A mother's age shapes her children's biology — but not through the slow accumulation of genetic damage scientists long assumed. Research on rotifers, tiny aquatic animals whose rapid reproduction makes them ideal windows into inheritance, reveals that maternal age effects travel through epigenetic mechanisms: chemical tags on proteins that switch genes on and off, leaving marks that can be erased within a single generation. This discovery, emerging from the Marine Biological Laboratory, invites us to reconsider how the lives of grandmothers and great-grandmothers quietly echo forward through t