Many scientists think of aging as what happens when the body accumulates life’s wear and tear—the costs of metabolizing food and burning through daily energy demands, the gunky buildup of cellular waste. Hibernation brings those burdensome processes to a near halt. Animals that manage it are “barely doing anything metabolically, and they’re very cold,” says Jenny Tung, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. It’s caloric restriction and cryopreservation rolled into one, a slowdown that preserves physiological battery life, like toggling an iPhone into low-power mode.

Scientists were first clued in to the notion that hibernation might be a way to temporarily delay death in the early 1980s, when a team of medical researchers at Harvard found that Turkish hamsters that spent an especially long time in seasonal pseudo-slumber perished later than their peers. In the years that followed, researchers quickly identified several other creatures that belonged to the Wake Less, Live More Club. Among them were ground squirrels, bats, marmots, and lemurs—all of which outlast similar species that don’t hibernate, clear hints that the hibernators were somehow “cheating the game,” says Gabriela Pinho, a biologist at the Ecological Research Institute in São Paulo, Brazil.

But definitively nailing hibernation as an anti-aging ploy is tough. If animals are holed up in dens for months of the year, they’re also usually better hidden from predators and more sheltered from the elements. To confirm that these stints of dormancy were actually, on a molecular level, hitting the “Pause” button on animals’ inevitable march toward death, Tung told me, scientists needed a way to “start asking what’s going on within the cells themselves.”