If only I were a mouse. With all the research papers I've seen on HN over the years, I'm pretty sure I could live to be 200.

Survivor bias. I suspect there’s like a 100:1 ratio of dead laboratory mice to 200yr old mice.

I think 100:1 ratio for "long and happy life" among lab mice would be hilariously optimistic.

Because of their speed of reproduction, their lack of reusability, and the fact that in order to cure diseases you first have to inflict them, lab mice are basically in a constant state of massacre.

They're not even livestock. They're more on the tier of stationery.

I'll be patiently waiting for the vermintide - the day the rats fight back.

Remember that all of this research is done on mouse strains in highly controlled lab environments. Many of these results won’t even apply to other strains from what they were tested leave alone mice in the wild.

PS: strains means stable inbred clone producing animals.

Is this for the purpose of more easily identifying causative factors? Kind of like always developing/debugging in the same environment for reproducible results?

Yes. But also I think there is certain amount of selection for mice that will behave and cooperate with lab protocols. Meaning, mice strains, that for instance, aggressively destroy stuff, or sleep too much will not be used.

Yes, but at the same time most inbred strains have genetic disorders precisely because they are inbred. E.g. the most commonly used strain C57BL/6 develops age-related hearing loss. To avoid this, there are other lab strains like CD-1, which are deliberately bred to maintain a controlled level of genetic heterogeneity.

Lab mice have unnatural long telomeres.

That make them far more resistant to damaging pharma (lot’s of cell repair)

The downside is they all die of cancer (telomere length is a stop to cell replication)

Of the studies I've read, its my opinion that we actually have the knowledge to drastically expand lifespans, but because resources are finite and strained, the decision to use man made drugs to alter certain chemical reactions in the body which fix one problem but cause others, is what's limiting our lifespans, along with glyphosate added to the supply chain at different stages. If you cant afford to go organic, your lifespan and your kids lifespans and their number of offspring will be reduced.

Thank god we have these close relatives to experiment on!

Who's experimenting on whom? They're working on the Ultimate Question as we speak.

;) It think we all know what the answer is.

But left the fiddly bits and fjords to another species.

They're used for research precisely because they have a great deal of similarities to humans. Also:

- they have a short gestation period and produce lots of young making it easy to breed them

- their opex is low

- they're easy and relatively safe to handle

- they're well understood

- there are numerous genetically engineered variants are available

- And humans don't give a shit if we mass kill them because they are not overly cute.

Otherwise we'd just use humans or apes or something more similar to us.

Monkeys are used in research but they can be hard to work with. I've heard stories of flinging poop and them pulling implanted electrodes out of their brain

Found the person who has never taken mushrooms

You mean you found the person who approaches bold claims with an appropriate amount of skepticism in a world increasingly inundated with hyperbolic or even outright misleading headlines? And then goes the extra mile to share their findings and constructively communicate their concerns to others who might also be subjected to the same hyperbole?

Yep, found them.

This place has become even worse than Reddit as karma farming goes…

Yeah I've noticed a serious uptick in the past ~2 years of bots and blatant shilling.

HN is arguably not as popular as reddit, but also not as complex, so smaller efforts to game the system work better.

What's the point?

I remember being excited when my karma crossed 1000 here for no reason. Nothing happened, obviously.

I wasnt karma farming.

Do you recall the time when one needed a certain karma score in order to downvote?

I never downvote, but there are times when I wanted to - but couldnt, even though I am way beyond the initial karma limit which was ~400 or something...

I've been on this site daily for 15 years.

I still never feel the need to upvote or downvote very often.

I also think its criminally funny that the HN forum lacks so many features of moderation, comment management, topic curation etc of even such of the companies they fund.

It works - because its a self-entrenched psuedo-sapio-walled-garden...

I love HN - but lets not act like its flawless.

You've been here since 2020...

me: https://i.imgur.com/qrNUzma.png

It was pretty obvious I was talking about the misleading headline at the OP. How did you come up that my comment was targeted at you I have no idea…

You don't generally "take" lion's mane mushrooms, you just eat them. As they are tasty, and won't give you any trips, neither to the emergency room or to nirvana.

Ya I accidentally stumbled into "taking" lions mane daily. In the process of breaking a caffeine addiction I sought out anything that was "coffee-like" as a replacement habit, and of the options, one that was simply one type of mushroom turned into powder seemed the 'most safe' easy choice.

Now I'm wondering how much of the (profound) benefits of ditching caffeine may have actually been enhancement by the lion's mane...

Also, it was part funded by a CNG-Bio inc., a Lions Mane mushrooms and medicinal mushrooms supplier

> ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

> This work was supported by … and CNG-Bio grant Funding to F.A.M.

> CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

> This work was supported by the company CNG-Bio inc.

- https://cngbio.en.ec21.com

- https://cngbio.en.ec21.com/company_info.html

They've found cognitive benefits in people as well. (small studies, but it's more than just mice)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Hericium%20erinaceus&p...