International Team Claims to Double Lifespan

An international team of scientists from France and Tunisia claims to have doubled the lifespan of rats by feeding them fullerenes in olive oil.

Fullerenes are molecules made only of carbon, in hexagons, pentagons or heptagons which join to form hollow spheres, tubes or ellipsoids.

Spherical fullerenes - also called "buckyballs" after geodesic dome inventor Buckminster Fuller - look like soccer balls, but the cylinders are called carbon nanotubes ("nano" coming from the word "nanometer" - one billionth of a meter).

 A "fullerene" or "buckyball" is a molecule made entirely of carbon, linked in hexagons.
 

A carbon nanotube is a similar structure, a cyclindrical molecule made of linked hexagonal carbon molecules.
 They were exploring the potential toxicity of buckyballs, but claim they instead found the solution doubled the lifespan of lab animals. Said the team: "The estimated median lifespan (EML) for the C60-treated rats was 42 months, while the EMLs for control rats and olive oil-treated rats were 22 and 26 months, respectively. These are increases of 18 and 90% for the olive-oil and C60-treated rats, respectively, as compared to controls." In other words, the olive-oil supplement extended lives significantly, but fullerenes transformed them into super-rats.

That's just the beginning, however, adds the team:

"Since 1993, countless studies showed that [60]fullerene (C60) and derivatives exhibit paramount potentialities in several fields of biology and medicine mainly including... UV and radioprotection , antiviral, antioxidant, and anti-amyloid (Alzheimers preventing) activities, allergic response and angiogenesis inhibitions (growth of blood vessels that feed tumors), immune stimulating and antitumour effects, enhancing effect on neurite outgrowth, gene delivery, and even hair-growing activity."

Download the original paper here: http://extremelongevity.net/wp-content/uploads/C60-Fullerene.pdf