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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.
That's a combination of two factors: A) by that age you've seen everyone you care about die and B) evolution made us accepting of death at that age, to the point of giving us a massive dose of super potent and all-natural hallucinogens when we're approaching death's doorstep so we don't freak our progeny out crying about ceasing to exist. If everyone knew they just had nothingness to look forward to, like really knew it the way you can only know it if you watch everyone older than you that you give a shit about die from some horrific thing like kidney failure or heart disease or stroke or whatever else (pretty much everything other than suicide bomber is guaranteed to be unpleasant for the person dying) - then they would most likely commit suicide before reaching reproductive age, or fighting age, or discovering anything of merit to push us forward. Religion didn't just form without reason, the notion of an afterlife in some form or another held civilization together for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years (even gorillas have "rituals" of piling stones at the base of trees they've lost loved ones at as a memorial.) You are either an idiot denying their fate and refusing to fight it in that denial, or you are a senile old man hallucinating on his pre-death meds, there is no middle ground and either way you are poisoning society with your beliefs.