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.

Comments

Hmm!

[Mikkeles]

Maybe hanging out in your mom's basement in the dark is a successful long-life strategy>

Google

[110010001000]

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.

Re:Google

[SuricouRaven]

Money certainly can buy more life. It can't buy endless life - at least not yet - but a plentiful supply of money allows access to a lot of expensive treatments which will cure conditions that might kill a less-financed patient. Buying time, in a quite literal manner.

Re:Google

[avandesande]

Trying homeopathic BS doesn't count, no matter how expensive it is.

Re:Google

[cayenne8]

Tell that to Steve Jobs.

Steve had the money AND the medical advice to try to help extend his life.

However HE made the choice to ignore them and try more holistic types of tx...and waited too long to try more proven medical tx.

He could likely still be alive if he'd listened to the original medical tx advice.

Not that other sources and types of medicine aren't valuable, I believe they are, but when it comes to cancer, you need to try the prevailing medical recommendations there, you don't fuck with the big "C"...

Re:Google

[110010001000]

Your outlook changes as you get older. When you get in your 80s and 90s death isn't seen as such as bad thing. But thanks for admitting you are self-centered at this point in your life.

Re:Google

[lgw]

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.

Nudity

[Oswald McWeany]

The secret to a longer life is nudity.

Where is my science grant to study people in nudist colonies?

Re:Nudity

[Hal_Porter]

I imagine after not too long you and the below ground nudists will *wish* for a quick death.

Or they'll evolve into Morlocks and farm your Eloi ass.

Re:Absence of Solar Radiation?

[arth1]

No solar radiation in their normal habitat is the biggest environmental factor.

There are plenty of other underground species that don't show this neoteny. And some that do, like axolotls, but without a greatly increased life span.

Isn't the question why they die at 30?

[mykepredko]

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?

Re:Isn't the question why they die at 30?

[Herkum01]

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.

Researchers?

Re:Hardly

[Narcocide]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:So naked and ugly

[Immerman]

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.