Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vog obamb here, how would you like to live
Speaker 1: five times longer than a mammal your size has any
Speaker 1: right to expect? It sounds great? Right? But wait? Would
Speaker 1: you still be interested if it meant you had to
Speaker 1: live out your days looking like a tiny alien dressed
Speaker 1: in an old sock made from the skin of somebody's
Speaker 1: hard living grandpa. Take a minute to think it over.
Speaker 1: Naked mole rats taxonomic name Heterocephalus glaber have made their
Speaker 1: evolutionary choice in this regard. This cold blooded rodent is
Speaker 1: incredibly long lived. They routinely lived the ripe age of
Speaker 1: thirty five. Compare that to porcupines and guinea pigs, close relatives,
Speaker 1: which usually live no longer than age eight. Naked mole
Speaker 1: rats very rarely get cancer, are nearly incapable of feeling pain,
Speaker 1: and when the oxygen runs out in their underground tunnels,
Speaker 1: they basically start acting like plants. Their bodies automatically switched
Speaker 1: from using oxygen to process glucose into energy in their
Speaker 1: cells to process reserved stores of fructose into energy like
Speaker 1: a plant. Wood no oxygen necessary, and in a study
Speaker 1: published in eighteen based on analysis of the life histories
Speaker 1: of thousands of naked mole rats, researchers found that while
Speaker 1: the rodents not only live incredibly long lives, they also
Speaker 1: don't really age seriously. Their risk of dying just doesn't
Speaker 1: really seem to increase as they get older, and female
Speaker 1: fertility doesn't seem to decline with age either. The term
Speaker 1: for this is negligible. Sentizens and lobsters and glapcost tortoises
Speaker 1: are two other examples of animals with these qualities. Study
Speaker 1: author Rochelle Buffenstein, a comparative biologist who works for the
Speaker 1: longevity focused California biotech company Calico, has studied naked mole
Speaker 1: rats for more than three decades and has recorded the
Speaker 1: life history of each of the three thousand, three hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty nine animals that have passed through her lab
Speaker 1: in that time. What she's found is that naked mole
Speaker 1: rats are a huge exception to the slightly unsettling Gumpert's
Speaker 1: Law of mortality, which was developed in eighteen twenty five
Speaker 1: by British mathematician and insurance actuary Benjamin Bomparts to assign
Speaker 1: a mathematical formula to the phenomenon of aging. Actuaries calculate
Speaker 1: the financial risk and insurance company assumes by ensuring a
Speaker 1: given person. For humans, the Gomperts law states that after
Speaker 1: the age of thirty, the likelihood that we're going to
Speaker 1: die doubles every eight years. Some variation of this law
Speaker 1: applies to basically every other mammal we know about, with
Speaker 1: the exception of Buffenstein's lab reared mole rats. Once Buffenstein's
Speaker 1: naked mole rats reached sexual maturity at about six months
Speaker 1: of age, she found the likelihood that they would croak
Speaker 1: reached around one in ten thousand, where it hovered for
Speaker 1: the rest of their lives. Since only a few of
Speaker 1: Buffenstein's naked mole rats were not killed in experiments or
Speaker 1: moved to other labs, we don't actually know how or
Speaker 1: if the naked mole rats strong longevity game eventually hits
Speaker 1: a wall. The oldest individual in the study is currently
Speaker 1: thirty five years old, so who knows. Aging could happen
Speaker 1: really quickly for these superheroes after a certain point in time,
Speaker 1: But for the rest of the over thirty mammal crowd
Speaker 1: out there try to have a just okay day to
Speaker 1: day in spite of the fact that the likelihood of
Speaker 1: your death is roughly doubling by the decade. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Jesslin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more in this and lots of other well preserved topics,
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