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Maria Branyas Morera, then the world’s oldest living person, had one last request before she died. “Please study me,” she said to Dr. Manel Esteller, chairman of genetics at the University of Barcelona’s School of Medicine. A resident of Olot, Spain, she died last summer at age 117. Dr. Esteller and a large cohort of colleagues fulfilled her wish. They examined Ms. Branyas’s blood, saliva, urine and stool to try to learn why she lived so long. (Kolata, 9/24)

Leo Chenyang Lin was on a trip to New Hampshire two years ago when he stopped to watch a group of squirrels darting through the trees. That “playful moment” stuck with him. By the end of that day, he realized he could recall that moment “in vivid detail” — and also the farm animals he and his colleagues had passed earlier, on their way to their destination. (Timsit, 9/25)

It’s among the most common cancers affecting older men. But a diagnosis today isn’t always what it seems. (Dodge, 9/24)

At 70, Walter Carpenter juggles two physically taxing jobs. In the winter, he works at a ski resort restaurant in Vermont, lugging heavy loads. In the summer, he is an attendant at a state park with a swimming beach, a job that has him trudging through sand and heat. Both are tough on his arthritic knees, which he has put off replacing. His bills won’t let him retire anytime soon, even as working becomes increasingly difficult for him. Carpenter knows that if he pushes himself too hard, the results “could be disastrous or fatal,” he said. He worries: “Will my body hold up? Will my heart hold up?” (Euzet, 9/24)

At age 13, Katrine Petersen was fitted with a contraceptive device by Danish doctors without her consent. She had become pregnant, and after doctors in the Greenlandic town of Maniitsoq terminated her pregnancy, they fitted her with an intrauterine contraceptive device, commonly known as an IUD, or coil. Now aged 52 and living in Denmark, Petersen recalled being told she had been fitted with the device before leaving hospital. “Because of my age, I didn’t know what to do,” she said tearfully. “I kept it inside me and never talked about it.” Later in life, after she married, she was unable to have children. (Brooks, 9/24)