Scientists Able To Predict DEATH With Stunning Accuracy After Discovering ‘Death Spiral’

SCIENTISTS have identified a fourth phase of life which is helping them to predict death with stunning accuracy.

It was thought that there were just three phases of life – childhood, where one does all of their physical growing, adulthood, which is for the majority of life, and late life, which is the final years and eventually leads to death.

However, researchers have now identified a fourth phase which they have dubbed the “death spiral”.

By analysing how fruit flies age, researchers found that they enter the fourth phase of life, and with that they are able to predict when the fly might die with 80 per cent accuracy.

The scientists now believe that this stage could also be found in humans.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that scientists had discovered the late life phase when they realised that the chances of dying plateau in later life.

For example, they noticed that a 90-year old was at the same risk of death as a 100-year old, but they are yet to fully understand why this is.

The experts were investigating this mystery when they spotted the fourth, previously unknown phase.

They found that in the two-weeks leading up to a female fruit fly’s death, her fertility drastically dropped. They then discovered the same in male fruit flies.

The experts from the University of California reached the conclusion that it was too much energy for female fruit flies to release eggs in their later life that they simply gave up in the fortnight leading to their death.

Laurence Mueller, who was involved in the research, told the BBC: “I noticed that if I separated out the females that were close to death, and compared them to other females of the same age that I knew from the dataset still had several more weeks to live, there was a difference in the fecundity.”

While there are doubts about whether this can apply to humans, other studies have confirmed its presence in other animals, and experts will not apply the study to humans.