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LiveScience
LiveScience
Jennifer Nalewicki

The secrets to extreme longevity may be hiding with nuns... and jellyfish

An elderly woman celebrates her 100th birthday with a cake.

On March 4, María Branyas Morera turned 116. In January, the great-grandmother, who was born in San Francisco in 1907 and now lives in a nursing home in Catalonia, Spain, became the world's oldest person following the death of Sister André (née Lucile Randon), a French nun who lived to be 118.

Branyas Morera, who goes by the nickname "super grandmother," has lived through the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, both World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. She also survived a bout of COVID-19 just weeks after turning 113, according to Guinness World Records.

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