In April, Emma Morano, the oldest known human in the world at the time, passed away at the age of 117. Supercentenarians — people older than 110 — such as Morano and Jeanne Calment of France, who died at the record-setting age of 122 in 1997, have led scientists to wonder just how long humans can live. In a study published in October in the journal Nature, Jan Vijg, a molecular geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and his colleagues concluded that humans may have reached their maximum life span.