“If you go into outer space without protection, you'll die. The lack of pressure would force the air in your lungs to rush out. Gases dissolved in your body fluids would expand, pushing the skin apart and forcing it to inflate like a balloon. Your eardrums and capillaries would rupture, and your blood would start to bubble and boil. Even if you survived all that, ionising radiation would rip apart the DNA in your cells. Mercifully, you would be unconscious in 15 seconds.” Despite being slightly scared by this dramatic start to an article about the microscopic animals, Tardigrades, on the BBC Earth website, during their first meeting of the year Café Scientifique were fascinated that the weirdly adorable moss piglets/water bears/tardigrades could survive the hostile conditions mentioned above.
We discovered that these fascinating microscopic animals also known as tardigrades or water bears could survive temperatures between 1 and 373 Kelvin, live through pressures up to 6000ATM and enter an ametabolic state for over 100 years to simply come back to life when the conditions return to optimal. We were rather amused to here that one was revived after being in an ametabolic state for 120 years to simply twitch its leg, and die and slightly horrified that upon researching what would happen if you ate a tardigrade (as they seem completely undestroyabe) we found out that you and I alike eat approximately 2 every time we eat a piece of lettuce!
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AuthorOur blogs are written by the girls that attend this society. Archives
June 2020
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