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And if that's not weird enough, as a species they haven't had sex in about 80 million years. We know what you're wondering: How do they keep their genetic material fresh, then? By stealing it from other species , naturally. Via Bob Blaylock A bdelloid in its natural habitat: a ruler.

A lot of scientists are of the idea that a species can't survive long by reproducing asexually, since they end up becoming more flawed with each generation, like microscopic hillbillies.

Bdelloids have defied those odds in the most horrifying way possible. When they analyzed the little bastards' DNA, scientists found it to be a "genetic mosaic" -- a single bdelloid had DNA from more than different species. Apparently, when they need to add some alien DNA to the gene soup, they just find whatever is lying around and attach it to their own broken double helix.

This includes bits from near-by dead animals, from any food they hadn't gotten around to eating yet, and from who knows what else. Via Wikipedia If you've ever relieved yourself in a lake, there might be a little bit of you in this guy.

This DNA-stealing routine might also explain how bdelloids are able to survive, like, every conceivable deplorable condition you can imagine. For instance, you might think they'd need water to keep on living, since that's their natural habitat and all, but bdelloids have been able to survive nine years completely dried up. Hell, they can even shrug off massive amounts of radiation -- a bdelloid can withstand about Gy of radiation before becoming infertile, which is about times what it takes for a human woman.

Uh, don't ask how we know that. And they aren't the only impressive freaks of nature living in ponds: their distant cousins, the planarians, are tiny wormy creatures that have been called "immortal under the knife," since you can cut their heads off and they'll just grow another one. These guys don't get old at all. They just replace damaged tissue with shiny new cells. Via Burgscience This is also exactly how the Baldwin clan was created. Via Close Encounters of the Deep.

Bowhead whales are huge freaking whales endowed with the largest mouth of any animal -- they basically just swim around giving the ocean a huge blow job all the time. Not content with breaking one impressive record, it was recently discovered that these whales are pretty good at something else: outliving all of us.

And our sons. And our sons' sons. Seriously, if there's a mammal that lives longer than them, no one's been able to prove it. One was determined to be like years old. Scientists used to think bowhead whales lived 60 or 70 years, but in , some Native Alaskan hunters killed one and found a surprising artifact from another era inside. Via Talkingphilosophy. A great time for the whole family. The hunters were cleaning up the whale when, embedded in its blubber, they found the head of an explosive harpoon This thing had been swimming around with a bomb lance stuck in its shoulder for the last or so years.

To put it in perspective, the harpoon was thrown during the Grover Cleveland administration and removed in George W. Bush's second term. Scientists estimated that the whale had actually been born in , years earlier.

This guy was a contemporary of Sitting Bull. If the whale hadn't been shot with a second explosive bomb lance in , it may have lived to be around two centuries old. Another gigantic, ancient, ocean-borne terror is the Greenland Shark, which some experts believe may be even older than that -- based on its growth rate 6 centimeters in 16 years , scientists believe that the feet specimens may be over years old.

Oh, and these things actually feed on whales. And polar bears, and, somehow, horses yep, they've found horse remains in their stomachs. Since it lives so deep in the frozen seas of the Arctic Circle, some believe there can actually be bigger and thus older specimens roaming around. Biding their time. Waiting for a horse to go scuba diving. But let's say you give them the slip, and successfully keep your secret under wraps with a series of new identities.

It's going to get awfully hard to keep track of all of them, because We're not saying that if you were to be magically granted immortality, you'd eventually get Alzheimer's anyway--we assume that the Elixir of Life you sipped will keep your brain physically young just like the rest of you. We're saying it won't matter. Imagine if your cell phone number changed every week, and every week you were forced to memorize the new one. It gets exponentially harder because all of those old numbers are still in your memory, clogging up the works.

Then imagine someone asked you to instantly recall the number you had five numbers ago. It had a six in it. That's one reason your memory degrades as you get older. Your brain and its ability to store and recall memories is limited, but the amount of stuff you're asking it to remember keeps piling up over the decades.

That's a problem because your brain relies on not just storing information, but being able to rapidly recall it at a moment's notice. As time goes on, more and more memories pile up, along with names and dates and birthdays and anniversaries. Your brain can keep all that stuff organized for a while say, the span of most of a normal human lifetime but it's not like you can go into your brain and just delete files like cleaning up a hard drive. So useless stuff starts accumulating, clogging up the works and slowing everything down, like all those toolbars on your mom's Internet browser.

Your immortal life and experiences may be infinite, but your brain's ability to store and recall them is not. It wouldn't be very long before your brain is piled up with junk like one of the houses on Hoarders. Your body will be young, but you'll still be forgetting people's names and telling the same jokes to the same person twice in one day.

Though you'll still be perfectly capable of giving a grumpy speech on where you were when the World Trade Center was destroyed and how kids in the future have it so easy.

How many of you out there are old enough to notice time speeding up? For those of you who aren't, can you remember when you were a kid and the school year finally ended and the summer was about to begin?

It seemed like you'd been waiting half your life for it, while at the exact same time your mom was going, "Gah! It's just math. Every year of your life seems shorter than the previous one since each passing year represents smaller and smaller portions of your life. It's the same reason a gift of a thousand bucks would be huge news to you, but meaningless to Bill Gates. So when you're years-old, a minute will seem six seconds long compared to a minute when you were If you live for 1, years, a year marriage spent with a woman for her entire adult life, will have the same significance to you as the girl you dated for a few years back in college.

If you live for , years, she'd basically be the nameless chick you made out with at a Weezer concert.

Live to be a million, and people will seem to be just exploding in and out of existence around you, like a time lapse video of a mountain slowly eroding over eons while cities and nations appear and disappear around it, unnoticed. Entertainment will become a dull blur, as you see the same trends and ideas emerge, go out of style and then emerge again for a new generation who thinks they're brand new. You'll have the pleasure of seeing vampires go out of style, then become cool again in , then , then , before you just stop going to the movies.

See, this is why Dr. Manhattan turned into such a dick in Watchmen. But it could be worse We spend so much time being afraid of death that we forget the one, overwhelming benefit death offers every species: cutting short suffering. Obviously when we talk about immortality we're picturing always being young and healthy, not laying in a bed suffering from lung cancer forever and ever.

But it's a dangerous world out there, and any number of freak accidents could get you stuck somewhere, with no escape, for the rest of time. Say an earthquake strikes the building that you're in, and it collapses while you're in the basement parking garage.

You're pinned under a million tons of concrete and drywall. All you can do is wait for rescue. Only don't count on being rescued, because the people in charge of doing that tend to give up when shit gets too hard to dig through and they've pulled enough people out to say, "We tried.

Or we could just skip it and go straight to Chick-fil-A. Now some clever people are starting to talk as if it could be possible after all. But is it a dream - or a nightmare? The clever person at the heart of the talking is an amiable year-old Cambridge University boffin called Aubrey de Grey.

His taste in shirts and facial hair may be stuck in the hippy era he has possibly the longest real beard I've seen , but his ideas are distinctly futuristic. Of course, hippies always were believers in Utopia.

The idea that growing old is not the inevitable and natural course of events, but a condition we can be cured of, goes against pretty much all we've believed about life up till now. In very many senses, growing older and ultimately dying define our lives and our existence.

What would be without them? It's impossible to say for sure, but it doesn't sound all good. Human life expectancy, at least in the wealthy West, is possibly now greater than it's ever been. And Dr de Grey believes the first person to live 1, years may already have been born.

He predicts that in about 30 years genetic therapy will be available that will not just slow a person's aging, but actually reverse the process.

Well, not quite indefinitely. Over the course of a few centuries some unavoidable accident is likely to cut short the life of even the most perfectly un-aging genetic specimen. You might reasonably expect, though, that people who have everything to lose might be more careful about things like smoking, driving or walking in front of buses.

So accidents might be fewer. The first and most obvious drawback to the indefinite postponement of death is the spectre of catastrophic overpopulation.