Abstract
Plots of survival against time for nematode worms in different conditions can be superimposed by rescaling the time axis. This observation has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the nature of ageing. See Letter p.103 This study in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, well established as a model organism in ageing research, shows that a range of different interventions — mutations in the insulin/IGF-1 signalling pathway, changes in ambient temperature, and chemically induced oxidative stress — all yield lifespan distributions that can be collapsed into a universal curve simply by rescaling the time axis. This phenomenon of 'temporal scaling' identifies a novel state variable, r(t), that governs the risk of death and whose average decay dynamics involves a single effective rate constant of aging, kr. Interventions that produce temporal scaling influence lifespan exclusively by altering kr.
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