Organisms often react to extreme environmental conditions with defence mechanisms which allow them to survive. In a work recently published in the journal Aging Cell, a team of researchers from FAU, the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden and the TU Dresden together with the Max Planck Centre for Physics and Medicine (MPZPM) in Erlangen discovered that alcohol can double the lifespan of nematode larvae.