A man who lived to age 114 died recently on a small Mediterranean island. Until age 102 he rode a bicycle every day to tend to his family's orchards. His 101-year-old brother, his two daughters aged 81 and 77, and a nephew aged 85 all still live in a small town on the Spanish island of Minorca. All of which got some scientists wondering: ...

It is interesting that scientists are finding so many comparatively minor mutations that extend the healthy life spans of lower animals; why didn't evolution lead to those mutations in the first place? From Ouroboros: ''Why, then, are these artificially created mutant alleles not the wildtype? In other words, if lacking a particular gene makes an ...

From Ouroboros, a look at the way in which the relationship between your genes and their effect on your life span is both a little random and a little determined: ''[I]n humans only about 25% of the variation in life span can be ascribed to genetic factors to any degree, and even in lab animals where variables can be greatly reduced, only 10-40% ...

Randall Parker of FuturePundit comments on the latest results from studies of the long-lived and centenarians: ''CETP is on one of the 3 pathways that transfer cholesterol from HDL particles in the blood into the liver. So CETP is involved in regulating the amount of cholesterol in the blood. ... Work is underway to develop a drug that emulates ...

Researchers at the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have discovered a gene that apparently protects the brain and prolongs life. Centenarians who passed a common test of mental function were two to three times mo...

The secret to longevity genes may lie in their potent power to fight off cancer. Research suggests that signalling pathways that control longevity may have coevolved with tumor-suppressive mechanisms....