Update: Looks like it fixes itself after a little bit. I'm wondering if Hover Zoom is to blame as it was on in incognito for me but I can't reproduce now so I don't know...
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OS X 10.10
Chrome 41.0.2272.89 (64-bit)
It's happening to me as well. I thought it may be Privacy Badger blocking some JS or something stupid like that but after trying in incognito mode I can confirm it's probably not a plugin causing it (The plugins still being loading in incognito mode are: 1Pass, EditThisCookie, HoverZoom, JsonView, and RES). In Chrome Canary (43.0.2330.4 and 43.0.2331.0 tested) scrolling seems to work fine. It also works fine in FF (34.0.5 and 36.0.1).
The average individual is usually 0.3 to 0.5mm, 1.5mm are giants. And though they're described as barrel-shaped, they're not as wide as they're long.
The main problem is they're close to translucent, so bigger individuals can be visible with good vision and the right light, but it's not exactly trivial.
I found a tardigrade while using my microscope to look at pond water. Man, they look funny and dopey and move around very clumsily. Not exactly what you'd think would be the toughest animal around. I would have put my money on rotifers.
Rotifers are interesting in their own way. They are an example of an animal where their sex is determined by what environmental conditions their parents were in. We normally think of sex determination as something that happens at conception, but with rotifers it is much before that.
There's actually some evidence and theory to suggest that sex of human children is determined by their mother's stress level: http://www.economist.com/node/10130882
To be clear, in humans that's a 5-10% shift in probability, and no evidence to suggest that the effect is determined post-conception (an extraordinary conjecture) and not statistical miscarriage pressure.
I was thinking why we don't include these in the mars rovers and other space probes, see how they do on other planets. Is there some ethical problem with that? Like the prime directive.
As far as I know, such missions go to great lengths to ensure this does not happen. There are two main reasons for that: 1) if you're searching for traces of life on another world, you don't want to discover bacteria you brought from Earth, and 2) you definitely don't want to unintentionally contaminate said world with terrestial life that would start to alter the planet, because you'll lose valuable research data.
The tardigrade image in the banner at the top is... freaky. Like a Monsters Inc. monster wearing one of those HAZMAT suits they have to wear in case of child contamination.
Does anybody else feel sorry for them, you look like a turd with legs, your mouth looks like an anus, and you can't die easily. Maybe some sort of reincarnation hell?
Cryptobiosis (the long-fangled scientific term for what these things do) is something I've been fascinated by ever since I heard about Water Bears on one of those weird little nature shows ten years ago. Most of the organisms that can do it are understandably "simple", but it is truly fascinating.
I learned about tardigrades from an episode of last year's remake of Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson said tardigrades survived all five of earth's mass extinctions.
It's not just the harsh environs of outer space that
tardigrades can survive in. The little critters seem adept
at living in some of the harshest regions of Earth. They
have been discovered 5546m (18,196ft) up a mountain in the
Himalayas, in Japanese hot springs, at the bottom of the
ocean and in Antarctica. They can withstand huge amounts
of radiation, being heated to 150 °C, and being frozen
almost to absolute zero.
I'm having a hard time seeing how the ability to survive in such high and low temperatures arose via natural selection, especially the ability to survive at near absolute zero while in the tun state. Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen via environmental pressures, at least not directly.
> Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen via environmental pressures, at least not directly.
Doesn't need to arise directly, it may be that the adaptations that allow you to survive -50C are the same ones that allow you to survive -200C.
Also there is Exaptation where one trait for one set of circumstances later adapts to serve another set of circumstances - the classic been feathers, they evolved as a method of keeping warm and later where later co-opted for flight.
This seems the most likely explanation, but it is still extraordinary. Being able to survive in cold is one thing. But being able to survive being placed in liquid nitrogen for an extended period of time? That's incredible.
I dunno, have you looked into the human suspended animation with sulphur? A layperson could say: "wow, it's amazing the humans adapted to go into suspended animation when exposed to the cold and an atmosphere of sulphur!" It's not really something we adapted to, it's just another accident of our biology. https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation
All life is a hack! All organisms are just pushing the minimum code change to get a leg up on everything else. Loopholes are everywhere.
Once you solve the problem of your cells freezing over, I don't think any additional cold is going to be much of a problem. If anything, the colder it is the better off you are due to the slowing of chemical reactions. There's a reason we freeze things to preserve them.
>Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen via environmental pressures, at least not directly.
Your premise does not justify your conclusion. Reword your final sentence to read: Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen on Earth via environmental pressures, at least not directly.
What if the adaption is just a side-effect of another adaptation? As in, if there is no difference between surviving at -80 C and absolute 0?
Besides, I don't exactly see a point in some intelligent creature creating these little buggers with the ability to survive basically anything, yet giving them no other purpose. It's the equivalent of creating a computer program that is in all ways perfect, yet does absolutely nothing.
There is no intended implication for intelligence behind the extremophile behavior of tardigrades. Merely that it is curious how such a characteristic would have arisen given the absence of the environmental conditions (seemingly) needed to precipitate such traits.
Fair enough. I still think that it's not that surprising. For example, nobody in the part of my ancestry that matters evolutionarily had to jump out of the way of a moving car, yet I am able to do this. Perhaps this analogy is too simplistic, but I think you see what I'm driving at.
They have been around a while, and the an evolutionary mechanism that lets you survived to -100C (some of the temperature extremes speculated in the last glacial period) might "just work" all the way down to near absolute zero.
That said, I am surprised that no NFL team has picked the Tartigrade has their mascot/theme ("The Texas Tardigrades are victorious!" kinda rolls off the tongue and they the buggers are tough and hang in there, good qualities for a sports franchise)
But the more interesting bit for me, is that they would survive on Mars if there are underground aquifers of liquid water occasionally, and Ganymede or any other moon with liquid seas if the radiation didn't kill them. Which I find interesting that we already have a 'proof of concept' of life that could be living off planet, now we need to figure out if it is actually out there.
As for the "Texas Tardigrades" proposal: the name sounds too much like "retard". Even if the local PC committee did not object, the opposing team supporters would have a field day.
Some scifi (e.g. Simmons's Hyperion series) posits that the way for humans to survive near-light-speed travel is for the body to be basically destroyed by acceleration, and then rebuilt on arrival. If that ever happens, perhaps tardigrades will inspire the techniques used in the process.
I enjoyed reading it, but Hyperion struck me as having a great many fantasy elements. It has both time travel and FTL (both of which are nonsense given current physics, there is no reasoned framework to explain them in). Also, symbiotic life extension technology.
I also crankily believe that unobtanium is also a fantasy element (sorry Larry, scrith too), so maybe I shouldn't bother having the conversation. But why is a magic wand 'a stupid plot device', but an inexplicable technology is 'a reasoned exploration'?
Or is that not what hard sci fi means? Because fantasy often focuses on the social implications of magic, which is at least a similar sort of activity as imagining how big you can make something if you can adjust the laws of physics.
All valid but the caveat 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. The line between what is science fiction and what is fantasy in a future setting can be very thin.
I'm basically arguing that any such line is arbitrary.
The distinction between science fiction and fantasy is probably a useful one for helping readers find books they like. Going further than that seems like it is going to almost always involve a lot of personal preference.
OK, I removed the adjective "hard". I'm not sure what I was thinking, using such a nebulous term. If you ask nine people the difference between "hard" and "soft" scifi, you'll get ten answers. And the vast excluded middle threatens to dwarf the two complementary categories anyway. I meant merely to differentiate those examples of scifi that go beyond "then they pressed the warp drive button and warped across the galaxy", to consider how humans might travel very fast. In the perhaps poorly chosen example of the Hyperion sequels (if any category would fit them, it's probably "kitchen sink"), bodies were reconstructed by a cruciform "symbiont" that restored recent snapshots. I imagine that instead, whatever cellular processes tardigrades exhibit might be somehow induced in humans.
The difference between hard and soft speculative fiction (science vs fantasy is really more about the setting than the universe structure) is how big the plot holes are in the fabric of the universe.
Why does only one special person have the magical powers? Why do people use their incredible powers only for rather mundane tasks? How is it possible to create that space fortress that has more steel than the all conjectured quantities within 100 light years? The more questions you can ask and file to get good answers for, the softer the fiction is.
Thanks for the link but the author, Ed Yong, http://edyong.flavors.me, is wrong.
That wasp has probably 10(0) 000's of tiny cells and is as big as some large single-cell creatures.
I just read that "Tardigrades (water bears) are so tough, they can SURVIVE outer space" and they need WATER from decade to decade to survive and they also live on earth for 500 million years.
Then I read "Suddenly, It Seems, Water Is Everywhere in Solar System".
So wouldn't be fun to have a probe (on Philae for example) called "Bearfinder"? Shouldn't our friends live (sleep) in worst case scenario (if earth would be their birthplace) on the moon, mars, or comet 67P. Or best scenario rather everywhere?
Just the other day I read a fascinating (to me) Quora reply to the question "What can happen if a human eats a water bear (the most resistant living organism), or gets a water bear in their blood stream?"
Short answer: it gets dissolved in the stomach acid and dies.
In the Bayesian sense, I must now update my priors regarding life coming to Earth from another planet. I always gave that theory a very low probability, but now that its been demonstrated that some life can survive in space, I must admit the theory is somewhat more possible than I previously believed.
Also, does anyone know what "mm" stands for when they say these creatures are a maximum of 1.5mm long? I thought "millimeter" but that doesn't make sense in the context:
"They are never more than 1.5 mm long, and can only be seen with a microscope."
I can see things that are 1 millimeter with my own eyes, so what does "1.5 mm" mean? Could "nm" would have been nanometer, but that would be far too small, much smaller than a virus. I'm thinking they meant millionth of a meter?
Can someone explain why something up to 1.5mm long can "can only be seen with a microscope?" That would make sense if the other dimensions were small. But from the pictures, it appears that this is not the case; tardigrades are approximately oval shaped, not much narrower than they are long. I have a circuit board on my desk here where some surface-mount components are about millimeter-something long, and less than a mm wide. I can plainly see them.
Rotifers support a billion dollar's human industries currently.
They are the preys for breeding the tiny larvae of marine fishes in our future spacial stations so don't go out your planet without some of them.
You don't want just to put some humans in mars. You'll need to move entire reliable trophic chains, and humans are only the cherry at the top. So take with you some rotifers, some Chlorella also and... well, maybe a big bag of dehydrated eggs of desert pupfishes.
There is an educational game, MetaBlast (http://metnet-mbl.gdcb.iastate.edu/), where Tardigrades are creatures you can encounter (and interact with). Even one appearing on the screenshot.
I don't know if you know this but 'Tardigrades' are the only living beings that survived all the four ice ages. This any many more amazing stories around it can be seen in an amazing TV documentary series 'Cosmos: A space Odyssey' presented by by Neil deGrasse Tyson
What is the chance that these creatures didn't evolve on earth but on some other planet and comet and instead got transported here on a meteor. That would explain a lot of things as to why they evolved to stand 6 times the maximum pressure, temperature colder than ever recorded on earth, and their other attributes which are too extreme for even the most hostile environment on earth.
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