Slashdot Mirror
Naked Mole Rats Defy Mortality Mathematics (discovermagazine.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Naked mole rats are adorably ugly creatures that challenge what we think we know about aging. Naked mole rats can live to be 30 years old. Further, female mole rats show no signs of menopause, and remain highly fertile even into their final years of life. Neurogenesis in naked mole rats continues over two decades, and their hearts and bones don't seem to change significantly over time. They rarely get cancer. Hell, they can even live up to 18 minutes utterly deprived of oxygen.
[...] At Google's biotech company, Calico, in San Francisco, California, biologist Rochelle Buffenstein is looking to the naked survivors to unlock their secrets of aging. Buffenstein says naked mole rats violate to the Gompertz-Makeham law, and she has over 3,000 data points to back her conclusion. After reaching adulthood six months into their lives, a naked mole rat's mortality risk remained the same for the rest of its days her analysis revealed. Rather than grow exponentially, a naked mole rat's risk of death on any given day, no matter their point in life, hovered around 1 in 10,000. Surprisingly, their mortality risk even fell a little when they grew very old. In this sense, Buffenstein writes, naked mole rats have established themselves as "a non-aging mammal. This life-history trend is unprecedented for mammals," Buffenstein and colleagues wrote in a study published recently in the journal eLife.
[...] At Google's biotech company, Calico, in San Francisco, California, biologist Rochelle Buffenstein is looking to the naked survivors to unlock their secrets of aging. Buffenstein says naked mole rats violate to the Gompertz-Makeham law, and she has over 3,000 data points to back her conclusion. After reaching adulthood six months into their lives, a naked mole rat's mortality risk remained the same for the rest of its days her analysis revealed. Rather than grow exponentially, a naked mole rat's risk of death on any given day, no matter their point in life, hovered around 1 in 10,000. Surprisingly, their mortality risk even fell a little when they grew very old. In this sense, Buffenstein writes, naked mole rats have established themselves as "a non-aging mammal. This life-history trend is unprecedented for mammals," Buffenstein and colleagues wrote in a study published recently in the journal eLife.
Maybe hanging out in your mom's basement in the dark is a successful long-life strategy>
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
All the Google engineers are getting older and are looking for ways to extend their lives. And all your money won't another minute buy.
No solar radiation in their normal habitat is the biggest environmental factor. A bugger to properly design a human trial for without significant ethical issues, particularly as you'd want to eliminate screens, Wi-Fi etc as well.
can't survive when a television show jumps the shark. r.i.p. rufus.
Naked mole rats live about 20-25% the span Humans do, they just seem abnormal because rodents don't normally live that long.
Finally, cramped living conditions in a windowless environment can be touted -- sans couture -- as a health benefit!
The secret to a longer life is nudity.
Where is my science grant to study people in nudist colonies?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
...is the way to go if you don't want to die.
They always say that they don't age and that they don't get cancer, but nobody ever tells us what's killing them.
Are they eaten by a grue?
because they're born old?
So, they reach maturity at 6 months and stay at the same point for the rest of their lives. I would like to know what kills them at 30.
Is it the telemores in their cells being used up and shutting down the animal or is there something else at play? Did they pass through a different evolutionary process which makes the established Gompertz-Makeham law invalid for them?
Can anybody comment?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
They don't have any, right? There ya go!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why does Google have a biotech company?
Obviously obvious facts are obvious. Mole rats live underground their entire lives, and are thus shielded from most of the harmful radiation bombarding the planet, which in turn minimizes the cumulative, species wide DNA damage they have suffered compared to top side species like actual mice and rats, which like humans, now live extremely short lives compared to the original design. (Rodents average 1-3 years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Thus shielded from all that radiation, mole rats live 10x longer than top side rodents. Equating that to humans prior to all the cumulative DNA damage from un-shielded radiation on the surface of the earth, humans could have lived 10x longer or ~900 years... Oh look, that is exactly what the Bible claims before the flood wrecked the planet and destroyed the natural radiation barrier above the earth.
This blows another gaping hole in the Evolution theory, showing that less radiation damage, less cumulative DNA damage (i.e. mutation) is significantly beneficial to overall lifespan and health of the organism. But we have known that since at least the Curies (for ionizing radiation) and since the first sunburn... Scientists are once again good at science, but fail at drawing conclusions, basic logic and evaluating their biases...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
It's like the budget reincarnation package for someone who has never done anything bad, but contributed nothing to society: you get to live a shitty life in a shitty world as a hideous burrowing scrotum with claws and teeth but you're blind anyway, feel no pain, and never age or stop fucking.
May be that helps.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Maybe 'law' is too strong, or... PARADOX ALERT!!!!!
Requiem for the American Dream
If you were to run the numbers for humans up to the age of 30 and just truncate any data points beyond that, would humans end up looking a lot like mole rats? Women wouldn't appear to go through menopause, cancer would be very rare, and there would be almost zero incidence of mental degenerative diseases.
On the flip side, if you could manage to keep a mole rat alive for an additional 40 years, I propose that all the problems we experience in our later years would start to appear.
There may be something special about mole rat biology, or they might just have a propensity to die by the age of thirty because they have unusually weak hearts. (or whatever. I don't know what the leading cause of death is in thirty year old mole rats). A really interesting medical investigation might be to see if you can prolong the life of Mole Rats by addressing the leading causes of death.
There is an engineering axiom of, "Everything is a trade off". There might be a way to live 1000 years, but there is going to be some kind of cost. The fundamental question is going to be, "Is it worth paying?"
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"everything finite is inherently worthless"
Far as we know everything is finite... therefore everything is worthless. You are on step 1 of being a Buddhist.
The proviso is that if the Universe is infinite then everything is infinite. For example you will make the above post an infinite number of times and I this one. A toast to infinity.
Only three known species go through menopause: killer whales, short-finned pilot whales, and humans; that female naked mole-rats are fertile into their later years is not uncommon or that remarkable.
That freaky thing?
New car every 6 months to avoid requirement for plates, in order to park in handicapped spaces, and new car smell is carcinogenic.
1) Mole rats don't live past 30.
2) But those their mortality does not INCREASE as they get older, until they get 30. THen they all start dying off in the next 2 years.
So they don't age till 30, then they die all of a sudden in the next 2 years, despite not being in bad shape.
That does not sound like 'immortal' to me.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The emissions scandal and the related monkey business may do more to that end than anything else.
2 comments on numbers:
Human life expectancy tables show an increased chance of living to the next year, once you are in your 80s, as compared to your 70s, in the country I live in.
The 'select only posts rated 5' button? First time I've found it necessary to use it. Reading below the line effect. Sheesh.
I tend to be a big fan of Wikipedia, largely ignoring the social friction (no worse than any other system—except for less suppression), but I do have my own complaints.
The mole-rat article is a prime example. It's well written and well sourced, but on a closer inspection has Pablum for brains.
* no mention of how new colonies are created
* no mention of mortality cause at the lifespan boundary
On the text given, you'd have to assume that their main predator (snakes) can only manage to catch the geriatric rats, who for some reason show little signs of cancer, but do lose a step in their third decade.
Or perhaps, they are even more eusocial than previously reported, and the senior mole-rats practically jump at the opportunity to be eaten by the snake to protect the larger colony—an extra virgin for every year of age at time of demise! The females sprout a penis at age 25 so as not to miss out on all the fun (this hasn't been noticed yet by researchers in a frothy footrace to first decode the fountain of youth).
In Wikipedia, it's impossible to cite "scientists do not yet know how colonies reproduce" because this kind of formal admission in the science world is largely confined to grant applications, and never makes it into the cite-worthy literature.
Come to think of it, opponents of global warming would do well to FOI rejected NSF grant applications. Therein would lie many pointed admissions about just how incomplete our present knowledge actually is.
Such an initiative (backed by a sizeable FOI war chest) would finally get the information into Wikipedia through the back door, in an article devoted to the giant NFS FOI PhD pan-handle papers data dump.
Yet it still wouldn't make the page on climate science, grant applications not being peer reviewed.
I'd go for a full life over a long life anytime, sex drugs and rock n roll. How are you going to get it on at 110 anyway.
Naked mole rats violate to the Gompertz-Makeham law, and she has over 3,000 data points to back her conclusion.
According to Wikipedia, this law is describes human death rate, hence it should come as no surprise that naked mole rats violate it.
If mole-rats can live forever, then I, for one, welcome our new Heterocephalidae overlords.
I just know that I don't like it when the mole rats get in between me and my Cinnabon's.
But maybe I'm wrong.
If I am, it's the Eloi I feel sorry for.
Unlike physicists, biologists have no 'first principles' to work from. No solid theoretical foundations. It therefore attracts people curious about life but averse to any serious theoretical endeavours. The kind of people who happily kill to 'understand' by say watching how long something can survive while utterly deprived of oxygen. 'Biologist' provides respectable sounding vocation for children whose curiousity made them experts at pulling the wings off flies, burning ants with magnifying glasses, and choking kittens.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.