more important than almost anything else.
Depriving ourselves of food to the point of near-starvation doesn’t sound very appealing, but it could prolong our lives and prevent the onset of age-related diseases. A combined analysis of two long-running studies shows that caloric restriction does indeed work in monkeys, hinting at its potential to work in humans.…
Speculation has emerged in recent years that young blood can reverse the aging process, raising the prospect of an exciting new rejuvenation technique. A new study contradicts this claim, pointing to other factors that may be responsible for the perceived anti-aging effects of youthful blood.
The oldest human to have ever lived died at the age of 122—and that was nearly 20 years ago. A recent analysis of global demographic data suggests this may very well be the maximum age attainable by humans, and that it’s extremely unlikely anyone will ever live much beyond this advanced age. That is, unless we science…
If you’re counting on technology to radically extend your lifespan, you’ll want to pay close attention to what’s happening with the Greenland shark. According to a new scientific paper, this mysterious deep-sea dweller can live up to 400 years, making it the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth.
