This is much better than the clickbaity versions calling them immortal.
Naked mole rats are very nearly hairless. They evolved that way by living in a harsh underground environment. They are also almost ectothermic (cold blooded). And now, it seems they do not age—at least in the traditional sense. Reports of long-lived mole rats prompted the team at Calico to take a closer look—they have a specimen in their lab that has lived to be 35 years old. Most "normal" rats, in comparison, live to be just six years old, and they age as they do so.
Naked mole rats also have some other interesting biological features—they very rarely develop cancer, they experience very little pain and they have been found able to survive without oxygen for up to 18 minutes by going into a plant-like vegetative state. Also, they never reach menopause, and can have offspring right up until their death—and their hearts and bones never show signs of aging. But it was their longevity that was the focus of this new effort.
The team collected what they describe as 3,000 points of data regarding the lifespan of the naked mole rat, and found that many had lived for 30 years. But perhaps more surprisingly, they found that the chance of dying for the mole rats did not increase as they aged... This, the researchers claim, suggests that mole rats do not age—at least in the conventional sense. They do eventually die, after all.
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-naked-mole-rat-defy-gompertz.html
Yeah, over the decades I keep reading about research studies using naked mole rats, and it is obvious why.
ReplyDeleteMany of its species anomalies are very useful traits.
Rufus!!! #KimPossible
ReplyDeleteSo... if people find a way to love most of their body hair and no longer look like musk ox, human lives will improve from 35 years to 120 or so?
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