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water bear

Water Bears On the Sun!

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Solar Tardigrade - ESA

Regular followers of the QSF blog know we have a soft spot for tardigrades – also called “water bears,” and we live for space news. So we HAD to share this one with you! From Live Science: No, tardigrades haven’t colonized the sun. But a tardigrade-shaped speck on a solar mission’s images recently led to some joking about the unlikely solar presence of a wee water bear. Today (July 16), when the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA unveiled the latest images captured by the agencies’ Solar Orbiter mission, some sharp-eyed viewers were quick to point out a small, dark blotch on … Read more

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Water Bears

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tardigrade - deposit photos

Emma at Modest Fish heard about my mini obsession with tardigrades – also known more fondly as water bears – and sent me this great article to share: You may have heard of water bears and wondered if they’re really as amazing as people make them out to be. As someone who has personally worked with Tardigrades in the lab, I can confirm that, not only are they fascinating, they’re adorable too. And, in this article, I’m going to show you what sets them apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. What Is A Tardigrade? The name Tardigrade literally … Read more

SPACE: Water Bears on the Moon!

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tardigrade - deposit photos

When you look up at the moon, there may now be a few thousand water bears looking back at you. The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the moon during a failed landing attempt on April 11. In doing so, it may have strewn the lunar surface with thousands of dehydrated tardigrades, Wired reported yesterday (Aug. 5). Beresheet was a robotic lander. Though it didn’t transport astronauts, it carried human DNA samples, along with the aforementioned tardigrades and 30 million very small digitized pages of information about human society and culture. However, it’s unknown if the archive — and the water … Read more