In the last ten years, researchers have discovered thousands of species, both living and extinct. We got dino-eating crocodiles and killer kangaroos; a fish with a transparent head and a demon duck of doom; a bright pink millipede and giant spiders. And previously named species, such as the tongue-eating isopod and the alien-limbed Magnapinna, made headlines.

A few of these species were observed before 2000, but were only named or recognized as species in the last ten years. And each has some wonderfully monstrous quality, be it their incredible size, arsenal of offensive or defensive weapons, or knack for survival.

A Big Cat With Bite: The Bornean Clouded Leopard, which was found to be a new species in 2007 (though it had been observed long before), may not look like much at first. It may weigh in at a mere 55 pounds, putting it on the small side for a big cat, but it has the largest teeth of any known cat alive. It has even been described as the modern answer to the Sabertooth Tiger.
The Largest Snake to Slither the Earth: If South America's giant Anacondas make you quiver, be grateful that Titanoboa cerrejonensis has been dead for two million years. This prehistoric constrictor grew up to 50 feet in length and weighed in at a whopping 2500, the largest snake ever found. And its favorite food? Crocodiles. I can only imagine the digestive system on that thing.

Incidentally, this decade also saw the discovery of the smallest known snake, the Barbados Threadsnake.

Fanged Frogs: 2009 was a big year for frogs with teeth. Fanged frogs turned up in the Mount Bosavi crater in Papua New Guinea, where strange and wondrous new species are being discovered all the time. But even more monstrous are the Limnonectes megastomias, recently discovered in Thailand. This amphibian has been known to use its fangs in deadly combat, dismembering its froggy opponents. On top of that, when a bird swoops near, L. megastomias will snap and turn it into a tasty feast.

Sea Monsters of the Ancient Deep: Paleontologists digging in the Arctic Svalbard islands uncovered what they believe to be a new species of pliosaur, one with a skull twice as large as a Tyrannosaurus rex's. Its teeth were 12 inches long (with a bite four times as strong as T. Rex's), and is 15-meter-long body weighed an estimated 45 tons. That would make this Jurassic beast considerably larger than any pliosaur previously discovered.

Beware the Box: Giant jellyfish are a sight to behold, but it's the diminutive Malo kingi that you'll really want to avoid. The jelly gets its name, tragically, from its first known victim, Robert King, an American tourist swimming off the Queensland coast in 2002. Some researchers believe kingi venom is among the most toxic in the world.

A Rat as Big as a Cow: They just don't make rodents like they used to. Josephoartigasia monesi weighed around a ton — dwarfing the modern capybara — and had enormous incisors that rival a beaver's wood shredding teeth. Those incisors came in hand when fending off predatory birds and Sabertooth Tigers, though this largest of the rodents snacked on fruits and vegetables.

Mammal-Eating Plants: Pitcher plants are nothing new, but these large, rat-eating veggies added a few species in the last ten years. Naturalist David Attenborough was immortalized in Nepenthes attenboroughii, a new species found in the Philippines. Rodents are attracted to the liquid in the pitchers, then drown when they tumble inside.

A Bug Bigger Than You: In 2007, diggers found giant spiked claw belonging to Jaekelopterus rhenaniae in Prum, Germany. This sea scorpion, which lived 390 million years ago, was an estimated 8.2 meters long and ate anything it could get its claws on — including other scorpions.

Extreme Living, in Your Hairspray: Extremophiles can exist in environments that would kill lesser species — in extreme heat or cold, inside nuclear reactors, or in the void of space. Microbacterium hatanonis, discovered in 2008, chooses an odd environment as its home: in hairspray. It's not clear how the bacterium affects humans, but the discovery adds more information on where and how they can survive.

Bomber Worms: This year, a researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography discovered seven new species of sea worms that secrete small globs of fluid that act as biological flash bombs. These bombs glow, distracting predators while the worm slips away. It's only a shame that their defensive bombs can't be weaponized for bonus monster action.

Ducks are known for their bizarre penises, stretching up to 20cm in size in an anti-clockwise spiral. That's an impressive organ for a bird often only 60cm long. The females, on the other hand, have vaginas that spiral clockwise, opposite to their menfolk. Ducks also engage in what is politely termed "forced copulation", where the male ducks attempt non-consensual sex with the female, and explosively extend their penises with a technique that takes less than half a second.

Eversion in air: from blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.

This forceful mating is something the females try to avoid. Luckily, evolution is on their side. Female ducks have evolved vaginas that spiral clockwise, and contain sharp turns, which scientists believe were used to prevent insemination by unwanted suitors. This theory has finally been tested by enterprising researchers at Yale, with too much time and glassware on their hands. With sets of cylindrical glass tubes shaped into clockwise or anti-clockwise spirals, they tested how easily the penis advanced through various vaginal configurations. The clockwise vaginas managed to stop the intruding organ, protecting the female duck form unwanted advances.

In fact, the majority of forced copulations don't result in fertilization, and it appears the two sexes are involved in an arms race over their genitalia, with males evolving new attacks and the females defences. The twisted vaginas can completely stop the penis from its explosive exertion, preventing unwanted genes from being passed on. This helps stop undesired advances, and lets females retain control over who will reproduce successfully with them.

It may not be a vagina dentata, but it's a close approximation.

[via Yale]

Extraordinary Animals In The Womb aired last year, using advances in scanning and imaging technology to trace the gestational paths of animals outside the human family. The documentary footage is actually a combination of digital photography, scans, and computer-generated models. The filmmakers took detailed scans of the animal's wombs, then had the model makers recreate every blood vessel and whisker. The resulting images, while not direct photographs, are, according to the researchers, accurate representations of what goes on inside these creatures' wombs.

You can read more about the documentary at the Daily Mail.

Stunning photographs of animals inside womb [This Blog Rules via Maurissa Tancharoen]

Today PLoS Biology published a study of fruitflies, a species where the male flies show a marked preference for mating with larger females because they are more fecund. The problem is that the males show such aggressive preferences that they basically badger the females constantly to mate. What this means is that the females are so harried that they have less time to search for food, which degrades their health. Also, among fruitflies, the mating process is itself damaging to the health of the females - fruitfly sperm is toxic.

As a result, the most-desired females become far less capable of generating healthy offspring. And the smaller, less fit females wind up bearing as many offspring as the fitter ones. In the end, the males' aggressive mating with the fittest females ends up preventing their species from evolving into a much fitter group.

Tristan A. F. Long, one of the authors of the study, said:

These larger females are disproportionately harassed and harmed, by males attempting to obtain matings. When these males are ‘choosy' with their courtship, there may be negative consequences to the species' ability to adaptively evolve.

What's interesting about this study is that it's one of the few to point out how male mate choice affects evolution of a species. Usually female mate choice is emphasized, except in species where females are dominant. Here we can see clearly that male mate choice is having a profound and not very salutary affect on the future of fruitfly fitness. The issue here is obviously not attractiveness, but instead the kind of fitness associated with being larger and more fecund. If larger, "attractive" females are harrassed into reproductive uselessness by the males, then any traits they possess that make them healthier (a trait for metabolic efficiency, for instance) won't be able to spread through the population as quickly as it might if males chose mates randomly.

via PLoS Biology

In this awesome movie, where the butterfly flaps around in its cage with a floating chrysalis, you can see the future of elementary school experiments. This video is one in a series produced for elementary school classes whose students are growing their own butterflies - now, they get to compare their results with the insects' space-going counterparts.

Discovery News writes: BioServe Space Technologies and the University of Colorado [work with] students on the ground to follow the progress of the orbiting creatures. The school kids can then compare the development of butterflies in the classroom with their orbiting cousins.

Butterflies In Space experiment via Discovery News

First of all, there haven't been very many biotech apocalypse flicks at all, even though genetic engineering and other genome/proteome-based weirdness are freaking everybody out in the pop science media. Possibly 28 Days Later is the iconic example of a biotech apocalypse, since it's a human-made virus that unleashes the zombie hoardes. But honestly, we can do better than plagues - we've all seen those before. Besides, the upcoming World War Z movie is probably going to hold the whole plague subgenre hostage to its awesomeness next year.

So what would have to happen to produce a really great biotech apocalypse that wasn't just a virus scare with zombies that made us all think disappointedly of I Am Legend?

First of all, the biotech armageddon would have to affect the entire biosphere, not just humans. When it comes to imagining this scenario I always think of Kathleen Ann Goonan's Jazz Quintet novels, which begin with Queen City Jazz. She creates a future where many people move into biotech cities whose entire infrastructure is mutable and organic - genetically-engineered bees keep the cities "growing" by fertilizing the buildings, which are actually giant wildflowers. The problem comes when the city itself is infested with a virus that causes its entire fabric to remake itself to resemble stories from files stored in the city's library. What if your city decided that it wanted to be a film noir Paris, and then reprogrammed every person and building to emulate that (fictional) place?

If you wanted to go even weirder, visit the scenarios that Rudy Rucker comes up with in Hylozoic, where every object on the planet becomes sentient. Suddenly you are having an emotional relationship with your telephone, which has a lot of opinions about how you've abused it in the past.

I'm not saying we need movie versions of these books, though that might be nice if done by the right people. What we need is for mainstream media to catch up to what is happening in literature and in the lab.

Though I wasn't entirely crazy about Minority Report, one thing that film got right was its emphasis on believable technology. The filmmakers went to MIT, checked out labs where futuristic computer interfaces and biotech are being invented, and incorporated them into the film. I'd love to see the movie that got made after some filmmakers spent some time hanging out at the Department of Energy's Genome Research Institute, or the Max Planck Institute in Europe - or, hell, how about just reading even one essay by Drew Endy? In fact, you don't have to read - you can just watch him talk about synthetic biology here:

If researchers can genetically-engineer bacteria whose behavior changes with a flash of light, or build poplars that contain termite genes so that they break down into ethanol more easily, imagine what kind of apocalypse we're facing. That's right - it's not necessarily an apocalypse at all. It's simply a world packed with flora and fauna we couldn't possibly recognize today. In her novels Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood imagines that this will result in creepy half-human pigs and sheep who sprout human hair that can be sold as wigs. There is something admittedly horrifying about the idea that humanity could reshape the biosphere in its greedy, simian image. What marks the biotech apocalypse is that it's a scenario where life as we know it doesn't end - it turns into new forms of life.

What I'm saying is that I want to see stories where synthetic biology generates cities and technologies like the ones Jeff VanderMeer imagined in his recent novel Finch, where spore people grow buildings and guns from mushrooms. And I want these tales to do what few apocalyptic tales have dared to do: Explore what it means when what has been destroyed isn't the world, but instead just one instance of the world.

One of the most basic truths we learn from evolutionary theory and geology is that the world we live in - the one whose climate and landmasses we fuss about endlessly - is in fact just one version of Earth. For a long period, Earth had a different set of gasses in its atmosphere, and all life lived in the seas. The composition of our biosphere and state of our climate has changed dramatically over the millennia. C'mon Hollywood - give us a story where the world doesn't suffer apocalyptic death, but instead a dramatic rebirth. One that begins in our nanoscopic genomes, not in mega-explosions.

Image via Yanko Design

We've written about this kind of work before, specifically the research into optogenetics, which allows scientists to genetically-engineer light-sensitive reactions in animals or plants. What's different about this nematode experiment, however, is that no genetic engineering was involved - the little worm just ate a small amount of a chemical (basically the equivalent of popping a pill).

According to National Geographic:

After feeding a light-sensitive chemical to transparent, microscopic worms called nematodes, scientists at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia were able to paralyze the tiny creatures by exposing them to UV light. The paralysis works because UV light changes the structure of the ingested chemical, called dithienylethene.

Upon UV exposure, the normally clear chemical turns blue, and it shuts down the worms' metabolism, said study co-author Neil R. Branda. A shot of visible light restored the worms to normal, and the animals slowly began to wiggle around "as if they had never been paralyzed," the study authors say.

Will we be seeing the equivalent kinds of experiments taking place with humans? Yes indeed, though not for paralyzing people. Researchers are interested in light-activated medicines, which only get activated when exposed to light. This would allow doctors to activate drugs in very precise places in your body.

via NatGeo (thanks to Marilyn Terrell)

The BBC captured this rare timelapse video of Antarctic creatures feeding on a fallen seal carcass. Its estimated that they see this kind of bounty just once every ten years or so, and the critters have taken the opportunity to swarm the body, picking it down to its skeleton. Several species of worms from the phylum Nemertea use their sometimes venomous proboscises to pierce the seal's flesh, while starfish attach themselves to the carcass, pushing their stomachs out through their mouths to feed. Sea urchins and sea spiders, the latter of which can grow up to 30cm across, also flourish here, with no crabs and few fish.

Be warned, the video below contains graphic images of these animals feeding, but it's also fascinating to watch them pick apart a rare, meaty find.

Monster worm and sea star frenzy [BBC]

The photic zone is an area of the ocean that extends beyond the reach of sunlight, as deep as 5,000 meters. For the first time, a serious effort has begun to try and catalogue the vast array of deep sea life, under the auspices of the Census Of Marine Life (COML). Currently, they've identified more than 17,000 species inhabiting the dark depths, which will join with information from hundreds of other projects next October to reveal the complete results of the census.

Most of these creatures survive on marine snow—particles of decaying plants and animals that descend to the ocean floor. This transparent sea cucumber was found at 2,750m, creeping forward at a rate of 2 cm per minute, sweeping detritus into its mouth.

[via COML]

Photos courtesy of Larry Madin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The tiny copepod, from the Atlantic.
Image © Büntzow/Corgosinho

One of the dumbo octopods, which can grow up to five feet in length.
Photo by David Shale



The jewel squid has tiny light organs all along its body, which emit and perceive light.

This is only the fifth ever found Neocyma, discovered between 2,000 and 2,500m. Image from David Shale.

The northern comb jelly has oscillating lights up and down its length.



The snake pipefish

The "wildcat" tubeworm, which drills for oil, then dines on the chemicals inside when it hits a small well.

It wouldn't be the deep sea without nightmare fuel. Like the loosejaw, with its extendible lower jaw and red-light sensitive eyes.

Or the swallower.

A group of researchers in the United States decided to do an experiment with water striders, in which they observed the mating success of prudent, "nice" males versus aggressive, "psychopathic" males. The latter group tried often to mate with the females very aggressively, and in previous experiments they had the most reproductive success. But these scientists discovered that the success of the psychopaths depended on very specific laboratory conditions

It turned out that other studies of sex among water striders had kept the population contained in a limited area, where females had access to very few males. When the researchers opened up the insects' habitat, allowing the females to roam freely, they discovered that the less aggressive males attracted the highest number of mates.

According to a release about the research, published yesterday afternoon in Science:

"The presence of psychopaths dramatically reduced the productivity of the population," [biologist David Sloan] Wilson said. "When all the males were gentlemen, the females laid about three times more eggs than they did when all the males were psychopaths. And yet within each group the psychopaths were doing better than the gentlemen. How do the gentlemen persist if they're disadvantaged within the group?"

Once the females could move between groups, the researchers had their answer. [Researcher Omar Tonsi] Eldakar and Michael J. Dlugos, then also a Binghamton graduate student, devised a wading pool equipped with special doors that could restrict movement between groups or allow the insects to move freely.

"When they opened the doors, the females would leave whenever a psychopath came around," Wilson said. "The whole thing resulted in a heterogeneity in which the females were clustered with the gentlemen. It's the movement of individuals that creates these differences between groups that favor nonaggressive males."

Who knows how much research into sexual selection has been flawed because researchers forgot the crucial ingredient of female freedom?

Ultimately, what's interesting about this study is that it shows why isolated populations might engage in a different mode of sexual selection than a free-ranging population that has a lot of contact with outside groups.

via Science

The class' syllabus, quizzes and related links are online, and so are the study guide, a class wiki, and some student projects. It's pretty fascinating to get a glimpse into the ways in which some of science-fiction's weird creatures, including some of the most far-fetched ones, can provide insight into actual biology.

Top image is cover of Slonczewski's novel, A Door Into Ocean. [The Columbus Dispatch and Biology In Science Fiction Blog]

Normally relocating bears is frowned on as a way of saving populations. Conventional environmental science says that a declining population should not be moved until the sources of its decline have been addressed. But this group of French biologists say that in this case, they have population models that prove the cause of the decline in the population has to do with a gender disparity.

While you might think this solution is obvious, it isn't. You see, the problem with these bears isn't that there aren't enough females to breed a new population - in fact, there are. Instead, the problem comes from the bears' practice of co-rearing their young, with the fathers sticking around to care for their offspring. Because the babies take a while to mature, there will be long stretches where some males are fathers and others aren't. The single bears will fight the fathers. When single bears win, they murder the father's offspring so they can parent their own children. As a result, even a slight gender imbalance between the bears can result in viable offspring being killed over and over.

The scientists' study was published yesterday in PLoS One. A release about the study explains:

The researchers analyzed field data collected from 1993 to 2005 and found that the western sub-population had much lower reproductive success than the central sub-population. They suggest this could be the consequence of the western sub-population being inbred or having a male-biased sex ratio. In species with extended parental care, a male-biased sex ratio can induce sexually selected infanticide, a behavior in which males attempt to kill unrelated cubs to induce estrous in females, maximizing their opportunity to breed.

[Researcher Guillaume] Chapron and his colleagues used a population model to compute how many bears should be released to ensure viability, and showed the population could recover provided an adequate number of new females are translocated.

via PLoS One

The article, published today in Science, looks at a microbe known as SUPO5, which lives in areas of the ocean which have low amounts of oxygen. These "dead zones" are created by climate change and nitrogen runoff. The microbes were found off the coast of British Columbia, in the Saanich Inlet, and use nitrates instead of oxygen as a source of energy. They remove sulfides from the water, fix carbon dioxide, and in turn produce nitrous oxide, a very potent greenhouse gas.

The dead zones, officially called oxygen minimum zones (OMZs), are expanding, and most marine life struggles to live in their low oxygen environments. You can find dead zones off the coasts of British Columbia, Oregon, Chile, and Namibia, among other locations. Their growth may have significant impact on fisheries and marine life, and the presence of SUPO5 seems to be one of the best indicators of the presence of dead zones - they are helping turn the zones into nitrogen sinks that pump out greenhouse gasses.

By creating dead zones, we my have inadvertently helped space-faring microbes evolve. SUPO5 can survive low oxygen environments, with otherwise deadly chemical makeups. The organism refines sulfur compounds, which on earth are only found in very exotic environments, such as hydrothermal vents, or these OMZs. On another planet, they could thrive.

Said Steve Hallam, the head researcher on the project:

I hesitate to use the word alien to describe [SMO5], as it's very much part of earth's system, but it's alien to us...it doesn't require the thin film of oxygenated atmosphere that we thrive in.

Possibly these microbes could be used in terraforming. They can survive starvation, too. When food supplies get low, the microbe goes dormant. That would make it ideal for putting into hibernation for a long trip.

Hallan says SMO5 also could be useful here on Earth in wastewater treatment or fuel production, where the microbes' unique biology could be used to remove sulfides.

via Science and the Joint Genome Institute

Image courtesy of Hallam Lab.

The spider was discovered in South Africa, and a group of researchers officially described the species in a paper published in PLoS One yesterday evening. Spiders in the Nephilia family all exhibit what's called extreme sexual size dimorphism - in other words, the females are a lot larger than the males, and usually eat the males after mating with them. You can see from these images that the males of N. komaci really are so small compared to the females that they could be mistaken for a post-coital snack.

The researchers also analyzed the evolution of these spiders, and concluded that what we're seeing is a tendency towards female gigantism rather than male dwarfism. Because the female spiders survive better the larger they get, they have evolved to be huge. The males, on the other hand, wind up passing along their sperm to the next generation if they mature early (i.e. when they are smaller) and can climb really well. And thus, you get tiny males and giant females.

via PLoS One

A study published this week in PLoS One showed that chimps would share tools with each other, but usually only if requested. Which raises interesting questions about why humans are so easygoing, and free with our assistance.

The experiments focused on two chimps in adjoining cages. Either both apes had a tool the other needed, or just one had the object their neighbour required: a stick to get at a juice box, or a straw to drink from a container of juice. Even when there was no reciprocal trade, the chimpanzees gave the tool, but usually required a request. How does an ape signal that it wants what you have? Vocalizing, clapping, beating against the wall, and reaching through the barrier between walls.

Professor Shinya Yamamoto, of Kyoto University, and head of the experimental unit said:

Communicative interactions play an important role in altruism in chimpanzees. While humans may help others without being solicited, the chimpanzees rarely voluntarily offered an effective tool to a struggling partner. Indeed, simple observation of another's failed attempts did not elicit voluntary helping in chimpanzees.

Why do humans, and some other animals (like capuchin monkeys), offer help spontaneously, yet an animal we're so closely related to does not? As always, no one really knows, but there are a lot of theories.

Even though half the experimental couples were non-related chimps, they were just as likely to hand over the tool, so it's not a straight out family link. If food was at stake, then the chance one chimp would share with the other plummeted from 80-90% likelihood to down around 30%.

One significant factor may be the chimps' difficulty in understanding another being's point-of-view. But from a social perspective, requested altruism makes a huge amount sense. In a situation of limited resources, be they food, tools, or anything else, unnecessary assistance can lead to wasted goods. Evolving an "altruism on request" system is a way to ensure that the "help" offered is actually helpful, and minimizes unnecessary behaviour.

So why do humans behave differently? Chimpanzees function at a level very similar to a hunter-gatherer tribe. They make and modify tools to aid in their endeavours, getting most of their calories from gathering, but with the occasional hunting boost.

Humans, on the other hand, evolved into agricultural societies several thousand year ago. There's a huge body of literature based on the premise that, among humans, the food surpluses brought about by the shift to agriculture allowed for the creation of cities and complex hierarchical societies as we understand them. Could agriculture have made humans more altruistic than their hand-to-mouth chimp brethren?

If that were the cause of the change, then we would have developed our current style of offering help whenever we thought it appropriate in the last 10,000 years or so. Maybe the change happened when we shifted from the trees into the grasslands, a situation of higher predation which would require greater teamwork within a group. While this is purely speculation, further studies of altruism in apes will perhaps provide a better idea of why this discrepancy exists.

The above image, by Spike Walker, was one of the winners of the 2009 Wellcome Image Awards, announced yesterday in England. Last year's winners blew us away, but if anything, this years' are even more spectacular. Many of them play to our weakness for beautiful microscopy images. Here are our absolute favorites — more images at the link. [Wellcome Image Awards]

Microparticle drug delivery by Annie Cavaugh and Dave McCarthy: A synthetic drug coated with co-polymers. Scanning electron micrograph.

Villi in the small intestine. Multiphoton fluorescent micrograph by Paul Appleton.

Capillary network. Light micrograph by Spike Walker.

Mouse liver. Scanning electron micrograph by Jackie Lewin.

Lung cancer cell. Scanning electron micrograph by Anne Weston, London Research Institute, Cancer Research, UK.

Summer plankton. Light micrograph by Spike Walker.

OK, I'll admit it. This cat is genetically engineered in that old-school breeder way, and it doesn't really have antenna dishes in its ears. Though that WOULD BE COOL.

What you're actually seeing is 4-month-old long hair American Curl showcat Sarah Jessicurl Parker. This photo was shot during a media preview for "Meet the Breeds" in New York. The event is the world's largest showcase of cats and dogs, and will take place at the Jacob Javits Center in New York this weekend.

via AP Photo/by Mary Altaffer

Researchers believe that the estrogen levels in breast tissue are an early indicator of breast cancer risk. So they've devised a special chip, smaller than a credit card, to extract the estrogen from breast tissue so doctors can study it. Electricity coaxes liquid to move across the chip, based on the science of "digital microfluidics." As the liquid travels, it dissolves the dried tissue sample, then moves along to another reservoir containing a second liquid, and then on to a third reservoir where it circulates and removes contaminants and other biological components. What's left is a purer sample of estrogen, which can indicate your level of cancer risk.

Here's a handy diagram:

[via EurekAlert]

A paper published in the journal Polar Biology discusses the possible benefits to an arrangement like this one. The most common explanation is that the mother carries the slower moving cub to make swims between land masses quicker. This could make hunting easier, make swimming less tiring, or even help the less-insulated cub get out of the cold water as quickly as possible.

Ignoring for the moment this increasingly human-like behavior in polar bears in Svalbard, this image also seems to hint at climate fears. The paper suggests that the swimming time saved by this piggy-backing behavior would be very advantageous in an arctic region with decreasing ice.

Polar bear cub hitches a ride [BBC Earth News]

(Image: Angela Plumb)

A team of researchers in the UK explored the role of a protein known as S6K1, which turns out to play an extraordinary role in aging and age-related disease. When the researchers grew mice lacking the gene to produce S6K1, their mice lived significantly longer (see chart - the red lines are mice without S6K1). They also developed fewer age-related debilitating conditions.

Female mice without S6K1 lived slightly longer than their male counterparts, and over 160 days longer than the control group. That means the female mouse lifespan increased by twenty percent.

Mice without S6K1 also lost weight, even if they ate more than ordinary mice. In other words, a substance that could block the expression of S6K1 would trick the body into thinking that you'd gone on a very rigorous diet. And it would make you healthier into an older age. The best part?

In their paper, the researchers conclude:

It might be possible to develop drug treatments that manipulate S6K1 and AMPK to achieve improved overall health in later life. Indeed, short-term rapamycin treatment reduces adiposity in mice, and metformin treatment [often used against type 2 diabetes] extends lifespan in short-lived mice.

This is good news, because often when researchers make discoveries related to longevity there is no immediate pathway to manufacturing a life-extending drug. For all of us who want to stay healthy in old age while still eating sugar and fat once in a while, let's hope this research team starts testing a drug based on their S6K1 discovery - and soon.

via Science