Researchers uncover reason why mole rats are oblivious to acid pain

Reasource: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-uncover-mole-rats-oblivious-acid.html Summary: Scientists have been very interested how mule rats are not affected by acid and never get cancer. You would think that mole rats would be affected by acid and die a lot easier due to the way that they live. They live underground and in a group which makes carbon dyoxide levels usually kill most animals and oxygen levels are really low which would make them feel pain to acid, but they don't. These researchers are trying to figure out why that is and they first came up with, mole rats have different nociceptors then other animals, but that is not true. Mole rats simply have a different sodium channel then most animals, so they took a closer look and found that nociceptors are things in your body that get attacked and can either block or send the message to your brain that you are feeling pain. The sodium channel that they looked at was the same for all animals so they looked at a different one called Nav1.7, which they found blocked when exposed to acid. This article stated that since these researchers found this out they could possibly find a way to change a part in the Nav1.7 so that people and animals wont have to feel pain towards acid. Impact: This article has a very big impact on society because if they find a way to make people not susceptible to acid then that could make a lot of problems with birth defects and other things go down dramtically. Critique: There is nothing bad about this article, all I can say is to read it because it is very interesting and hopefully these researchers find a way to make humans not susceptible to acid.