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New "Super Mice" Run for Five Hours Without Stopping

by Terrence O'Brien on November 2, 2007 at 11:09 AM















Scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio have developed a breed of "super mice."

These new mice are able to run 20 yards a minutes, for five hours, without stopping. They even have a metabolism that we're sure is the envy of all the chubby mice out there. They'll eat 60 percent more food than the average mouse, but weigh about half as much. They're also sexually active, especially later in life.

The mice even breed at an absurd rate. The researchers created their first mouse four years ago and now have a colony of 500 super mice.

The simple switch of a single metabolism gene, one that is shared with humans, caused this change.

It looks like the goal of the experiment was not to create an army of super mice, or to find a way to genetically modify human beings for better athletic performance, but to maybe help heal human injuries faster. That said, the researchers said that creating drugs or treatments to "enhance" athletes' natural abilities was not out of the question.

From CNN and Daily Mail


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Tags: experiments, mice, research, science, super mice, SuperMice, Weird, Weird Science, WeirdScience

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