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Keeping Cool May Be the Key To Longevity
merryprankster writes "New Scientist reports that Scripps Research Institute scientists have found that lowering the body temperature of mice by just 0.5C extends their lifespan by around 15%. Until now the only proven way of increasing longevity has been calorie restriction — but as this also causes a lowering of body temperature the researchers speculate that this cooling may be the underlying mechanism retarding aging. In this study mice with a defect in their lateral hypothalamus, which has the side effect of cooling body temperature, not only lived longer but also ate normal amounts."
Alaska, here I come!
Space for rent, inquire within
So when my dad kept yelling at me not to touch the thermostat, to keep it at 60 degrees, he was really trying to help me live longer?
Thanks Dad!
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
I should live a long and fruitful life then!
Then with global warming, we'd be truly screwed, eh?
Hey that explains why congressional pages live so long!
It did extend the life by 12-20%, but what will happen in case there is an infection?
Wouldnt this force us to have relatively poor immunity to diseases ?
In the end, would this even out?
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
it's in my head
Global warming is bad for your health.
Apparently heat makes your CPU die early too. Down with heat!
Excuse me, I'm off to 31 Flavors. My very life depends on it!
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Aye, Moby Dick fans: swallow ye the whale, ere that Soviet Russian devil swallow you.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The glorious Air Conditioner!
Deleted
Let's see... be cold all the time and eat just enough to keep your body going.
Sounds like a ton of fun.
I think I'll pass...
They ran commercials years ago showing people from the frigid north somewhere (Russia maybe)? eating Dannon yogurt and living to 100 years old.
This is nothing new.
The reason I am a fat lazy slob is because I have defective hypothalamus. It's not because I sit in front of a computer all day reading slashdot and not exercising, it's because I have abnormal brain composition.
Live 80 years or so compfortable and warm, than freezing for 90 years or so!
This is a line from the computergame Aqua Nox.
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
So when people complain that I'm weird for liking a data center cold enough in which to hang meat, I'll have the last laugh? Enjoy your warm, short life in those cozy, tropical getaways, suckers! I'll be here configuring a new web appliance in one of my racks, freezing my ass off and barely able to type with my cold, stiff hands. Hah! I win!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Huh, I thought those guys in the server room looked a bit young for their age...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Let's see... .5C for 15% extension of life... so 150C decrease in temperature should yeild a 3000% extension....
Freeze me!
must... find... better... heatsink.... yeaaaarggghh... /RIP
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I for one welcome our 15% longer living, micro-cryo-frozen mutantmice!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
This has been discussed many times with the folk-science of elders in colder climates around the world for centuries. If the landscape wasn't violent as well as cold, people up North just seem to live longer.
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Since I hear that lowering your body to say 0 degrees centigrade will keep you from aging a day.
Yeah, better known as cryogenetically freezing.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
While it's great that this research was carried out and has provided some reasoning behind caloric restriction, it's not a very shocking finding at all. The aging process is just a series of chemical reactions, some that we understand, some that we do not. Most organic reactions are slowed down significantly by relatively small decreases in ambient energy (lowering temp). Hence aging process should be expected to slow down as well.
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So, if your woman is frigid, will she live longer?
Click here or here.
...will we live longer? No, really! I have a bodytemp that's about 36.5 C / 97.7 F.
Not so cool otherwise I guess.
Just another reason to get out of this job where I am in the computer room of 89 degrees!
The Fonz will NEVER die!
Oh, wrong 'cool'. My bad.
henry -- the human evolution news relay
My body temp is usually a little high, around 99 f. Nice knowing you guys.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
So, when you read the directions to cook a turkey and see "cook 5 hrs for 20 lb at 325 degrees". Do you think, "well, if I cook it at 650 degrees, I can get it done in 2.5 hours. And if I bring it down to the kiln at the art studio, cook it at 1300 degrees, I can have it done in 1 hour and 15 minutes! OR, I can bring the turkey down to my local steel mill, put into the balst furance at 2600 dgrees and I have my turkey in a little over a half hour! Woohoo!
You and I should get together
My body temp has always been about 3 degrees F colder than normal. When I get sick, I have a real hard time talking nurses/doctors into believing that's a 6 degree fever, not a 3 degree one, and I need help NOW.
Almost died from viral pnuemonia once...
This is good news to me. Ever since I was a kid my non-sick temperature ranges from 97.0 to 97.8 during routine checkups.
So, the next piece of research will be telling us that people who live in warmer climates have a shorter average lifespan, right?
Despite the title, and all the comments talking about living in a low-temperature environment, I hope people realise that turning down the thermostat or moving to Alaska is not going to make a difference.
I'm sure most people remember, but just in case, internal body temperature is carefully regulated by your brain, and won't change unless you catch a fever, or start freezing, in which case you have other problems to worry about.
As for the results of this study, lab mice are not humans, and correlation does not imply cause... both mice and humans must have evolved to have their normal body temperature for a reason, so lowering it will undoubtedly have some negative effect on the chances of survival.
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
If it's compounded, you get to live 1.62x10^16 % longer!
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Average body temp appears to actally be closer to 98.2. The 98.6 figure comes from a rounding error in converting from celsius.
From Lena Wong
"I vaguely remember hearing that the oft-quoted healthy human body temperature of 98.6 degrees fahrenheit was a "factoid"-- a statement treated as factual that has, in fact, never been verified. I have sent students out in search of real research on this matter, but they have all come up negative. It is a surprisingly difficult assignment. Source after source faithfully states that the temperature of a healthy human body is 98.6 F or 37 C -- no exceptions, end of story. The table above hints at the "truth"of the matter.
The first systematic measurements of human body temperature were performed by the German physician Carl Wunderlich. In 1861 he measured the temperatures of one million healthy individuals (a sample size that seems too large to be believed). The average value was reported as 37 degrees celsius. When converted this value becomes 98.6 degreed fahrenheit. So what's the problem? Wunderlich's value has only two significant figures while the converted value has three. The last digit (the "point six" at the end) should be regarded with great suspicion. Wunderlich's converted value should really be stated as "ninety eight point something" if one is being honest.
In 1992 Mackowiak, Wasserman, and Levine measured the body temperatures of 65 men and 65 women and came up with a value of 36.8 C (98.2 F). You can do a statistical analysis of the data yourself. The numbers are available online at numerous websites including The Physics Factbook"
"but as this [calorie restriction] also causes a lowering of body temperature"
I don't think the net effect will end up in your favor.
Aw! :P
So looks like the UK Govt has an excuse to stop paying winter fuel top-ups to OAPs then.
Cryogenics is for real? People have been freezing their eggs and embryos for years, and reducing temperature has long been known to slow the metabolism. What grandiose parent organization funded research to prove the obvious? Instead, you should have given me the research funds and I would study the effects of caffeine in underpaid technicians for periods of 5+ years. Provided of course I could publish the results independantly in book form for additional subsidies from the likes of Barnes and Noble and Amazon! [/rant] In all seriousness though, as the most of the previous posts do seem to lean toward this end of sarcasm and wit, the larger issue is that grant and research dollars are being funneled to projects like this. At what point do we step up and say stop wasting our tax dollars?
Just another nameless binary in a crowd of 1's and 0's
Back in '98 there was an article about this very subject http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33562?issue=4 227&special=1998
After a dozen of years discovering that everything fun is unhealty, finaly some good news! We can eat Pita, pizza and hamburgers as long as we keep cool. Turn the airco a bit lower or get red or get rid of that sweater and fine!
Yeah, if we eat less, don't move, and encase ourselves in ice, we can live forever. Wouldn't be much of a life, though.
"It ain't the years, it's the mileage." If there's less wear and tear on your body, of course it won't break down as fast. Cold slows things down. Duh.
I'd rather live 72 years with enough heat to feel comfortable than 80 years freezing my ass off.
As a close friend with a degree in Foods and Nutrition points out:
The rodent calorie-restriction longevity increase only shows up in laboratory settings, where the rodents are protected from exposure to infectious agents. When they are allowed such exposure, they prove to be much more susceptable to them, becoming ill more easily and dying form it ditto. So calorie restriction in ordinary environments REDUCES lifespan from this effect alone (i.e. not counting competitive disadvantages of underfeeding).
Lowered body temperature has been known for a long time to suppress the immune system. Lowered temperature a symptom of the calorie restriction and lowered temperature alone able to produce the longevity increase is entirely consistent with the previous info - just pushing understanding of the mechanism one step further down.
Of course a big push in researching the longevity increase was to see if there was a point where the mechanisms leading to immune suppression and the absent-infection logevity increase diverge, so a practical intervention can be designed. This research implies they're still coupled at the lower-body-temperature step.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As a member of the calorie restriction society I have one thing to say:
Ohhhh my god give me a sandwich!
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Since escaping the Slick-On Valley rat race and moving to Montana I've felt much younger. I feel sorry for all those rats I left behind.
nice insight...after the fact.
noob.
Shh. Hear that, it's the sound of millions of nerds clicking a profile link.
If it works on my leftovers, why wouldn't it work on me?
Cartman had it right! Damn, I'm going to bury myself in some snow in the mountains. Wiiii!!!!
- Kal`Goblez
Not with all those STIs, you won't.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Lest we be fooled, lowering your body temperature as a warm-blooded person is impossible. What the researchers actually did was artificially inject a protein that when unfolding generated higher amounts of heat than normal proteins into the hypothalamus. This tricked the mouse's brain into lowering its internal thermostat.
This is more like holding a match to a thermometer which can trigger a fire alarm. It's fooling a local sensor to simulate a global sensation.
So you can't eat ice cream, or live in Antarctica, or whatever to fool it. You have to trick your brain. Even better, at this tricked out brain level, you need less calories to survive because your brain doesn't turn on its "must store fat" warning level as quickly. So this might be a good cure for obesity in the future.
But seriously, how cool is it that they can use a heat-generating protein to trick a mouse's brain? I love how neurology proves how gullible we are.
Lower temp = longer life.
Do people in Finland, Russia, Alaska, Canada, etc... live on average %15 longer than people who live in warmer climates?
Okay... those in warmer climates who die of old age, not starvation, disease, war, etc...
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I don't have time to read the article, but this kind of makes sense. Especially from a nerd point of view. The hotter something is, the more energy it uses. For humans this requires more fuel which means more calories. It stands to reason that we're on borrowed time and just wearing out our parts. Take care of them and you live longer.
No sig for you!!
Long, maybe. But not fruitful if that's all you're doing with it.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
I gotta be cold, hungry and drink red wine in moderation while eating fish and vegetables if I want to live longer. And apparently become a Super Villian. As long as I don't have to have that fake Austrian accent.
Man, and what's up with all the stuff I now have to do to write a comment? Geez.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
I don't live in my parents' basement just because it's economically sound or just because I love my parents so much, nay, I do it mostly because I can live longer. So, go ahead and mock me, I shall have the last laugh/sniffle
I think the "fruit" part was intentional.
Too many comments say that keepin' it cool with AC = longer life. Wrong. What makes you live longer is a slower metabolism, obtained either through low calories or through tricking the brain into keeping the body cooler. A cooler basal temp = less energy consumed = metabolism can run slower.
By physically cooling the body, you make it produce more heat (so you don't die). This means more metabolic activity ---> shorter life. Hence people in A/C or the south pole might be expected to have shorter lifespans than those in tropical climes. (This is purely hypothetical).
Personally, my temperature is usually slightly below 98, which is interesting because longevity also runs in my family (primarily on my father's side).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Another ice age is just what mankind needs to survive, eh?
Thus all the hullaboo about cryogenic suspension and hibernation.
Real estate values in the Canadian great north up 25% while Florida retirement homes file for bankrupcy.
... and a tub of ice.
Actually, if you follow the link from the blurb, you will find the idea of calorie restriction increasing longevity is contraversial.
A rat will eat itself to death, that doesn't mean that starving yourself makes you live longer.
It's pretty darn chilly up here, so you'll live a lot long... oh, wait ...
licet differant, aequabitur
Calorie restriction focuses more on simple foods - which a sandwich isn't.
http://www.calorierestriction.org/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
That's why I'm freezing myself until the Ninteno Wii comes out.
do we keep alive long enough for the Nintendo Wii to come out?
A new reason to work naked! "It's for my health."
No thanks. I'll take a cozy, short, well-fed life over a long life of hunger and cold any lifetime.
It's bad for your health if you watch too many episodes of single female lawyer. [Insert comment about the possible uses of a beowulf cluster of refrigerators]
Who wouldn't want an Impreza?
Why we send all our old people to florida!
It makes perfect sense now!
The biophysical mechanism in the article makes sense. Reactive oxygen species (i.e., the "free radicals", like superoxide and hydrogen peroxide) are generated in the mitochondria during metabolism. The bulk of the ROS's are scavenged before they can cause harm, but those that aren't neutralized can damage biological molecules (e.g., proteins, lipids, and DNA). On a slightly unrelated note that might make this a bit more concrete, UV rays generate ROS's when they strike biological moleculues in the skin. These ROS's are responsible for a lot of the damage from UV rays, both to collagen (wrinkles) and DNA (carcinogenesis). So there's a very concrete example of free radicals contributing to aging that you can actually see.
The article claims that the "thermostat" is being tricked to reduce metabolism, so that would, in turn, decrease the generation of ROS's. I also wonder if ROS production is temperature-dependent. (Are the molecules less energetic, to the point that it's more difficult to form ROS's?) So, it really does make sense.
Interesting, stuff, though. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Why did no one tell me this a week ago BEFORE I spent $4000 on a new furnace........
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
Does this mean you stay younger longer, or older longer?
From what I've heard (not sooner than 10 years ago) - it was common knowledge around zoo-keepers that it was a tradeoff between active "pet fish" in an aquarium and cost-effective fish... - you simply could regulate that with the temperature of the water. - A higher temperature would yield more interesting fish that would swim around faster. But, die sooner... - (and the opposite)... - Why wouldn't this also be true for other species? h
I'm going to use this research as the factual evidence supporting a new health program that you can buy for only $19.95 call now
"Live Longer: Reduce your Core Temperature by Not Exercising!"
This must explain why fasting (as in: only drinking water) for more than two days: you get cold and, according to the Old Testament, renew your youth.
Doctors haved recognised for a long time that the elderly tend to have lower body temperatures than young people. Perhaps that's partly because those with lower body temperatures tend to live longer, and thus make it to "elderly"...
Buffalo,NY debunks that theory.
If you think
smoking dope lowers your core temperature by .5 - 1 degrees.
So, the question is this - If "they" can offer you a gene-splice "cure" for aging that involves you looking like a crocodile or turtle for the next 200 years, do you want it?
What if you could double your lifespan, but think twice as slow?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Between getting punched, insulted, violated, and not to mention the toasty costumes themselves... I guess we mascots are meant to dye young.
Join the coldest most calories restricted people.. the Cadaver Society. Oh wait.
Yipee! My normal body temp is 97 degrees.
Don't both calorie restriction and body cooling slow down metabolism? I'm just curious...
Purposed variations of body temperature has many benefits. You do not have to travel to Alaska to increase your stamina and longevity. Set up a temperature "ocillating" system right in your own home or apartment. http://www.prleap.com/pr/32066 is your entry portal to an entirely New World of Super Health. All you need is a small btu window air conditioner and a partitioned off computer room.
Why didn't we think of it a long time ago? An air conditioner is a HEAT EXTRACTION DEVICE that pulls heat out of a computer room, COOLING EVERYTHING IN THE COMPUTER ROOM.. Per the main article > Pulling heat from a computer room MAKES THE COMPUTER PARTS LAST LONGER &&& MAKES YOU LAST LONGER. The window AC unit can be placed in the room's door instead of needing to build a partition, letting the door be the partition.
Cool your computer and it lasts longer. Cool your body and you last longer.
The heat that is extracted {transferred} out of your computer room is sent into an adjoining room, so every time you exit the computer room to visit the kitchen or bathroom or answer the door or whatever, you exit a cooled room into a heated area. This "oscillation" of body temperature is an INTENSE BODY FLUID EXERCISE. It is in fact a very real Fountain of Youth Health System. The cool-cold computer room air is like skinny dipping in a cold fluid (air) so each time you exit the room into the heated room IT HAS THE SAME EFFECT AS RUNNING THROUGH TIRES IN ARMY BASIC TRAINING. It is not a toy. This system can kill you. As with all new exercise routines you should be very cautious and have yourself a good physical before attempting. Use a low air conditioner setting. Drink more water or fluids.
BENEFITS OF THIS SYSTEM BEGIN IMMEDIATELY. Within two month's time of gradually increasing daily & 24/7 usage a healthy man and woman should be in vastly improved cardiovascular health worthy of an endurance runner. http://www.newpath4.com/ can be the beginning of the rest of your healthy lifetime. The cold air you breathe in the computer room is contracted, so each breath you take is giving your heart, brain, organs, blood & body an "OXYGEN BATH" that raises body alkalinity (cancer fighting). It is a simple idea that can improve Alzheimer's and Parkinson's sufferers on the old age side but also is for young people, pregnant women for having a much improved physical maintenance during pregnancy, and the baby benefits from the slight {non-poisonous} increase in blood O2 levels and lowered cholesterol of its Mom.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
As a fellow member:
Don't make me laugh, or I'll pass out...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
or just >>> http://tinyurl.com/yd52de .
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
I wonder what implications this has for those humans whose *normal* body temperature is BELOW the standard 98.6F??
Frex, mine is typically around 97.5F or even a little lower; at 98.6F, I'm actually running enough of a fever to *notice* that I don't feel well.
[Consults thermometer known to be accurate] At the moment, it's 96.9F, which starts to border on a feeling of "I could use a hot cuppa," but I'm not yet really chilled.
A friend also has naturally low body temp, and the other things we have in common is that we both come from long-lived bloodlines, and can readily pass for 15 years younger than we really are. Coincidence?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Don't you mean 'Wieght Watchers'?
I'd rather die sooner in comfort than live a long, cold, and miserable life! I was gifted (or cursed, which ever) with a high metabolism, so calorie restriction is out of the question.
I'm a southern boy, but still not satisfied. So put me down where the coconuts and bananas grow, and a stock pile of red meat, and I just might really enjoy the shortened life! O'yea, a local bar is a must too.