Perusing boingboing this morining led me to this post on Tartigrades, otherwise known as Water Bears. This has reminded me of the upcoming game Spore, by Sims creator Will Wright, which looks genius. More on Spore later.
Now here’s the thing I really like about tartigrades. They are apparently the World’s Toughest Animal. You can shoot them into space, take them to the deepest ocean depths and let them go, deprive them of air, water, and food for years and they don’t care. Send them into the core of nuclear reactor. They’ll be fine. — nfttu.blogspot.com
The Wikipedia entry contains:
1. can survive being heated for a few minutes to 151 °C or being chilled for days at -272.8 °C (almost absolute zero).
2. Radiation— Shown by Raul M. May from the University of Paris, Tardigrades can withstand 5700 grays of x-ray radiation. (Five grays would be fatal to a human).
3. Pressure—They can withstand the extremely low pressure of a vacuum and also very high pressures, many times greater than atmospheric pressure. In theory, they could even survive the vacuum of space, though the possibility of it is slim. — Wikipedia
2 responses so far ↓
1 Creation Robot » Underground rivers and lakes found in the Antarctic // Apr 20, 2006 at 9:41 AM
[...] Life can be damned hardy, so as the years go by expect the number of extra-terrestrial lifeforms to rise rapidly. Have a look at water bears, or deep sea worms. [...]
2 htu // Apr 19, 2006 at 8:26 PM
they rock
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