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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.
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.
You don't have 3,000 data points to back your conclusion.
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?
Humans live about 40-50% the span whales do, they just seem abnormal because primates don't normally live that long.
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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?
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Humans live about 40-50% the span whales do, they just seem abnormal because primates don't normally live that long.
Also, we make things instead of [just ]swim and get fat.
I've actually looked into these pretty heavily over the years, they have more or less the same set of survival genes we have (things which don't make cancer pop up in under 30 years, things which don't lead to heart disease in similar timeframes, etc.) There's nothing groundbreaking in them aside from their paws.
Of course there isn't anything different. But they have more than 3,000 data points. To Google, volume is everything.
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.
And the dolphins think they're the smarter ones for THE EXACT SAME REASON.
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Why does Google have a biotech company?
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.
And the dolphins know they're the smarter ones for THE EXACT SAME REASON.
FTFY
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Interesting. So everything underground (or shielded from solar radiation) lives longer lifespans? There are plenty of species who only exist underground. Did you report your findings? You must be one of those Scientists I keep hearing about!
May be that helps.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What about exposure to naturally occurring radon gas?
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!
If this were the case then people living in northern latitudes and in areas with little sunshine (think Seattle) would demonstratively have longer lives. You are reasoning rather shallow here.
There's nothing groundbreaking in them aside from their paws.
Well played, sir.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"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.
This whole comment is more or less complete garbage, because most of the background radiation humans et al are exposed to doesn't come from cosmic radiation: most of that is shielded by the air, near sea level the only thing that remains is muons, and that has no trouble penetrating a few dozen feet of, well, just about anything. Most background radiation comes from terrestrial sources, either from thorium/uranium in soil and rock or from radon, which is produced when uranium/thorium decays. In fact, I'd suspect creatures like mole rats that live underground are exposed to more radioactive background from radon (it's a huge, huge problem in mines and basements). The only radiation they're not going to be exposed to at about the same (or higher) level than humans is ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which contributes to skin cancer, but not most sources of human mortality.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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?
Must be the environment. I tried dumping bunch of humans in the middle of the ocean and they didn't last very long at all.
Clearly the conclusion if we want to extend whale lifespans is to get them out of the ocean as soon as possible.
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.
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The emissions scandal and the related monkey business may do more to that end than anything else.
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 was under the impression that mole rats had genetic differences that prevented low oxygen environments from triggering apoptosis of their cells. Instead, a interferon-beta mediated necrosis process takes the place of apoptosis. This process is also started when cancer cells start to multiply, resulting in the death of the cancer cells as well as some of the surrounding tissues.
Seems pretty different than what happens to grandparents.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
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.
This only means that body size and metabolic rate are not the major factors, which is, rather, obvious fact. The devil is in the details and with wast complexity and diversity of life literally tens still unknown factors could play a significant role. For example, a better liver which could resist more toxins together with a better immune system, together with a some unique cell repair mechanism and vuala. Hipsters are looking for quick fixes, which are not available for wastly complex systems.
But maybe I'm wrong.
If I am, it's the Eloi I feel sorry for.
Different creatures have different designed lifespans, and there are a multitude of ways to shorten that lifespan, and very few, if any, ways to lengthen that lifespan. Furthermore, you can shorten an entire population's lifespan with radiation (just ask the fruit flies that were irradiated in the quest for proof of Evolution). And to clarify, I am not just talking about solar radiation RTFP. There are a number of sources of harmful radiation outside the planet.
Ask any scientist about the effects of radiation on health and DNA https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/eleme...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
"Harmful radiation" |= solar radiation. Harmful radiation comes from a number of sources in the cosmos, only one of which is the sun...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Radon and mineral isotopes are fairly localized. Radon is non-existent in vast swaths of the world, as are radio isotopes. As you say, most of the radiation is shielded by the magnetosphere and atmosphere, or most mammalian life on earth would be extinct in a few generations (this is one of the big problems with long distance space travel https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/eleme... ). However, some harmful radiation does make it down to the surface, and over 6000 years, that cumulative radiation damage to the DNA of species is irreversible.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like