Science3 steps
The unkillable
A rabbit hole is a short chain of facts where each one hands you to the next. Start at the top and see where it leaves you.
- Tardigrades survived ten days of open space vacuum.
In 2007, dried-up tardigrades were flown to low Earth orbit and exposed to open space for ten days. The group shielded from solar UV but left in hard vacuum and cosmic radiation…
Their survival trick starts with losing nearly all their water…
- A tardigrade's trick: dry out and turn to glass.
A tardigrade survives drying out by pulling in its limbs and shrivelling into a ball called a tun, shedding almost all of its body water while its metabolism falls to a…
And that pause button holds for decades…
- Frozen for 30 years, a tardigrade woke and laid eggs.
Japanese researchers froze a moss sample from Antarctica in 1983 and thawed it 30 years later. A tardigrade inside twitched, then crawled, then went on to lay eggs that hatched —…