http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/4/motherboard-tv-meet-the-guy-who-hunts-space-bears-in-rural-virginia

Motherboard TV: Meet the Guy Who Hunts Space Bears in Rural Virginia

Posted by erinleecarr on Tuesday, Sep 04, 2012



Mike Shaw is a quiet, unassuming man in love with the wilderness. He also knows far more about tardigrades then almost anyone. These microscopic creatures, whose name comes from the German for “slow walker,” and who are sometimes called “water bears,” after their bear-like gait, are biological oddities. While their nervous system looks and acts like us, they are wholly different and can survive in extreme situations that almost no other living organism can – including space.

Beginning in 2007, biologists sent these little suckers up to the space station (along with other so-called extremophiles) and found that tardigrades can survive the vacuum of space and the life-zapping radiation of the sun. Other experiments have shown that adult tardigrades can survive both extreme pressures and temperatures, ranging from -459 degrees Fahrenheit up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Even if recent DNA and RNA sequencing show that tardigrades are the sister group to arthropods and Onychophora, their evolutionary lineage is unclear. Some have even theorized – cue the X Files music – that tardigrades came from another planet, and rode to Earth on space debris.

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