As we age, our bodies undergo various changes that can impact our physical and mental well-being. While some of these changes are inevitable, research suggests that incorporating certain foods into our diet can help promote healthy aging.

A recent study conducted by researchers from Edith Cowan University, Queen’s University Belfast, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that consuming higher intakes of black tea, berries, citrus fruits, and apples could lower the risk of key components of unhealthy aging, including frailty, impaired physical function, and poor mental health.

The study analyzed data from 62,743 women and 23,687 men over a period of 24 years. The findings revealed that women with the highest flavonoid intakes had a 15% lower risk of frailty, a 12% lower risk of impaired physical function, and a 12% lower risk of poor mental health compared to those with the lowest intakes.

While fewer associations were observed in men, higher flavonoid intake was still linked to a lower risk of poor mental health. The researchers suggested that regularly consuming flavonoid-rich foods could support healthier aging by reducing the risk of frailty, physical decline, and poor mental health.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Nicola Bondonno from Edith Cowan University, emphasized the importance of medical research in promoting healthy aging. “Our goal is not just to help people live longer but to ensure they stay healthy for as long as possible,” she said.

Professor Aedin Cassidy from Queen’s University Belfast added that flavonoids have been shown to reduce oxidative stress and inflammation, supporting blood vessel health, and even helping to maintain skeletal muscle mass – all of which are crucial for preventing frailty and maintaining physical function and mental health as we age.

The researchers noted that incorporating three servings of flavonoid-rich food into one’s diet could lead to a 6% to 11% lower risk across all three aging outcomes in females, and a 15% lower risk of poor mental health in males. This highlights the potential for simple dietary modifications to impact overall quality of life and contribute to the optimisation of healthy aging.

Overall, this study underscores the importance of incorporating flavonoid-rich foods into our diet to promote healthier aging. As Professor Eric Rimm from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health noted, “These findings underscore the potential for simple dietary modifications to impact overall quality of life and contribute to the optimisation of healthy aging.”

The lives of Sumatran orangutans living in zoos have been found to significantly alter how they interact with their environment, according to a recent study comparing wild and zoo-housed individuals. Researchers analyzed over 12,000 instances of daily exploratory object manipulation (EOM), revealing that orangutans in zoos engage in more frequent, diverse, and complex exploration than their wild counterparts.

“Our study shows that orangutans in zoos not only explore more but also explore differently,” said Isabelle Laumer, first author of the study. “What’s especially fascinating is that even when exploring the same kinds of objects, zoo-housed orangutans showed a richer repertoire of actions and were more likely to use tools or manipulate multiple objects at the same time.”

The study compared EOM behaviors in wild and zoo-housed orangutans across a wide age range. Data were collected from 33 wild individuals aged between six months and 76 years, as well as from 24 individuals in four zoos in Germany and Switzerland, with ages ranging from seven months to 49 years.

The results showed that zoo-housed orangutans explored objects more frequently than their wild counterparts, while there was no difference in exploration duration when individuals did explore. In contrast, wild orangutans primarily explored naturally occurring objects like plants, bark, and sticks, whereas zoo-housed orangutans engaged with a wider variety of enrichment items designed to encourage manipulation and cognitive engagement.

Importantly, the age at which orangutans first engaged in specific types of exploration was consistent across both settings, suggesting an innate developmental sequence. However, zoo orangutans continued to explore into adulthood, while wild individuals’ EOM declined sharply around weaning age (about 8 years old), likely due to the demands of survival in the wild.

In human infants, object exploration enables learning about physical properties such as texture and weight while stimulating cognitive and motor development – a pattern observed in many non-human animals as well. The heightened exploration may enhance cognitive flexibility and problem-solving skills in zoo-housed orangutans, as they interact with varied enrichment items and have more time and energy to devote to learning through exploration.

“These findings underscore how profoundly the environment influences animal behavior and cognitive development,” said Caroline Schuppli, senior author of the study. “And it also offers unique opportunities – by comparing wild and zoo-housed animals, we can better understand the full extent of a species’ cognitive potential.”

The amazing diversity of life on our planet is a testament to the multitude of biological solutions that have evolved to secure and maintain energy. However, despite its central role in biology, measuring energy consumption remains a challenging task. One major drain for many animals is movement, making it an ideal lens through which to estimate energy usage. While methods exist for measuring animal movement, they are often limited by the physical size of the equipment used.

In a groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, researchers from the Marine Biophysics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have developed an innovative method for measuring energy usage during movement using video and 3D-tracking via deep learning. This new approach opens up the possibility of studying energy consumption in animals that were previously inaccessible due to the reliance on wearable equipment.

The current state-of-the-art method, Dynamic Body Acceleration (DBA), involves measuring oxygen consumption while an animal performs a specific behavior in a lab setting. However, this method has limitations when applied in the wild, where reliably measuring oxygen consumption is impossible. To overcome these challenges, researchers have used physical accelerometers that weigh at least ten times less than the animal, but this still rules out the study of many small species.

The OIST researchers’ solution to this problem is elegantly simple: they use two cameras to capture video footage of an animal’s behavior from multiple angles, reconstructing its movement in 3D space. A deep learning neural network is then trained on a few frames of the videos to track the position of body features such as eyes, allowing researchers to subsequently measure the movement-related acceleration.

This new video-based DBA method has opened up possibilities for studying energy consumption in animals that were previously inaccessible, potentially enabling many new research avenues into the breadth of life on our planet. For example, researchers can now investigate the energy expenditure during schooling of small fish, which has long remained mysterious. By accurately measuring energy usage during free-ranging animal behavior, scientists can gain a deeper understanding of the ecology and evolution of various species.