Going for a squirm, snacking on poo, living the naked mole rat life.
Oh, naked mole rats
, what fresh new weirdness do you have for us today? It wasn't enough that you look like wee spring rolls with teeth, or that you are nearly blind and navigate your ramifying, oxygen-poor burrows by scent. No, you are also apparently immune to cancer
, have terrible, gimpy sperm
, and, we learn today, feel no pain from acid burns because your nervous system is defective
. We'd heard things like this before, naked mole rats. We learned in 2008 that you were missing the gene that makes hot peppers painful, when scientists injected your paws with the stuff and you were blissfully unaware
. Giving you the gene reversed that, but you still didn't seem to care when acid was injected (did we mentioned that you're also cold-blooded? Holy cow, mole ...
