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Naked mole rats are every bit as strange as they sound.
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They're cold-blooded mammals that live underground in big colonies run by a queen.
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They almost never get cancer and they can survive for 18 minutes with zero oxygen.
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They lose consciousness, and their heart rate and breathing slow way down.
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But as soon as oxygen is available again, they perk right up.
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A mouse, on the other hand, lasts about a minute.
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Researchers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, along with colleagues in Europe and Africa, used a variety of metabolic tests to figure out what was going on.
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In low-oxygen environments — pretty common underground — mole rats can change their energy metabolism in all their crucial organs, so they don't need oxygen.
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They switch fuels, like a hybrid car.
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Instead of glucose metabolized with oxygen, they use fructose and metabolize it without oxygen.
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Knowing more about this metabolic trick might one day help in treating heart attacks and strokes, where a lack of oxygen is a killer.