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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.
Rodents don't usually even live one tenth that long. 30 years for a small mammal is an absurdly long time, and the fact the life span doesn't have the usual rough correlation to body mass and metabolic rate in this case would be the equivalent of humans living 1,000 years. You'd better believe this is a hat trick worth learning.
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For the high UIDs in the room, GPP was quoting a Kansas song:
Now, don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away
And all your money won't another minute buy
Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind
It's more of a philosophical statement than a practical one: entropy is going to win in the end.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, absolutely not a bathtub curve.
A bathtub curve gives you a high probability of failing early on (manufacturing defects, etc), then a long period of relatively low, constant odds of failure, and then a climb back to a high probability of failure as things wear out. So that if you graph the odds of failure you get a U shape, or "bathtub cross-section"
They're claiming mole rats never get that final climb - in fact as they get really old the odds of dying actually *diminish*. That means that the older a mole rat gets, the better its odds are of still being alive in 10 years time.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.