Results of research offer hope to older women – but it will be several years at least before technique is approved

• Human eggs ‘rejuvenated’ in an advance that could boost IVF success rates

It is a rollercoaster of emotional extremes that will be familiar to many who have gone through IVF treatment: hope and joy turns to despair and back again. This is especially true for women over 35, the age when IVF success rates decline steeply and for whom the only real way to improve the odds is to keep trying.

While there has been huge progress in IVF in the past decades, including the advent of genetic testing, egg freezing and techniques to overcome male infertility, the primary cause of age-related female infertility – egg quality – has not been directly addressed.

Experts and community trying to untangle mystery of outburst that saw water travel almost 10km overland into a bigger lake

Manoel Dixon had just finished dinner one night last May when a phone dinged nearby with a Facebook message.

Dixon, 26, was at his family’s hunting camp near their northern Quebec home town of Waswanipi. They knew the fellow hunter who was messaging Dixon’s father, but what he wrote didn’t make sense.