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Since 1900, average life expectancy around the globe has more than doubled, thanks to better public health, sanitation and food supplies. But a new study of long-lived Italians indicates that we have yet to reach the upper bound of human longevity. “If there’s a fixed biological limit, we are not close to it,” said Elisabetta Barbi, a demographer at the University of Rome. Dr. Barbi and her colleagues published their research Thursday in the journal Science. (Zimmer, 6/28)

Jeanne Louise Calment lived for 122 years and 164 days, the oldest verified age of any person, ever. Her interviews revealed a portrait of the centenarian in high spirits: “I've only ever had one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it,” she told reporters when she turned 110. Calment died in 1997 in Arles, France, where she spent much of her impressively long life. No one else, according to accurate records, has lived beyond 120 years. (Guarino, 6/28)

For humankind in general, these findings hint at an intriguing, if largely theoretical, prospect: that the maximum possible human lifespan — essentially, the species’ design limit — has not yet been reached. It may even be extended by means as yet undiscovered. If the “oldest old” tell us how long we could live, then many centenarians could, in principle, get even older. And maybe older still with the right elixir. “This data suggest our genetic heritage is permissive,” Wachter said. “Our bodies are not put together so that at some point, everything goes wrong.” (Healy, 6/28)

Here’s what the Science paper found: A person’s risk of dying gets statistically higher with each passing year — until they hit 80. The idea is that those who were less fit, in a Darwinian sense, die out before they hit extreme old age. The survivors, who have proven their mettle as hardy stock, wind up less likely to die with each passing year. After 80, the death rates actually begin to decelerate — and after 105, the death rates plateau, according to the Science study. (Keshavan, 6/28)

Maybe you have heard the refrain before: The U.S. spends too much money on the dying. Every year, 5 percent of Medicare beneficiaries die, but one-quarter of spending occurs in the last year of life. Side by side, these stats have fed a widely held belief that, in an exorbitantly expensive health care system, much of end-of-life care goes to waste. A new study, published in the journal Science, pushes back on this notion. The researchers, a team of three economists and one physician, used machine learning to predict mortality and re-examine spending. In their new estimate, patients with the highest one-year mortality risk account for less than 5 percent of spending, much less than the original one-quarter claim. (Farber, 6/28)

If health costs must be contained, the argument follows, why not cut that relatively futile end-of-life spending? The answer, according to a new study that used machine learning on a huge trove of more than 6 million Medicare medical records to train a computer algorithm to predict deaths, is this: In most cases, it's not clear that the treatments are futile at the time. Because even with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, it's much harder than you might think to predict who's going to die soon. (Goldberg, 6/28)