Tag: Animals

Many species have developed amazing mechanisms to cope with various drivers of aging. We have previously interviewed two prominent experts that study those evolutionary marvels: Steven Austad and Emma Teeling. However, this research is not purely academic anymore. A handful of bold entrepreneurs are trying to go commercial, and one of them is Ashley Zehnder,...

In a new review paper published in GeroScience, the researchers explored the translatability of anti-aging interventions across species and received somewhat alarming results [1]. Necessary, but not the best Model organisms have been widely and successfully used to understand the molecular processes driving disease pathologies, identify drug candidates, and test therapeutic interventions. Modern drug development...

Emma Teeling is a professor at University College of Dublin, and her research focuses on bats. In this interview, Emma explains why many bats, despite having tiny body sizes and leading very metabolically demanding lifestyles, are so amazingly long-lived. Will we ever be able to learn these animals' secrets of beating the odds? Emma is...

A preprint published in bioRxiv has partially explained the lifespan of the bowhead whale through its duplication of CDKN2C, which regulates how cells divide. Peto's paradox It would be logical for longer-lived animals to be more susceptible to cancer than shorter-lived animals over time, as they have longer to develop the mutations that lead to...

To understand human longevity, we need to put it into perspective. Are we relatively long-lived or short-lived creatures? After all, among all the plants and animals in nature, we find a vast variety of lifespans, from several hours to several millennia, and possibly even more. While humans are the most long-lived primates, our lifespan pales...

Dr. Steven Austad of the University of Alabama at Birmingham is not a typical geroscientist, or at least, he did not become one in a typical way. After obtaining his undergraduate degree in English literature, Steven spent several years on jobs such as a wild animal trainer for Hollywood before deciding to study biology, and his...