All articles tagged with #tardigrade
Nature’s October science image roundup features a 46,000-year-old Neanderthal hand found in Spain, a tardigrade shedding its skin, and NASA’s Astrobee robots on the ISS. The selection also includes a bee stinger mechanism study, an elephant mourning ritual in Namibia, and 57 new marine species discovered in Argentina.
Wellcome Sanger Institute researchers are collecting tardigrades from moss to sequence their genomes using a picogram-input method that extracts DNA and RNA from a single specimen and amplifies the material with PCR. The Tree of Life programme now sequences about 48 genomes per week, adding to a growing catalog that already includes thousands of genomes; tardigrades’ very small genomes and remarkable resilience may reveal genes behind desiccation and cryptobiosis, with potential biomedicine and biotechnology insights.
Oxford and Harvard researchers find tardigrades—the water bears—are the most likely animals to outlive Earth’s final catastrophe, thanks to cryptobiosis and refuges in deep oceans; true planetary sterilization would require boiling the oceans, a feat only achievable by an extraordinarily massive asteroid or rare stellar explosions, while microbes would likely survive and ecological collapse could still wipe out all life even if some tardigrades endure.
A Harvard–Oxford study models what energy would be needed to sterilize Earth and identifies tardigrades as the ultimate survivors, capable of cryptobiosis and thriving in deep-ocean refuges; while surface catastrophes like asteroid impacts or nearby supernovae could devastate ecosystems, boiling the oceans would be the threshold to erase resilient life, suggesting life could endure long after humans are gone.
A rare video captures a tardigrade, or water bear, hatching from its egg inside its skin, showcasing its alien-like appearance and incredible resilience to extreme conditions, including space.