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The title is pure linkbait, which is surprising for NPR. I guess that's the only way to get more clicks when the entire article boils down to "Large plants/animals live longer, on average (except humans)". Thanks, we hadn't already noticed.

A formula that "tells us when it's time to die" would imply some sort of prediction about individuals, which they admit is not the case at all. That would actually be interesting.

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The actual paper really just applies to plants. But there are also far more exceptions than just humans. Giant tortoises have effectively no known life expectancy, at least as a result of aging -- they do not age:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence

Visual inspection also suggests a rather low R^2 on that regression. It looks much more like a loose correlation than a formula to me.

Good point, I'd only glanced at the chart.

Looks like the trees along the right have a half-life range of <10,000 to >1,000,000, even with nearly identical individual mass.

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