Secrets of Naked Mole Rats

The September 2026 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC includes an article on research into the slowing or prevention of aging, including possible techniques such as reprogramming the DNA of cells or growing organs for transplant from a patient's cloned tissues. Another approach, not mentioned in that article, involves studying naked mole rats to discover the secret of their unnaturally long lives. They can survive over ten times longer than typical rodents such as mice. If we could duplicate that feat, we'd live for 1000 years. Their chance of dying doesn't increase with age, and they enjoy phenomenal resistance to cancer. They don't suffer the diseases of age common to older humans. Here's an article about some of their biological anomalies:

Naked Mole Rats Don't Die of Old Age

Thus, the secret to near-immortality is to become a naked mole rat -- not really a viable strategy.

Why have they evolved to live so much longer than other rodents? One possible explanation I've come across is their underground environment. They live almost entirely in their burrows and have very few predators. Genes for longevity would be wasted on mice likely to get eaten after a year or two, so they live fast and reproduce prolifically while they have the chance. Naked mole rats don't have that constraint.

Wikipedia goes into detail about their weird physiological traits and unusual lifestyle:

Naked Mole-Rat

Aside from one other species of mole rat, they're the only eusocial mammals. That is, their society has a structure similar to those of bees, ants, and termites, with a single reproductive queen in each mole rat colony, mating with one to three breeding males and served by a horde of nonreproductive workers.

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the six-inch-tall, blue-skinned Nac Mac Feegle have a similar social structure. Each Feegle mound includes only one female, the kelda (queen), who's married to the chief of the clan. All the other males in the group are her sons or brothers-in-law. She bears potentially hundreds of sons and only one daughter, who eventually departs to become kelda of a different clan.

Incidentally, T. Kingfisher has announced she's working on a science-fiction novel called THE NAKED STARS, about a spaceship crewed by a hive of sapient naked mole rats. I can hardly wait to read that!

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Human Hibernation

The November issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC has a long article about a NASA project at the University of Pittsburgh, with the goal of making it possible for human beings to enter "a bearlike state of hibernation." Unfortunately, NG articles are behind a paywall, but here's an overview of the experiment on a different site:

Benefits of Sleeping in Space

The condition is "bearlike" in that subjects enter a period of torpor during which they can briefly awaken, unlike some rodents whose core body temperatures drop below freezing. The NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article mentions a ground squirrel in a lab put into such a deep "sleep" it appeared dead, yet revived unharmed. The magazine contains a photo of a dormant squirrel obliviously held in a researcher's hands.

A BBC America wildlife series about mammals includes video of hibernating bats, in which a male is shown briefly emerging from dormancy to mate with a sleeping female, who doesn't wake up. What happened to consent? :)

NASA hopes hibernation-like torpor might make long voyages to Mars and beyond more feasible. In that condition, astronauts would use less energy, needing less food, water, and oxygen. Sleeping through much of the trip would minimize interpersonal friction, too. Unlike astronauts at low gravity and/or in confined quarters, as well as people forced to spend weeks or months in bed because of illness, hibernating animals don't lose bone density or muscle mass. They also avoid strokes and diabetes despite their accumulation of extra fat. If space travelers could go dormant that way, even if only part of the time, they could arrive at their destinations in better health.

At present, we're nowhere near the capability of voyaging to interplanetary or interstellar locations in the "cold sleep" familiar in science fiction. We don't have to wait for long-range interplanetary travel to reap benefits from human hibernation, though. Slowing body functions in cardiac, brain-injured, and stroke patients could stabilize them until treatment could be administered -- if techniques or drugs can be developed to induce that condition instantly without dangerous side effects.

The Wikipedia page on suspended animation touches upon effects of hypothermia in humans and experiments in induced hibernation:

Suspended Animation

If I had the metabolism of a bear, I would happily go to sleep the night of the first Sunday in Advent and stay that way until the return of Daylight Saving Time, waking only for the week from Christmas Eve through New Year's Eve. Missing the cold, dark months wouldn't bother me a bit.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.