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Limit age article

I hate death. More than 150,000 people die on this planet every, freaking, day and some of those people are getting hit by buses or dying of how cute a puppy is or something. But in most cases, their bodies are just succumbing to the dirty work of aging... and I'm tired of it, and I don't want George R.R. Martin to die before he finishes his Game of Thrones series. Obviously we all have to die eventually. I mean it's something that we have in common with every other person who has ever lived, but, some organisms can live to be very, very, very old and scientists are beginning to understand better how they do it, and what it might take for *us* to live to be be very, very, very old. And I'm not just talking about doing squat thrusts or eating kale or whatever. "Glass of white wine every day!" Although those things probably help. I'm talking about discovering how our cells die, why they do it, how our genes make us age, and yes , how our behavior influences our longevity So I'm like "C'mon, scientists! Make me live forever...please?" (intro song) You and I are just collections of cells. Albeit magnificent and really complicated collections that exist as animated blobs for a while hopefully long enough to reproduce... and when it gets too tough for ourselves to keep these masses of cells together... *boof* We die. It happens to the best of us!... and also the worst of us, and also everybody in between. For humans, and for most animals, There's a process of aging that happens over the course of our lives, culminating in the buying of the proverbial farm. This process has a lovely little name, it's called Senescence. And at an organismal level, we see senescence take place after our bodies reach sexual maturity After that, we begin to lose the ability to combat physical stress, and to maintain homeostasis, the internal balance of all of our organ systems and body fluid concentrations and most importantly, we start to lose the ability to combat disease. 'Cause technically, there's no such thing as dying of old age. Everybody dies of something. But! This is good news! Not all animals do this! Not all animals age this way. Some, particularly some cold-blooded animals, exhibit what's called negligible senescence. They don't lose their ability to reproduce over time, and their death rates don't necessarily increase with age. These animals basically stay at a certain level of fitness until something terrible happens to them. Like a disease or predation or a really big, fast truck barreling down the road that they're about to cross. So, for instance, Galapagos tortoises have been known to live for 170 years and lobsters can live to be 140 and the oldest quahog clam ever collected was about 405 years old. Frikkin Shakespeare was writing Hamlet when that clam was born. So that's totally unfair. Why do some animals get to...