Caleb Finch’s (University of Southern California) review: Update on Slow Aging and Negligible Senescence – A Mini-Review, recently published in the journal Gerontology, explains the concept of negligible senescence he developed about 20 years ago. Since formulating this hypothesis he has been searching for organisms that display slow aging. In this review he discusses several [...]

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Gregory Blomquist uses patterns of physical traits and genetic correlations to try to determine if there is a trade-off between early reproduction and survival in his recent paper in Biology Letters. By studying rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, he saw a strong positive correlation for the trade-off, indicating antagonistic pleiotropy. First formulated by George Williams, antagonistic [...]

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The journal Developmental Neurobiology recently published an article linking age-related patterns of task performance in the ant, Pheidole dentata, with an increase in serotonergic cell bodies in the optic lobes of worker ants. Serotonin is modulator of insect behavior. The increase in serotonin in several neural tissues appears to be related to the type of [...]

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By studying red-toothed shrews (family Soricidae), some of the shortest lived mammals (~18 months), researchers in the Department of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University at Galveston have shown that age-related muscle senescence does occur in wild animals with short lifespans. The two species chosen for the studies, the semi-aquatic water shrew, Sorex palustris, and [...]

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In a controversial study published July 10, 2009 in Science (Science 325:201), researchers report that feeding rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) a diet that is 30% less calories than that of the control group results in lifespan extension. Rhesus monkeys live, on average, 27 years in captivity. Currently, in this 20 year long study, half of the [...]

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The news press (Wall Street Journal, New York Times) and blogs (WSJ’s Health Blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science) are all abuzz about Streptomyces hygroscopicus, a soil bacterium that secretes rapamycin. First discovered on Easter Island, rapamycin is an immune suppressant and an anticancer drug. But the reason people are talking about it today is because [...]

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The lifespan of fruit-feeding butterfies (Bicyclus anynana) is unusually long and is influenced by the animal’s food source (Molleman et al. 2008 Ecol Entomol. 33:429). A recent article in Experimental Gerontology shows that for this species dietary restriction did not result in greater longevity. These experiments were performed on males rather than females, an uncommon [...]

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A recent article in Nature suggests a protein involved in a conserved biochemical (ubiquitination) pathway is important for the increase in lifespan due to dietary restriction using the model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans. According to the authors: “Our study uncovers for the first time, to our knowledge, a role of the ubiquitin pathway in longevity in [...]

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Leonard Hayflick, discoverer of Hayflick’s limit (that cells in culture divide a limited number of times), discusses if and how scientists can solve the ‘aging problem’ in an interview with Technology Review. Hayflick offers a more detailed definition of aging: “There are four aspects to the finitude of life: aging, longevity determination, age-associated diseases, and [...]

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A recent article in FASEB Journal shines some light on why bats live far longer than is predicted based on their size. Compared to mice, two species of bats — Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) cave myotis bats (Myotis velifer) — are more resistant to protein oxidation after exposure to oxidative stress.
The FASEB Journal. 2009;23:2317-2326
Abstract [...]

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