An international research team led the Leibniz Institute on Aging – Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena, Germany, and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, USA, has uncovered new insights into healthy brain aging. Researchers found that aging leads to the accumulation of defective energy molecules in the brains of aged mice, like humans, and identified the responsible genetic sequence. Importantly, no evidence was found that this accumulation would impair brain function, highlighting that age-related brain changes are not necessarily harmful.