The zookeeper shows us a colony of naked mole rats skittering around a set of interconnected plastic tubes. They are distinctly unattractive animals, like wrinkled sausages with teeth. They are also incredibly weird: insensitive to pain, resistant to cancer, extremely long-lived, terrible at controlling their body temperature, and possessed of misshapen, incompetent sperm. They live in ant-like colonies with queens and workers.
