4 ms·

Title really made me laugh, but progressing beyond, I'm wondering if any science people found the article as amazing as I did?

autoexec 4y ago
If there's one thing you can be certain of it's that for the discovery of any fact, however obscure or trivial seeming, somewhere there is a scientist who is extremely excited about it. I'm sure there are a lot of tardigrade fans out there who are thrilled by this. > “I’ll never forget New Year’s Day 2019, when I received an email from Tomomi Nakano, another author of the paper. She had been working late trying to see the condensation of CAHS proteins and observed the first CAHS filament networks in human cultured cells. I was astonished at seeing such clearly defined microscopic images of these. It was the first time I had seen such a thing. It was a very happy new year indeed!” I was likely either still drinking or sleeping it off while others were working away and emailing colleagues about fascinating discoveries.
- dekhn 4y ago
  I have a bit of a tardigrade obsession- so much so that I built my own motorized microscope (far cheaper than scientists use) and trained an object detector so I can track individual tardigrades as they move around a large area. Eventually a friend who knows one of the world's leading tardigrade researchers and introduced me and now we have a plan to do some more experiments using the tech I built. It takes up many late evenings but the resulting imagery is indeed fascinating- I managed to image tardigrades egg grow and hatch in realtime.
dekhn 4y ago
I'm a bit worn out by all the "tardigrades are indestructible" articles but as long as people are actually doing biophysics experiments to understand the mechanism I'm interested. In this case I don't think this is the only mechanism they use but it's interesting that it's a gel, which are an underappreciated phase of matter, whereas most of the tardigrade desiccation literature I've read remarks that it looks more like they're virtrifying. For popular science articles about tardigrades it's hard to beat Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/scientists-glean-new-insights-into-how-tardigrades-can-survive-dehydration/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/scientists-glean-new... https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/nifty-biomechanics-of-adorable-water-bears-lumbering-gait-may-inspire-microrobots/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/nifty-biomechanics-o... https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/water-bears-can-replace-all-the-fluid-in-their-bodies-with-a-glass-matrix/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/water-bears-can-repl...

autoexec 4y ago

If there's one thing you can be certain of it's that for the discovery of any fact, however obscure or trivial seeming, somewhere there is a scientist who is extremely excited about it. I'm sure there are a lot of tardigrade fans out there who are thrilled by this. > “I’ll never forget New Year’s Day 2019, when I received an email from Tomomi Nakano, another author of the paper. She had been working late trying to see the condensation of CAHS proteins and observed the first CAHS filament networks in human cultured cells. I was astonished at seeing such clearly defined microscopic images of these. It was the first time I had seen such a thing. It was a very happy new year indeed!” I was likely either still drinking or sleeping it off while others were working away and emailing colleagues about fascinating discoveries.

dekhn 4y ago
I have a bit of a tardigrade obsession- so much so that I built my own motorized microscope (far cheaper than scientists use) and trained an object detector so I can track individual tardigrades as they move around a large area. Eventually a friend who knows one of the world's leading tardigrade researchers and introduced me and now we have a plan to do some more experiments using the tech I built. It takes up many late evenings but the resulting imagery is indeed fascinating- I managed to image tardigrades egg grow and hatch in realtime.

dekhn 4y ago

I'm a bit worn out by all the "tardigrades are indestructible" articles but as long as people are actually doing biophysics experiments to understand the mechanism I'm interested. In this case I don't think this is the only mechanism they use but it's interesting that it's a gel, which are an underappreciated phase of matter, whereas most of the tardigrade desiccation literature I've read remarks that it looks more like they're virtrifying. For popular science articles about tardigrades it's hard to beat Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/scientists-glean-new-insights-into-how-tardigrades-can-survive-dehydration/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/scientists-glean-new... https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/nifty-biomechanics-of-adorable-water-bears-lumbering-gait-may-inspire-microrobots/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/nifty-biomechanics-o... https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/water-bears-can-replace-all-the-fluid-in-their-bodies-with-a-glass-matrix/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/water-bears-can-repl...