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Jul 27, 2009 | 2
Spanish pearl mussels don’t usually make it into their 30s. The same species bathing in Russia, however, can live for nearly 200 years.
The secret to the Russian pearls’ longevity may be slowly undermined if Earth’s seas continue to warm, because cooler waters supply the fountain of mussel youth, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We wanted to see whether the geographical variation in life span that we see in all sorts of species has a common physiological basis in temperature,” study co-author Stephan Munch of Stony Brook University in Long Island, N.Y., said in a statement. Alternatively, one might expect local adaptations or geographic variations in predator and food abundance to account for disparities in longevity.
Jan 26, 2009 | 4
Scientists have long known that severely cutting food intake may lead to a longer life. But new research shows the phenom doesn't apply to everyone—or, should we say, to every mouse. A new study recently published in the online edition of The Journal of Nutrition found that reducing caloric intake only seems to prolong the lives of fat mice with low metabolisms.
"There has been this kind of settled paradigm that caloric restriction universally extends the life span of animals, [and] some have implied that it also applies to humans," says study lead author Rajindar Sohal, a pharmacologist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. But he notes that he and his colleagues found that "extension of lifespan by food reduction will occur only if there is an energy imbalance [caused by a low metabolism]."
Dec 15, 2008 | 2
Sleep apnea, a disorder that can cause sufferers to temporarily stop breathing while snoozing, has long been associated with obesity. Paradoxical new findings suggest an ironic benefit: the worse the disease gets, the more calories patients burn.
"It's something of a silver lining," says Eric Kezirian, director of the division of sleep surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, whose research appears in today's Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery. "It's not hurting in certain areas, but may be hurting in other areas."
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