A naked mole-rat queen – the sole breeder in a colony. (Felix Petermann, Max Delbrück Center)
Naked mole-rats are wonderfully strange. First off, they're awesomely cute or terrifyingly ugly, depending on your taste, with furless, wrinkly skin and buck teeth. Their chirps have accents. They can live without oxygen for up to 18 minutes. Naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) also have ridiculously high levels of pain resistance. They kidnap each other's young – and enslave them. But they're probably most famous for their longevity. Considered a 'non-aging' animal that defies Gompertz's Law, not only have some lived for almost 40 years (about ten times longer than any other rodent), but they show little cognitive decline as they age, and they don't appear to get cancer.It's those disease- and aging-resistance feats that have long drawn researchers to better understand how the naked mole rat differs from other mammals, and how the secrets of their long, healthy lives might inform treatments or drugs to help humans do the same.But that's not all these wrinkly weirdos can teach us. New research published in Nature shows that they govern by scent."The idea that a single scent can maintain peace and prevent violence may sound like science fiction," says Mohammed Khallaf, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin and first author of the study."In the world of naked mole-rats, it is reality."
