Chronic alcohol use damages the liver in multiple ways at once. Melatonin, best known as a sleep hormone, appears to block several of those damage pathways simultaneously.
A blood test that screens for multiple cancers at once sounded like a turning point. A large randomised trial in the UK tells a more complicated story.
In severe obesity, the heart works differently at the molecular level. A study in Science now shows exactly what changes inside the muscle cells themselves.
Collagen is the most abundant protein in the human body. For decades, doctors could not see it on an MRI scan. That has now changed.
Egg quality declines faster than most other parts of the body. Now it turns out gut bacteria may slow that decline, through a molecule they produce.
Atherosclerosis turns dangerous when immune cells stop doing their job. A small piece of genetic material may decide which way those cells go.
Longevity science is finally reaching a broad audience. Harvard Health Publishing released a detailed report on extending healthy life, written for readers without a scientific background.
Why do some viruses replicate so efficiently that they overwhelm the immune system?
Aging research is chronically underfunded. Venture capital prefers products that are almost ready.
Every time you breathe out, CO₂ levels in your blood briefly shift. But CO₂ does more than carry away waste gas: it opens tiny channels in cell membranes that normally stay shut…
Top nutrition researchers rarely agree this loudly. Ultra-processed food damages health, they say, and the system producing it is fundamentally broken. Now they are calling for sweeping political action.
Osteoarthritis affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide and ranks among the most underestimated consequences of aging. Current treatments manage pain but do not restore damaged tissue. Nanomaterials may change that.
Most cells carrying cancer mutations never become tumors. But a small number actively remodel their surroundings to build a safe haven.
Anyone trying to figure out whether a supplement or lifestyle protocol actually works drowns in studies, blogs, and marketing. A new platform aims to change that with structured, independent evidence reviews.
Alzheimer’s brains are in a constant state of inflammation. But why doesn’t that inflammation switch off on its own?
A protein involved in cellular transport turns out to limit serious brain damage in mice. And it works across two distinct neurological diseases.
Wet macular degeneration is one of the most common causes of blindness in older age.
A gene that barely registers outside research labs turns out to significantly extend the lifespan of fruit flies. And it does so by improving how mitochondria work.
Exercise damages your cells. But that damage is precisely what makes you healthier. A protein called HMGB1 appears to be the key to that paradox.
In girls, the timing of puberty is well established as a predictor of long-term health risks. In boys, the same question has barely been studied.
What happens inside a cell when you switch off a gene or add a compound? Until now, you had to run the experiment to find out.
In Alzheimer’s disease, the brain’s immune system stays permanently switched on. Researchers at Scripps Research have now identified the protein responsible and, for the first time, explained exactly why it gets stuck…
Anyone trying to figure out whether a supplement or lifestyle protocol actually works quickly gets lost in a mix of studies and marketing.
Eating within a fixed daily window improves health in both male and female mice. But only males actually live longer because of it.
A little-known protein has been shown to extend the lifespan of fruit flies by improving how their cells produce energy.
The cells that make eggs and sperm do more than enable reproduction. They also send signals that control how fast the rest of the body ages.
Every month, Lifespan.io publishes a roundup of the most significant developments in aging research. May 2026 covered a lot of ground.
Hearing loss is usually blamed on noise or age. But a new study in eLife points to something far less discussed: the cholesterol levels inside a specific type of cell deep in…
Venture capital chases clinical results. Government funding is shrinking. A new non-profit called the Thalion Initiative is stepping into the gap with an unusually ambitious fundraising target.
What if you could test how a cell responds to a genetic intervention before running a single experiment?
Organs do not age in isolation. As kidney function drops, the rest of the body follows. New research maps how renal decline and physical frailty reinforce each other in older adults.
Hundreds of supplements and protocols claim to slow aging. Most lack solid evidence. A new free AI-powered encyclopedia now systematically reviews what actually holds up.
Your immune system can learn from an infection and respond faster next time. That sounds helpful. But in chronic gut inflammation, the same mechanism can make the disease worse.
A startup aiming to reverse aging has raised nearly half a billion dollars.
Harvard has published a comprehensive report on living longer, written for ordinary readers. That sounds straightforward. But it is actually a sign that the field is growing up.
Scientists keep producing new tools to measure biological aging. The latest uses amino acid levels in blood. But does it actually tell us anything new?
There is a molecular brake on your DNA repair system. The more active that brake, the faster cells accumulate errors — and the faster you age.
A peptide beloved in biohacking communities has fifty years of research behind it. Almost all of it comes from one scientist in one lab.
The idea is straightforward: a body that has endured years of stress is more worn down than one that hasn’t.
Much of the twentieth century’s gains in life expectancy came from controlling infectious disease. But even people who survived infections didn’t escape unscathed.
When it comes to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, attention typically focuses on neurons dying.
The brain has its own immune cells that are supposed to clean up toxic debris, including the protein clumps linked to Alzheimer’s disease. With age, they become less effective.
Most mutated cells never become tumors. The ones that do have a trick: they remodel the tissue around them to create a safe haven for growth.
Sepsis is one of the deadliest complications of severe infection, especially in older adults.
People with certain cancer-linked gene mutations sometimes respond better to immunotherapy. New research explains why: faults in two well-known genes dramatically alter the environment surrounding a tumour.
Night shifts take a long-term toll on the body. But a new study suggests melatonin supplements may help offset some of that damage by improving how cells repair their DNA.
The standard advice of 150 minutes of exercise per week may be seriously undershooting the mark.
A new material can measure electrochemical signals from living tissue while stretching with the skin or muscle beneath it. That solves a long-standing problem for wearable and implantable health sensors.
The tau protein, best known for its role in Alzheimer’s disease, appears to be involved in how neurons respond to DNA damage during cell cycle activation.
A new AI model can predict how RNA is spliced in different tissues, and can also design new RNA sequences that produce a desired splicing outcome.
Organised clusters of immune cells inside tumours follow the same structural pattern across dozens of cancer types. That is the headline finding of a large-scale spatial atlas of tumour immunity.
A protein best known for helping other proteins fold correctly turns out to play an unexpected role in the cellular response to DNA damage.
Women in perimenopause are roughly twice as likely to have poor cardiovascular health compared to premenopausal women. That difference holds even after adjusting for age.
One changed letter in a protein’s code can alter everything. New large-scale research maps how amino acid substitutions affect the amount of protein present in a cell.
Chronic hepatitis B infects 250 to 300 million people worldwide and kills one million every year. The standard treatment cures fewer than one in a hundred.
Science moves on the right questions. A gathering of leading aging researchers tried to define those questions from scratch. What emerged says a great deal about where the field stands today.
CBD is best known for easing pain or anxiety. But new research in mice suggests it may also suppress inflammation in the brain.
Not everyone’s brain ages at the same pace. A single gene variant appears to make neurons more resistant to harm.
A single biological measurement tells you one piece of the aging story. Researchers now argue that combining multiple layers of data into one clock produces far more reliable results.
Population aging raises dementia rates. But particulate air pollution does too, and possibly more than expected. New research compares the two effects for the first time in a systematic way.
Women in perimenopause are twice as likely to have poor cardiovascular health as women who have not yet begun the transition. This is not a post-menopausal problem.
Tau protein is best known as a culprit in Alzheimer’s disease. But it turns out to play an entirely different role too: encoding long-term memories.
Cataracts are among the most common causes of age-related vision loss. New research identifies a specific receptor and protein that accelerate lens clouding when oxidative stress is present.
Some people reach a hundred in reasonable health. Others decline sharply in their seventies. A new review asks why, and the answer is more complicated than most longevity research suggests.
China has launched its first national training programme for physicians in longevity medicine.
Mitochondria, the energy-producing structures inside cells, decline with age. New research identifies a specific lipid molecule as a likely culprit: phosphatidylcholine, the most abundant fat in mitochondrial membranes, drops significantly as organisms…
Just two doses of a nasal spray improved memory and cognitive function in aging mice for several months.
Online communities around perimenopause are growing fast. Women share experiences, recommendations and products. But part of what circulates is simply wrong. And that has real consequences for women’s health.
Cells have ways to permanently silence certain genes. One of those guardians is the protein MORC2.
Eating without being hungry: almost everyone knows the feeling. But which brain cells actually give permission to keep eating, even after you have had enough?
You eat something, and your body knows almost immediately whether it contains enough building blocks. But how?
A new foundation is offering older patients gene therapy outside of regular clinical channels. The treatments have not been approved by national medicines regulators.
What if aging is not a biological puzzle but a physics problem? A growing group of researchers is applying the laws of physics to the aging process.
Genetically identical cells in identical environments still make different choices about what they become.
A toxic form of cholesterol accumulates in blood vessels and contributes to atherosclerosis.
Clinical trials systematically miss side effects that patients themselves notice. An AI analysis of more than 400,000 Reddit posts now surfaces complaints rarely seen in official studies, including menstrual irregularities and hot…
CRISPR normally works on DNA. A new system targets RNA instead, and can kill specific cells on demand.
A protein best known from cancer research turns out to play a key role in brain aging.
Tendons heal poorly. They have limited blood supply, repair slowly, and in older adults that repair is even slower.
Who is paying for longevity science, and what do they expect in return? At the STAT Breakthrough Summit West, leaders from health care and science gathered for frank conversations.
Cataracts are the leading cause of treatable blindness worldwide. Yet we still only partially understand why the lens of the eye ages and turns cloudy.
A longevity startup aiming to add ten healthy years to human lifespan has been valued at 1.8 billion dollars.
Sound waves directed at the abdomen seem like an unlikely tool for improving muscle function.
An enzyme that received little scientific attention turns out to play a major role in amyloid accumulation in the brain.
A closely watched experimental Parkinson’s treatment has failed its first major clinical test.
When the immune system detects a threat, B cells do not just produce antibodies. They also completely restructure their metabolism.
Microglia, the immune cells of the brain, do more than clear damage. They also control hormone production through a specific receptor in the hypothalamus.
Men and women do not age the same way. The immune system follows different decline trajectories in each sex.
A scan of the retina can reveal more than eye health. New research shows that an aging clock based on retinal images correlates with the progression of bone loss (osteoporosis) in older…
Meeting current vitamin B12 guidelines might not be enough to protect the aging brain.
Sunscreen sits on the outside of the skin. But what if protection against UV radiation could also come from within?
Sleep is not a passive state. While we sleep, the brain produces rhythmic electrical patterns that directly influence how memories are stored.
Why do humans, mice, and whales show the same epigenetic aging patterns, despite living completely different lives? A new model offers a surprisingly simple answer.
Your liver can be ten years older than your heart, while your calendar age gives the same number for both. New aging clocks now make that difference visible.
Tuberculosis still kills more than a million people every year. Older adults are far more likely to die from it than younger people.
The same protein accumulates in the brains of patients with more than twenty different diseases.
Aged skin heals more slowly. That has long been known. But a new experiment shows that removing damaged cells can significantly speed up that process.
Cells under stress temporarily halt protein production. That sounds like a useful defence. But researchers found that chronic activation of this system actually accelerates aging.
A single blood test that reveals your biological age rather than your calendar age. That is the promise of proteomic aging clocks.
A small chemical tag on an amino acid turns out to play a surprisingly large role in cell biology.
Most cancer immunotherapies work only for a minority of patients. A new mRNA treatment drastically increased immune responses in mice. It also boosted responses to flu and COVID-19.
The number of clinical trials testing Alzheimer’s drugs is rising steadily. Yet approved treatments remain few. Researchers reviewed 192 ongoing trials to map where the field stands.
Exercise improves metabolism in dozens of ways, but pinpointing which molecule causes which benefit is genuinely hard.
Older mice with elevated levels of a single protein grew stronger, more energetic, and had healthier bones. Their untreated peers declined as expected.
Neutrophils are the most abundant white blood cells in the human body. They survive for only hours to days.
European health data sits locked in national systems. A new proposal in Science argues for a different approach: instead of sharing patient data, share the AI models trained on it.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Most treatments slow its progression. Repair Biotechnologies is trying to reverse it by targeting excess cholesterol directly inside liver cells.
An implant that monitors when to release medication and produces that medication itself. Researchers have achieved this using living bacteria enclosed in a material that can be placed inside the body.
Metformin has been the most prescribed type 2 diabetes drug for decades. New research now shows it also inhibits cancer cells through a specific component of the cell’s energy-producing machinery.
A single brain scan and an algorithm. That combination may be enough to predict whether someone will develop Alzheimer’s, how fast their cognition will decline, and how severe the diagnosis will be…
Blue zones are held up as proof that certain environments make people live longer. But how solid is the data behind that idea?
Old mice with Alzheimer’s features behaved like healthy young animals after a nanoparticle treatment. The therapy addresses two of the brain’s core problems at the same time.
Aged skin heals poorly. But a toxic bacterial substance, given before an injury occurs, makes that skin noticeably better at recovering afterward. It sounds paradoxical, and it is.
Every bacterium in your body constantly sends out tiny molecular packages. A new hypothesis proposes that the build-up of these packages in the brain contributes to neurodegenerative disease.
A silent infection deep inside a tooth can do far more than cause jaw pain. Researchers are finding that inflammation around tooth roots spreads through the body and interferes with how insulin…
In several countries, public funding for science is being cut or redirected for ideological rather than fiscal reasons.
Not all RNA in the cell makes proteins. Much of it stays untranslated and regulates other genes instead.
Most people with dementia do not have one disease. They have two or three simultaneously. That makes treatment research far more complicated than assumed for decades.
Heart muscle cells are elongated for a reason: shape drives function. How cells maintain that shape during growth was poorly understood. New research points to microtubule dynamics as the key regulator.
Critics have warned that GLP-1 drugs strip away more muscle than ordinary dieting. A new study puts that concern in perspective.
Muscle stem cells in older animals struggle to activate. A new study pinpoints the reason: a specific metabolic pathway fueled by glutamine quietly shuts down with age.
Tumors damage surrounding tissue. That has long been known. But a new study shows they also actively block the renewal of nearby healthy stem cells by mimicking a signal that normally only…
Forgetting where you put your keys may not be inevitable. A non-invasive brain stimulation technique targeting a specific network appears to selectively improve episodic memory in both healthy people and clinical patients…
One gene shapes Alzheimer’s risk more than any other. But the two most studied variants — one harmful, one protective — have remained poorly understood at the molecular level.
Measuring tissue aging usually requires a biopsy or imaging scan. A newly developed probe could make it as simple as collecting urine after a single injection.
Most cardiovascular therapies lower cholesterol or reduce inflammation. A new clinical result takes a different approach: binding a toxic cholesterol byproduct and flushing it out through urine.
Neurons must survive for decades without dividing. That makes DNA repair critical — and a new study shows one key repair protein loses its footing with age.
A dietary amino acid shapes gut barrier function and immune regulation through a microbial pathway that has only recently been mapped in detail. The implications reach well beyond digestion.
Most cardiovascular treatments lower LDL cholesterol or reduce inflammation. A new drug candidate takes a different approach, targeting a toxic cholesterol breakdown product that traps immune cells in artery walls.
People in excellent physical condition score almost identically to sedentary peers on most mainstream epigenetic aging clocks. That reveals a fundamental limitation in how these tools are built.
Mammals that live in organized social groups tend to live longer than solitary species. The pattern holds across dozens of species and is stronger than many other known longevity factors.
Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day is associated with a 35 percent lower risk of dementia.
Detecting the buildup of aging cells in the body has always required invasive tissue samples. A new study suggests a simple urine test could do the job instead.
Scientists studying aging face one persistent obstacle: it takes a long time for animals to grow old. An unlikely solution is gaining serious attention — microgravity.
Lung disease kills more people than most realize. And aging is the silent driving force behind nearly all of it — even when the immediate cause appears to come from outside.
The brains of Alzheimer’s patients contain cells with DNA errors not found in healthy brains.
Aging tissue is stiffer than young tissue. It turns out that stiffness is not just a symptom of aging — it may be one of the reasons repair fails in the first…
Genetically identical animals in the same environment still behave differently from each other. And their behavior shifts over time with no identifiable trigger. That is not noise.
When neurons die, they do not simply stop working. They send out signals that damage surrounding healthy cells. Researcher Chaska Walton is developing a targeted delivery system to interrupt that process.
Until now, neuroscientists could distinguish at most two types of nerve cells at the same time while recording from a freely moving animal. A new technique raises that number to nine.
Anyone researching longevity supplements runs into the same wall: vast literature, uneven quality, contradictory conclusions. A new open-source system tries to fix that with AI.
Obesity raises the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The link has been suspected for years, but the underlying biology was murky. A new review maps the shared mechanisms in detail.
A compound from traditional herbal medicine activates pathways in mice that closely resemble the biological effects of physical exercise. But the gap between mouse data and human benefit remains wide.
The active compound in magic mushrooms reduces cocaine-seeking behaviour in animal models. That alone is notable.
Doctors are increasingly ignoring sepsis detection alerts. Not because they take the condition less seriously, but because the algorithm raises false alarms so often that clinicians have learned to distrust it.
Older people often say time seems to pass faster than it used to. A new theory links this to a concrete mechanism: the energy deficit in aging cells.
Tiny structures secreted by brain blood vessels may indicate whether someone is heading toward cognitive decline. That is the central finding of a new Nature Aging study.
Exercise is the best-supported intervention against aging. But what if a plant compound could activate the same signals inside cells?
Astronauts returning from space look as though they have aged by years. That is not coincidence.
A gene already connected to a rare form of intellectual disability turns out to play a central role in regulating sleep.
The brain isn’t a fixed structure. It reorganizes itself continuously as we grow up, following predictable patterns — and a new study maps those patterns in more detail than ever before.
Creatine is usually thought of as a supplement for young athletes. But a new study suggests its real potential may lie in older adults — when combined with a specific type of…
Sleep apnea doesn’t just leave you tired. New research shows it accelerates vascular aging through a specific biological mechanism — one that researchers may already know how to target.
Muscle loss in older age isn’t just about inactivity or poor diet. The junctions where nerves tell muscles to work are quietly deteriorating — and new research suggests targeted light treatment could…
In ALS and a form of frontotemporal dementia, a protein called TDP-43 clumps together in nerve cells — and kills them.
A researcher at Rockefeller University has mapped how aging unfolds across nearly seven million cells from 21 mouse tissues at three different ages.
Inject genetic code into cells, then switch it on from outside the body using an electromagnetic device. It sounds like science fiction.
Age-related muscle loss has long been blamed on stem cells that simply wear out over time.
Your body is full of proteins that have been chemically modified by sugar — not because of what you eat, but because of basic metabolism.
The bacterial community living in your gut shifts as you age — becoming less diverse, more inflammatory. For years, researchers blamed diet and lifestyle.
A shark older than five hundred years, swimming through waters it has known since before the Industrial Revolution.
Scientists have engineered nanoparticles capable of activating an immune response across the entire body simultaneously — not just at the site of injection.
Imagine a trial on a dietary intervention finding that participants become biologically younger.
A three-year-old mouse is near the end of its life. A thirty-year-old naked mole-rat looks barely different from how it did at five.
An AI system that ‘thinks’ before answering has outperformed human physicians on tasks involving complex reasoning and real-world patient records.
The immune system doesn’t stay neatly separate from the brain. As it ages and becomes chronically inflamed, it appears to actively promote dementia and other neurological diseases — a connection that may…
Every cell in your body lives inside a kind of scaffolding — a web of proteins that provides structure, relays signals, and helps determine whether a cell stays healthy or drifts into…
April 2026 was a busy month for researchers treating aging as a biological problem to be solved.
Whether something tastes sweet depends not just on what you eat, but on how much energy your body has.
The liver performs dozens of functions simultaneously, but how its structure is organized to make that possible was never fully visible.
Researchers have designed an improved version of the CRISPR gene-editing tool that can reach more locations in the genome — and they did it entirely through computer simulations, without running a single…
The rind of the mangosteen, a tropical fruit, contains a compound that widens blood vessels.
A new breed of AI system that reasons step by step has outperformed experienced physicians on complex clinical cases drawn from real patient data.
Something fundamental shifts in your gut as you age, and that shift makes it easier for dangerous bacteria to take hold. Researchers have now mapped out the mechanism in unusual detail.
Most drug development failures happen not because the biological idea was wrong, but because the molecule had the wrong properties.
Peer pressure is real. But new simulations suggest the influence teenagers have over each other’s behaviour fades faster than most models assume — and that changes how we should think about health…
Artificial intelligence now scores at the top of medical reasoning tests. The harder question is what that actually means for patients and the future of medicine.
When a key energy-producing protein is reduced in cancer cells, the tumors don’t slow down — they accelerate. New research reveals a metabolic paradox at the heart of cancer biology.
Most aging researchers focus on fixing the body’s damage. But a growing faction argues that some things are simply too broken to repair — and wants to replace them instead.
The immune system must constantly calibrate its own reactions. Too little and pathogens win. Too much and the body damages itself.
Scientists have grown human brain tissue in a laboratory that spontaneously organises into the layered structure of the cerebral cortex.
Lung fibrosis replaces healthy tissue with scar tissue, makes breathing progressively harder, and has almost no treatments that reverse the damage.
A large language model performed at physician level on clinical reasoning tasks, according to a new study in Science. The result is striking. The caveats are just as important.
For years, researchers blamed a specific type of nerve damage in the inner ear for age-related hearing struggles. A new study suggests they may have been looking in the wrong place.
The National Science Foundation — which distributes roughly nine billion dollars in research grants annually — no longer has an independent governing board. President Trump dismissed every member.
Drug development for epilepsy has always faced a frustrating bottleneck: waiting for a seizure to happen.
Spatial transcriptomics — the technology that maps which genes are active where inside a tissue — is one of the most exciting tools in aging research.
One of the twentieth century’s most devastating epidemics may have done something extraordinary: triggered a measurable evolutionary shift in human populations within just a few decades.
A new type of AI that reasons step by step — rather than just pattern-matching — beat experienced physicians on complex diagnoses using actual clinical records.
Millions of people are already experimenting with senolytic treatments to slow aging. A new study now shows that one of the most popular combinations causes brain damage strikingly similar to multiple sclerosis…
Bones were long treated as passive and slow — structure, not biology. New techniques are changing that, enabling targeted manipulation of bone tissue and opening the door to treatments for osteoporosis, fractures,…
By the time someone forgets a name or gets lost on a familiar route, Alzheimer’s disease may have been quietly progressing in their brain for twenty or thirty years.
From new data on senolytic therapies to AI-designed anti-aging molecules, April 2026 was a busy month for the science of keeping people healthier for longer. Here is what happened.
The weight can come off. But according to a new study in mice, the immune system may hold onto a memory of obesity long after the scales return to normal — keeping…
A quick afternoon nap sounds harmless — even healthy. But a new study suggests that older adults who nap frequently and for long stretches face a significantly higher risk of dying sooner…
April 2026 was a busy month for longevity science. New findings, clinical progress and policy shifts — a look at where the field stands. Lifespan.
Every time you fight an infection or respond to a vaccine, your immune system runs a miniature evolutionary competition. The cells that produce better antibodies win and multiply.
Every cell in the body follows a tightly regulated cycle of growth and division. When that regulation breaks down, cancer follows.
Why does one person develop severe Alzheimer’s while another with equally damaged brain tissue stays sharp into their eighties?
Millions of older adults take daytime naps and feel better for it. But a new study links longer and more frequent napping to a higher risk of death.
The uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes each follow their own biological clock.
Early cancer detection through a blood test — the so-called liquid biopsy — is one of the most promising developments in preventive medicine.
Fusobacterium nucleatum is a bacterium that normally lives in your mouth but is also found deep inside tumors. Scientists have long known it can fuel cancer.
Kangaroos independently evolved thick tooth enamel, just like several other large mammals did before them.
The field of anti-aging research moves fast. April 2026 brought a wave of new results, company announcements, and scientific insights.
Ghrelin is best known as the hormone that makes you feel hungry. But it also plays a role in how muscles age.
Your brain has a built-in system for clearing out damaged proteins. As we age, that system becomes increasingly impaired — and researchers have now identified a likely culprit: oxidative stress disables the…
People living at high altitude have less oxygen available. That has a surprising consequence: their immune systems appear biologically older than those of people at sea level — even when they seem…
A new fluorescent sensor can track the release of GABA — the brain’s main braking signal — in freely moving animals for the first time.
Life on Earth uses twenty amino acids to build every protein in every living thing. Researchers wondered whether all twenty are truly necessary — and used artificial intelligence to find out.
Naked mole rats live thirty years. Ordinary mice barely manage two. The answer to that gap may not lie in the big picture of biology, but in the smallest working parts of…
A new study funded by longevity company Seragon reports that their combination treatment extends the lives of old mice more than rapamycin — currently the gold standard for lifespan extension in mice…
COPD — the lung disease that slowly robs people of their breath — has long been considered irreversible.
Deep inside the aging liver, a rogue population of immune cells is fueling chronic inflammation and driving disease.
What if the key to fighting aging isn’t repairing damaged cells and organs, but simply replacing them?
A worm barely a millimeter long can sniff out bacteria enriched with a specific amino acid it cannot make itself.
The textbook account of how adult blood is made has a clean simplicity to it: bone marrow stem cells do the job, period.
Mitochondria — the structures inside every cell that generate energy — are known to decline with age. What is less understood is why.
Heart muscle cannot grow back after a heart attack. The dead tissue becomes scar tissue, and that scar gradually undermines the heart’s ability to pump.
Dasatinib and quercetin — the most widely used senolytic combination in longevity circles — causes damage to specific brain regions in mice that closely resembles what is seen in multiple sclerosis.
Conferences are filling up, startups are raising money, and the first human trials of treatments aimed at reversing biological aging are underway.
Researchers have identified a molecular switch inside the body’s blood-forming cells that gets triggered by stress and appears to accelerate the aging of the immune system.
In most mammals, the community of bacteria living in the gut shifts dramatically with age.
The most advanced Alzheimer’s treatments ever developed can now demonstrably remove the protein clumps long blamed for the disease. Patients, however, are barely improving.
In a mouse model of spinal disc degeneration, a cheap, decades-old drug combination beat a newer and more expensive competitor.
Air pollution has long been linked to heart disease, lung damage, and cancer. But researchers are now asking a sharper question: does breathing polluted air actually make the body biologically older, faster…
Not all ant colonies build at the same pace. New experiments show that the age structure of a colony — how many young versus old workers it contains — directly determines how…
Cancer cells have a way of making themselves invisible to the immune system’s hunters.
On June 4, 2026, a full-day longevity event in Lisbon will bring together scientists, clinicians, investors, and founders. The organizers promise a program stretching from ancestral nutrition wisdom to cutting-edge biotech.
Cancer cells that reach the heart barely grow at all. Researchers have now discovered that the mechanical force of a beating heart actively suppresses tumor cells — an effect that holds up…
Older adults who exercise regularly have measurably different gut bacteria than those who don’t.
Your DNA doesn’t change, but the way your genes are read does. A new review in Science maps how epigenetic changes — driven by diet, stress, and environment — shape long-term health…
Cells that have stopped dividing and are normally considered a hallmark of aging turn out to play a crucial role in wound healing.
A roundup from the Lifespan Research Institute surveys what happened in rejuvenation science over the first months of 2026.
Astrocytes make up roughly half the cells in the human brain and do far more than support neurons.
Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. That has been known for decades. What happens next in the body, and when, is far less understood.
Aging research in Europe is well-funded and growing fast. But scientists in different countries are largely working in isolation, duplicating efforts and missing insights that only emerge from sharing data at scale…
The brain’s outer layer is built like a six-story building, and each floor has different jobs.
When a heart attack kills part of the heart muscle, the human body has no way to replace it.
Every cell in your body carries nearly identical DNA, yet a liver cell and a brain cell look and behave completely differently.
In longevity science, the word ‘breakthrough’ gets used a lot. A recent roundup from Lifespan.io surveys the state of the field.
Your brain produces constant rhythmic electrical pulses. One of those rhythms — the alpha wave — turns out to be a key gatekeeper of perception, determining in real time what you detect…
Two studies in Science have produced the most detailed picture yet of how individual brain cells develop differently in Down syndrome.
When the blood-making system comes under pressure, the body has a fallback plan. Researchers have discovered an entirely unknown pathway that allows red blood cells to acquire the building blocks for hemoglobin…
Sexual reproduction has puzzled biologists for decades. It’s costly, requires a partner, and halves the genetic contribution per individual.
Surviving malaria is not the same as escaping it unharmed. New research shows the infection can leave measurable cognitive damage that persists long after the parasite is gone.
The cost of testing an experimental treatment in humans has grown so high that many promising longevity interventions never reach the clinic.
Not all fat storage is the same. New research shows that fat tissue can expand in two fundamentally different ways, and that which path it takes — cells getting bigger, or new…
A small molecule that blocks one of the body’s central inflammation engines has passed its first clinical test in humans.
Scientists have reprogrammed blood stem cells to generate a continuous supply of protective proteins — potentially for the entire lifespan of a patient.
Two of the most discussed phenomena in aging research — chronic low-grade inflammation and the biological clock of cells — are more tightly linked than previously understood.
Women tend to mount stronger immune responses than men — but their immune systems also appear to shift more dramatically as they age.
Rapamycin is widely considered the leading drug candidate for slowing aging — but a new study suggests it may undercut the health gains from physical exercise in older adults.
What if the body’s own cells could be reprogrammed as tiny factories, producing exactly the protein a patient needs at the right time, in the right amount?
A gene associated with longer lifespan in fruit flies for decades appears to work partly through the animal’s gut bacteria.
A small molecule that blocks a key inflammation trigger in the brain has cleared its first human trial without serious side effects.
Periodic fasting has been promoted for years as a powerful way to improve metabolism. But how the body actually responds differs sharply between organs.
Ghrelin is best known as the hormone that makes you hungry. Less well known is that it also appears to undermine muscle health as we age.
Two of the most discussed processes in aging science — chronic low-grade inflammation and epigenetic changes in DNA — turn out to be closely connected.
As people age, their risk of joint inflammation rises — not just because joints wear down, but because the body quietly loses one of its own braking systems.
Ribosomes are the molecular machines inside every cell that build proteins. They were long thought to work identically in everyone.
Chronic kidney disease affects roughly one in ten adults worldwide, yet the molecular reasons why some patients deteriorate rapidly while others plateau have remained poorly understood.
Antibiotic resistance is one of medicine’s most pressing threats — and one of bacteria’s cleverest tricks is simply pumping drugs back out before they can do any harm.
AI models that study proteins have a blind spot: they learn from data without understanding how evolution actually works.
Scientists studying how genes drive aging have long faced a frustrating problem: the tools to switch genes on and off in living animals work, but not cleanly enough.
What if your immune system could be programmed once and then protect you for life — without ever needing a booster?
Your body can be biologically older or younger than your birth certificate suggests — and a type of inflammation you never feel may be quietly pushing that number up.
People with a particular inherited eye disease go slowly blind, starting with their central vision. For decades, the exact mechanism was unclear.
It sounds counterintuitive: slightly damaging your cells to make them stronger. Yet that’s precisely the principle behind one of the most intriguing ideas in aging research.
Everyone knows that fit people live longer and get sick less often. But proving that exercise actually causes that better health — rather than the other way around — turns out to…
A drug used for decades to treat a rare blood cancer turns out to also clear senescent cells — the so-called zombie cells associated with aging and age-related disease.
Arterial stiffening, high blood pressure, a leaking blood-brain barrier — many of the health problems that come with age begin at the inner lining of blood vessels.
Sitting still in intense heat turns out to do something the body normally reserves for physical exertion.
As people age, they steadily lose muscle mass — and a hormone best known for triggering hunger may be making things worse.
A small group of fish — including tuna and swordfish — can keep their muscles warmer than the surrounding water. In warming oceans, that remarkable ability is becoming a dangerous liability.
Bacterial cells can radically shift their internal molecular composition in response to changing conditions. Yet something remains surprisingly constant.
After damage, lung stem cells produce their own molecular signal that tells them when to start regenerating.
The immune systems of men and women don’t just age at different rates. They age along fundamentally different trajectories — with real consequences for who gets sick, when, and from what.
Suppressing IGF-1, a growth signaling pathway that has been studied for decades as a key to longer life, barely extends lifespan in mice with heavily damaged mitochondria.
A single half-hour sauna session is enough to temporarily spike the number of white blood cells circulating in the body.
Male and female brains look largely the same. But at the level of individual cell types, a new study finds striking differences in which genes are switched on — with direct implications…
Ten thousand years ago, humans started growing crops and raising animals. That shift didn’t just change dinner — it accelerated our biological evolution in ways scientists are only now beginning to fully…
Every cell in your body is constantly building proteins — the molecules that do nearly everything. But exactly how that production is controlled has remained surprisingly murky.
A salamander loses a leg and grows it back. We lose a fingertip and it’s gone forever.
Hidden inside the livers of people with fatty liver disease is a population of immune cells that have biologically aged — and are fuelling a slow, smouldering inflammation that makes everything worse…
A one-time treatment that makes your body produce its own medicines — for life. Researchers have now shown this is possible, by reprogramming blood stem cells to churn out powerful protective proteins…
The human brain is bad at quantities — and that appears to be a feature, not a bug.
Fever is widely recognized as a defense mechanism, but the precise molecular pathway has remained poorly understood.
When mice are trained to fear a specific odor, the structure of their offspring’s smell system changes — even though those offspring never encountered the scent themselves.
Nearly half of the human genome consists of remnants from ancient viral infections. In youth, cells keep these sequences locked down. As we age, the locks weaken.
Scientists have known for decades that cutting calories extends lifespan in mice.
The big folds of the human brain have been mapped for over a century. But there is a second layer of smaller, shallower folds that most imaging studies have simply ignored —…
Anxiety isn’t spread diffusely across the brain. Researchers pinpointed a specific population of neurons in a rarely discussed brain region that flicks on under stress and directly drives anxious behaviour in mice…
After decades of research focused on amyloid plaques and tau tangles, a study points to a neglected signalling molecule in the brain — and drugs that target it already exist.
NAD+ supplements have attracted enormous attention as potential anti-aging interventions.
A fragment of a protein that normally helps organise the cell’s genetic material can create small, temporary gaps in DNA — and those gaps, counterintuitively, appear to trigger repair processes that roll…
Tau protein is present in almost every brain over the age of eighty, yet most people never develop dementia.
An international summit on healthy longevity is set for Hong Kong in October 2026, drawing scientists, clinicians, pharma companies, and AI developers under one roof.
Tuberculosis kills more people each year than almost any other infectious disease. The bacterium survives by hiding inside the very cells meant to destroy it.
Cells are wrapped in a thin membrane made mostly of fat. For decades, that membrane was treated as a passive scaffold.
A molecule central to how cells make energy drops sharply as we age. Scientists have known for years that supplements can partially restore it.
A single half-hour sauna session causes a significant but temporary spike in circulating white blood cells, according to new research.
The same technique that has transformed cancer treatment — reprogramming immune cells to hunt down disease — is now being aimed at Alzheimer’s.
Nipah has caused small, deadly outbreaks across South Asia for decades. The conditions for a larger epidemic are worsening. And despite everything learned from covid, preparations remain thin.
Blood cancer cells cloak themselves in a layer of sugar molecules that tells the immune system to stand down.
When chronic pain persists long after an injury has healed, many assume the problem lies in the brain.
The blood-brain barrier keeps harmful substances out of the brain. For decades it was treated as a near-impenetrable wall.
When you picture an apple in your mind, your brain activates many of the same neurons as when you actually see one.
Women live longer than men, but spend more years in poor health. Many anti-ageing interventions work better in one sex than the other. Yet most research barely looks at the difference.
Older adults who received a high-dose flu vaccine showed a greater reduction in dementia risk than those who got the standard shot.
The trade in wild animals has been one of the primary routes for new diseases jumping from animals to humans for at least forty years.
Some animals simply grow a new leg when the old one is gone. Humans don’t. Scientists have known for decades that a fundamental difference must exist between species that can regenerate and…
Cancer cells are skilled escape artists. But leukemia cells have a particularly elegant trick: they coat themselves in sugar molecules that actively send a stop signal to the immune system.
Nearly every older person has it in some form: a protein that slowly misfolds and accumulates in the heart and other organs.
Older people don’t die from the flu more often simply because they’re frail. They die because their immune system can produce fewer new defenders each year while simultaneously staying locked in a…
You could follow the most nutritious diet imaginable — but if your first meal comes late in the day and your last one lands close to midnight, your body may still be…
Newborns sleep sixteen hours a day. Adults need seven or eight. Everyone knows this changes, but almost no one knows why.
Every cell contains millions of proteins that must be in exactly the right place at the right time.
Life Biosciences is about to become the first company to test a therapy that makes cells biologically younger — not as a treatment for a specific disease, but for aging itself.
APOE4 is the most powerful known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. But what does it actually do in the brain, long before the first symptoms appear?
Instead of targeting amyloid or tau — the usual suspects in Alzheimer’s research — scientists focused on a neuropeptide that had been sitting in the background for decades.
Immunity doesn’t age the same way in everyone. A new study of nearly a thousand people reveals that women and men follow fundamentally different immune aging trajectories — with far greater cellular…
Researchers have found that two genes that normally put a brake on cell growth are lost in many cancers — and that their loss unleashes one of the most well-known growth molecules…
Salamanders can regrow entire limbs. Humans can’t — with one exception: the tip of a finger.
Pesticides are designed to kill pests. But a growing body of research suggests they may also be damaging the bacteria in our digestive system — bacteria that play a critical role in…
When a heart attack strikes, heart muscle dies — and it doesn’t grow back.
Cartilage heals slowly even in young people, but in older age that capacity nearly disappears.
Influenza kills tens of thousands of people every year in the US alone — and many of those deaths aren’t directly from the infection.
A biotech company has received FDA clearance to begin resetting the biological clock in human eye tissue.
A quarter of older patients become confused after surgery. It sounds temporary. But the brain damage often isn’t. Now researchers have identified a potential mechanism — and a place to intervene.
Topping up a single supplement helps a little. But what if you also stopped the leaking?
The FDA doesn’t officially recognise aging as a disease. Yet this year, for the first time, a therapy designed to make cells biologically younger is entering human trials.
Same species, same lifespan pressures — but the immune system ages in strikingly different ways depending on whether you’re female or male.
Proteins are the machines of life — and designing new ones from scratch used to take years of painstaking work. AI has upended that in less than a decade.
To eventually grow replacement organs — or even whole bodies — scientists first need to understand how an embryo does it.
Not all cell death is the same. Some cells go quietly. Others set off a chain reaction that damages surrounding tissue for years.
For the first time, a treatment that resets the biological age of cells is moving into human trials.
You could follow every dietary guideline perfectly, but if you’re eating dinner at 10 pm, your cells may be aging faster regardless.
Before a single memory slips, something has already gone wrong deep in the brain. Mice carrying the most dangerous genetic variant for Alzheimer’s have smaller, chronically overexcited neurons — and researchers have…
Mitochondria have their own DNA, and errors in it accumulate as we age.
Pulmonary fibrosis is one of the most devastating age-related diseases — the lungs stiffen progressively, with no effective cure.
Fat tissue ages faster than most other parts of the body. Scientists have now identified the enzyme that keeps that process in check — and what goes wrong when it disappears.
Ageing cells that refuse to die accumulate in our bodies and cause widespread damage. A new drug can now selectively eliminate them in humans — the first data are in.
A small biotech company is about to test whether ageing cells can literally be ‘rewound’ in living humans. If it works in the eye, it could change medicine forever.
For decades, a particular pattern of brain activity called theta oscillations was thought to govern both how we store and how we recall memories. New research challenges half of that assumption.
King penguins moved from the wild to a zoo get all the food they want and never have to work for it.
CAR T-cell therapy transformed blood cancer treatment. But for solid tumors — the most common cancers — it has largely failed.
Thousands of people already take rapamycin — a transplant drug — hoping it will slow their aging. For years, the evidence behind that idea was almost entirely from mice.
Millions of people carry the APOE4 gene, the strongest known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
Mitochondria — the energy generators inside our cells — carry their own DNA, separate from the cell’s nucleus.
Gout has long been typecast as an affliction of older, wealthy men. But it’s now appearing earlier in life, in more diverse populations, and its biological mechanisms are proving more complicated than…
Fat tissue ages just like the rest of the body. But why does it deteriorate faster in some people?
Around a quarter of older people become acutely confused after surgery. Most recover, but the episode leaves a mark: it permanently accelerates cognitive decline.
Older people are more likely to see their cancer spread to other organs. Researchers now have a molecular explanation: aging liver cells leak tiny packages of genetic material that make tumors elsewhere…
Nearly half the human genome consists of ancient ‘parasitic’ DNA — sequences that once copied and pasted themselves throughout our chromosomes. In healthy cells they are silenced.
Bacteria have been fighting viruses for billions of years, and in doing so have evolved a vast and largely unknown arsenal of immune defenses.
A blood test that can detect Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms appear sounds like unambiguous progress.
Worn-down spinal discs are behind much of the back pain that becomes nearly universal with age.
Cancer cells burn sugar differently from healthy ones, leaving a distinct chemical trail.
In early 2024, a strain of bird flu turned up in American dairy herds. Since then it has spread across dozens of states, infected a handful of humans, and left researchers with…
Researchers have developed a way to control nerve cells using light pulses — without the genetic modifications that have made this technique impractical in humans.
Insilico Medicine, a company that uses artificial intelligence to discover new drugs, has signed a deal worth up to $2.75 billion with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.
We’ve known for years that gum disease is bad for your heart. Now the evidence is growing that the same bacteria colonising your gums may also be reaching your brain — and…
Your blood does far more than carry oxygen. A new piece in Science describes how blood components can directly neutralise pathogens and repair damage — without any help from doctors or drugs…
Mitochondria have long been known as the cell’s energy generators. But new research published in Science reveals they also control how effectively your immune system attacks tumors — and that changes everything…
Why do IVF embryos sometimes fail to implant even when they’re genetically healthy?
Tuberculosis bacteria survive inside the very immune cells meant to destroy them. Scientists have now identified how: a bacterial protein sneaks into the cell’s nucleus and reprograms the host’s immune response from…
From a vital aging research database that risks disappearing for lack of funding, to promising animal experiments with plasma exchange and thyroid intervention — March 2026 offered a wide range of developments…
Half of our DNA consists of genetic elements that can copy and paste themselves into new locations.
Body fat has a reputation problem — but it also ages, and often faster than the rest of us.
Back pain from worn-down spinal discs is one of the most common complaints in aging adults.
Adolescents have long been known to cooperate less than adults. New research now reveals what is happening internally: it is not only that they are worse at reading others — they also…
The way people eat is simultaneously one of the largest drivers of chronic disease and one of the largest contributors to climate change.
Cartilage is one of the body’s least regenerative tissues. Now researchers have found it carries a built-in molecular brake against its own destruction — one that appears to fail precisely when it…
Spinal disc degeneration is one of the most common causes of chronic lower back pain in older people — and so far, there is little to offer beyond painkillers and surgery.
For decades, atrial fibrillation and heart failure have been treated as entirely separate diseases.
Proteins are fragile. Heat, acid, mechanical stress — they deform and fall apart. But a new study shows how combining artificial intelligence with classical chemistry can produce a protein scaffold so robust…
Two of the most well-known genetic risk factors for Parkinson’s disease both disrupt the same cellular process: waste disposal.
The importance of gut bacteria in early life is well established. But how the microbial residents of the intestine contribute to gut movement itself — the muscular contractions that push food through…
Back pain from worn spinal discs is one of the most common consequences of getting older.
Parkinson’s disease begins in the power plants of cells. Researchers have now found a way to deliver healthy versions of those power plants directly into diseased neurons — packaged inside an unexpected…
Fat tissue ages. That much has been known for a while. But what drives the aging process inside individual fat cells has remained murky.
A biotech company targeting so-called zombie cells — cells that stop dividing but refuse to die and instead damage surrounding tissue — has shown for the first time that its approach appears…
Spinal disc degeneration affects almost everyone as they age and is a leading cause of chronic back pain.
Brief exposure to Yamanaka factors can reset cells epigenetically toward a younger state. In mice, the results are striking.
Frailty in older adults — the combination of muscle loss, fatigue, and heightened vulnerability — has no effective treatment.
LDL cholesterol has long been flagged as a cardiovascular risk factor. Now evidence is building that oxidized LDL particles play a specific role in vascular dementia — through a mechanism that starts…
A study of 527 women has mapped how breast tissue changes with age in unprecedented spatial detail: cell density drops, proliferation slows, and inflammatory immune cells take up proportionally more space.
Animal studies confirm that high doses of nanoplastic particles cause tissue dysfunction.
The gut microbiome sends a constant stream of chemical signals to the brain. In people with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, that microbial community looks systematically different — and researchers are now asking…
BioAge Labs lost its lead drug candidate last year after a phase 2 trial failure. Now the company is reporting positive early-stage data for BGE-102, a new candidate targeting metabolic disease through…
Stress is the most reliable trigger for alcohol relapse. A new study in mice and rats maps the specific neural circuit responsible — and shows how alcohol actively disrupts the very mechanism…
People are living longer. They are not necessarily living better. The Buck Institute for Research on Aging has announced a new initiative specifically aimed at measuring and extending the years of life…
Patients are arriving at clinics clutching reports of their ‘biological age’ — a number generated from a cheek swab or dried blood spot mailed from home. The appeal is obvious.
Senolytics — drugs that selectively eliminate aged, dysfunctional cells — are among the most closely watched interventions in aging research. Until now, the leading candidates have been synthetic compounds.
A small organ tucked behind the breastbone, largely ignored after childhood, turns out to be one of the more powerful predictors of mortality.
CAR T-cell therapy is one of the most powerful tools oncology has produced in decades — but its complexity and cost put it out of reach for most patients.
A small organ tucked behind the breastbone, largely ignored after childhood, turns out to be one of the more powerful predictors of mortality.
Pollution-exacerbated asthma is notoriously resistant to standard treatments. New research in mice explains part of why: nociceptors — the nerve cells that normally signal pain — are actively amplifying the inflammatory response,…
A biotech company targeting senescent cells has reported positive preliminary results from its first human trial.
Transplanting mitochondria into living cells has long seemed more fantasy than medicine.
Cellular senescence has become one of the most active frontiers in longevity science.
Senolytics — drugs that selectively eliminate aged, dysfunctional cells — are among the most closely watched interventions in aging research. Until now, the leading candidates have been synthetic compounds.
The hunt for safe senolytics — drugs that selectively eliminate aged, dysfunctional cells — has largely focused on repurposed cancer medications.
BioAge Labs lost its lead drug candidate last year after a phase 2 trial failure. Now the company is reporting positive early-stage data for BGE-102, a new candidate targeting metabolic disease through…
CAR T-cell therapy is one of the most powerful tools oncology has produced in decades — but its complexity and cost put it out of reach for most patients.
Stress is the most reliable trigger for alcohol relapse. A new study in mice and rats maps the specific neural circuit responsible — and shows how alcohol actively disrupts the very mechanism…
People are living longer. They are not necessarily living better. The Buck Institute for Research on Aging has announced a new initiative specifically aimed at measuring and extending the years of life…
Patients are arriving at clinics clutching reports of their ‘biological age’ — a number generated from a cheek swab or dried blood spot mailed from home. The appeal is obvious.
More than a billion people worldwide have metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, yet the molecular events that determine who will progress to cirrhosis remain poorly understood.