Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can tardigrades survive on the Moon?

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Daniel and Kelly talk about the extraordinary ability to tardigrades to survive extreme conditions, and ponder whether those abilities have kept them alive after a space craft carrying them crashed into the surface of the Moon. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I mean, these poor teeny tiny creatures have been exposed to all manner of unpleasant stimuli in the lab. They've been frozen to near absolute zero, heated up to way past boiling, irradiated, squeezed at pressures you'd experience 180 kilometers below Earth's surface, exposed to the vacuum of space, and shot into sandbags. If tardigrades ever become large and sentient and start looking for retribution, we're in a lot of trouble. But the good news for tardigrades is that they survive most of these experiences surprisingly well. How do they do it? Well, that's what we're going to discuss today. And by the end of the episode, we'll answer a question that has no doubt kept you up at night.

Are those tardigrades that crash landed on the moon in 2019 still alive? Let's find out. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I don't like a lot of biology, but I do like hearing about critters that only poop when they molt. Wait, wait, wait, whoa. Back up, back up. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith, a biologist. Did you just say that you don't like a lot of biology? You know, there's a reason I'm in physics. The biology's all weird and messy. I mean, it's wonderful and fascinating.

but sometimes I just feel like there aren't really any hard answers. Well, you guys haven't reconciled quantum mechanics or general relativity yet. How dare you? But there is a hard answer. We don't have it yet, but I think one day eventually humans or some clever aliens will figure it out. Biology, I just don't even know if there's an answer. I mean, I can't argue with that. I'm not sure there's an answer for a lot of this stuff either, but I still think that's exciting.

And also, I will note that you said, that they only poop when they mold. There are probably more than 1,300 species of tardigrades. I don't know that it's true that all of them only poop when they molt. I think some of them might just poop, like the rest of us. All right. Well, I am fascinated. I want to hear more about it because I'm sure there's an answer to at least this question

of when do tardigrades poop. I mean, it's going to depend on the species, but yes. All right. So we had an amazing listener question. Let's go ahead and listen to that now. Hey, Daniel and Kelly. A question about tardigrades, those little water bears. Just curious, what is it about them that allows them to survive in basically any environment?

I've heard that there's even some on the moon. And as far as I know, NASA hasn't engineered little spacesuits that small. So, yeah, just curious, what is it about their physiology that allows them to survive? Thanks. Also, go Virginia. Okay, so first off, I laughed out loud imagining NASA engineering tiny space suits for the tardigrades. That was amazing. Thank you for this question.

And go Virginia. I'm sorry, this question is disqualified. I mean, obviously they have no credibility from the get-go. Daniel, I did 10 hours of research for this episode. We are not dropping this episode. And did you discover that you have to be a tardigrade to enjoy the climate of Virginia? Everybody enjoys the climate of Virginia. Tim and I agree on that at least.

There was a little bit of snow falling the other day, and I felt highly festive. And I know that there are some places of California that have snow, but only some. Well, you know, Tardagrades can live on the moon. They can live deep underwater. They can survive when it's dry. They can even survive Virginia winter. Well, hold on. Can they live on the moon?

I don't know. That's the whole point of this episode, trying to find the answer to that question. So should we dig in? Yes, Kelly. Tell us, what are these Tardagraids? Where do they look like? where do they stand in the context of all biology, and what do we know about where they can actually survive? Okay, all right. Well, so it'll take me an hour or so to give you that answer, but let's

start with reiterating that there are probably more than 1,300 species. In fact, it's under Kingdom Animalia. There's something like 30 phylum, and tardigrade, they're their own phylum. Whoa. And so there's a lot of them, right? But usually you're like, tardigrades do blah, blah, blah, as though there's just one species. But there's a lot more. than just one species. And the fact that they're so high up in this tree of life, I mean, it's not just like I'll just like to organize things because they don't really understand them. It tells us something about like, wait, wait, wait, let's listen to the particles episode and

you're like, I don't know how we categorize these things. So anyway, a little hypocritical, but. No, seriously, I think when particle physics is failing is when it's just doing taxonomy. If we're just doing botany, then we don't really understand anything. It's when we're doing philosophy. When we're linking things together, we understand how they work. underneath. That's when I think we're really making progress. But what I want to ask you, I think we need both. We'll move on. But what I want to ask you is how we should interpret

where people have put tardigrades in this tree of life. The fact that they're so high up, does that mean that they're really their own kind of thing? They're so different from everything else or they have their own weird history or both. Let's go with both. And let's talk about why they're so unique. Awesome. All right. So first of all, these are tiny little guys. They're multicellular. They got lots of cells. Big ones are about a million. millimeter long, so about the size of a period. They have this hard outer cuticle, and because it's hard that it doesn't grow with them, so they have to molt the way, like, nematodes and some insects will molt, the way snakes shed,

because snakes are awesome. Let's get snakes in there. You probably don't even like snakes, do you, Daniel? You probably don't like it. Like, that's an outrageous thing. Like, oh, yeah, snakes, rats, and cockroaches. You don't like any of that, do you, Daniel? Do you not like those things, Daniel?

Well, I mean, I wouldn't want to like snuggle up with them, you know, it's not like if I see a bunch of them in my bed, I go, ooh, cozy. You know, they're not in the same category as like kittens and bunnies for sure. All right, all right. I won't disagree with that, but I have seen some snugly rats. But anyway, okay, hard outer cuticle, sometimes when they lose that cuticle, that is when they release the contents of their bowels that they've been holding on to for a while. That's also sometimes they'll release their eggs into that cuticle when they molt, and then the eggs sort of have this, like, protective little case that they're in for a while. And then when they hatch, they have to find like the holes in the cuticle to get back out. All right.

So these things are really small. You're saying a millimeter is the biggest one. Can I see something with my naked eye that's just a millimeter? So like tardigrades, you could actually like if you squint, see one of these things. So it's about the size of like a period on a printed out sheet of paper. And so like, you know, maybe you could see some like flailing limbs. But like if you had a dissecting scope, you could see them better. But again, a millimeter is about the size of like some of the bigger ones.

And so a lot of them are even smaller, and so you'd be better off with, like, a compound microscope. And does everything that has this hard outer shell have to molt when it grows, or are there some critters out there that can, like, gradually expand? Because, like, our skeleton gradually expands as we grow. Why can't you gradually expand your exoskeleton as you grow? Or is that a totally naive biology question? Our skeletons are inside of us, and so they can, like, expand as our squishy outer parts, sort of, like, accommodate that. But I think that if you have a particular kind of cuticle that's like super hard, that doesn't tend to grow and expand.

I think you do usually need to lose those. All right. And so do all of these things look roughly the same, even though some of them are a little bigger and some of them are smaller? Do they all roughly look like the same critter? Like an individual non-trained biologist tell them apart by eye? They do have some definite characteristics that help you tell them apart. So my question for you is, I think when most people think of tardigrades,

there is an animated video that they saw. Is something coming to mind for you, or have you not seen this video? No, I definitely have a mental image of a tardigrade. I think the phrase water bear has also influenced me, so I'm imagining something that looks a little like a fat caterpillar, but with sort of claws, and then a weird face with like a tube sticking out the front of it. So it's a little like a possum or something. I'm not sure exactly which animal it looks like.

Maybe like a microscopic water possum. Oh, I love possums. Okay, so there's this, like, famous video where they're pink. And they've got that like almost a toilet paper roll on top of their face. And it kind of like goes into the face and out of the face over and over again as the tardigrades eight little legs furiously have it swim through this water. So I was listening to ologies and Ellie Ward was interviewing Dr. Paul Bartels and he was lamenting that that is like not what they look like at all. What? Popular sciences let us astray, Kelly, really? Hold on. I know. I know. It's amazing. Okay. So first of all, that toilet paper rolls.

nose thing does not go out and in and out and in and out and in. That was a mistake because someone took a special kind of microscopic picture. They used a scanning electron microscope. And the way the sample was prepared, one of the tardigrades had that thing sticking out like it usually does. And one of them, because of how it was prepared, it just kind of got like sucked into the face. But I don't think that usually happens. And so the nose thing isn't going in and out and in and out and out. I think someone just saw both of those photos and were like, oh, it must alternate between these two states as opposed to like the preparation process just kind of messes up specimens sometimes wow it's like they saw two frames and just animated the interstitial that's crazy

and then the other thing is they don't swim they are what's called benthic so they walk around on like the floor of things or like they crawl up vegetation but they're not swimming they're crawling along and that video that most of us are you know perhaps imagining right now it has eight legs that are all like in front of it. It's like a bear, but all of its legs have been multiplied by two. But what really happens is it has six legs in like the usual configuration. And then another two that go like straight out from its butt. Butt legs. But legs. Yeah. How convenient. So those butt legs hold on to stuff so that they like don't get washed away with the current or something. And some have claws and some don't have claws and they're not usually pink. A lot of them are clear or white or if they've got

color a lot of times it's because they are clear but you can see like the algae they ate so they look green or you can see their poop so they look brown and so some of them do have some colors but they're not even though they're moss piglets they're not pink i see so clear like they're invisible like you can see through them they're like transparent if they are starved some of them probably are transparent but if they've eaten anything you can see their digestive tract because they've got like green in it wow that's crazy So like little tart of great children when they've been sneaking cookies from the cookie jar, it's like not a question. The parents are like, I see that cookie.

Exactly. Yes. Wow. What's the evolutionary advantage to being transparent? Is it like a form of camouflage or is it just totally incidental? I really don't know. My first guess would be that it does help with camouflage if like a predator just kind of sees through you. But then the other thing is that like creating pigmentation is often a process that requires some energy.

And so maybe being clear is just easier than creating. pigmentation. But if you're in an aquatic environment, probably being clear is a good way to hide and blend into stuff. Wow. All right. So we have totally the wrong mental image of a tardigrade grade, but it is still kind of cute. Yeah. And it does have those fat little legs and a toilet paper snout. But we're setting the record straight here today. Well, they don't all have the toilet paper snout. Again, there's over 1,300 species. Some of them look like cute little salamanders, but instead of a tail, they've got like, you know, their two butt legs. There's some variability in how they look, but they do have that like general shape. There's also

tons of variability in where you find them. Some are in lakes. Some are in oceans. And some are living in like when there's a little bit of water on lichens or moss. They live in that like little water film. And there's some that you find in like roof gutters. They're essentially anywhere where there is enough water to keep them from like desiccating or they're in environments that dry out sometimes and then water comes back. And this is what they're so well known for. They have a bunch of different strategies for surviving that dry-out period. If you find them in large bodies of water, how come you never find, like, mega tardigrades? You know, like there are sharks, and there used to be, like, huge sharks.

Was there ever a tardigrade that was, like, a meter long or like a hundred meter long? Or is that the next Michael Bay movie we're looking forward to? There have been, I believe, a couple fossil tardigrades that have been found. I don't think we've ever found a mega big one. So, yeah, pass that idea onto Michael Bay. I think it's a winner because there are some that are carnivores and including there are some that will eat other tardigrades. So I think that would make a great movie. Exactly.

You thought they were cute and fuzzy until you saw the big one come for you. Yum. Yum. Yum. Yum. Yum. Okay. But what limits them from growing?

Like, why aren't there bigger ones? Is there something about their geometry which doesn't scale up or is an ecological thing? Like they can't eat enough food to get that big? Or is there something which will eat them if they get too big? or do we not know? I don't think we know. Amazing. Amazing that we don't know.

Amazing. How many things biologists don't understand? Oh, I feel like that's a theme of the physics talks, but all right. Fair, fair. All right. Okay, man, it's a battle between California and Virginia and physics and biology today. I appreciate when you and I are both anti-chemistry and we're on the same team, but I guess today we're doing battle. All right.

So let's start with their abilities to survive desiccation, which means like dry. out. So this is something you hear about a lot in popular science. Are you going to ruin this for us also, Kelly, or is this something they really can do? They really can. Well, not all of them. So again, many, many species, the ones that tend to live in like mosses and lichens and roof gutters, like places that are wet sometimes, but dry other times, they're able to form this stage known as a ton state where they essentially, it's like almost go dormant. Some of them describe it as like it's near death. So they're able to like go into this like super resistant form. And And when they're in this super resistant form, this is when scientists have done all manner

of horrible things to them, like dip them in liquid nitrogen, shoot them out of guns, just to see, like, how much can they handle when they're in this state? So this is what they're famous for when it's not like a nice and cozy and damp time to be a tardigrade, you like convert into this like weird, long lasting state where you're basically immortal and then you can just like unfurl and be a tardigrade again later. It's like time traveling to the future. So immortal, no. When they go into this state, they can survive for like years, maybe decades.

But so one thing you might have heard is they can stay in this stage for hundreds of years. Actually, that seems to be possibly a misreading of a study. So there was like a museum specimen where we knew when it was collected. And a hundred years later, it got taken out of like some drawer. And they found some tardigrades. And they added some water. And it looked like part of an arm kind of moved a little. This was written in Italian.

Either Italian or French, in some romance language. And so it was like an arm moves. a little, but then nothing else. Well, you know, in Italian, hand gestures are super duper important. So maybe that was interpreted as communication, you know. That's right. It could be. As a biologist, I've had to look at a lot of specimens where, like, oops, the ethanol dried out, and now this animal's totally dried, and I'm going to try to, like, get it

back in its normal shape by adding, like, water or more ethanol. And when that happens, they often, like, move in response to the rehydrating. And it's not that they're alive, it's just the molecules responding to the presence of water. And if it did do a like, hello guys, hand gesture, it died right afterwards. Maybe it's impressive, but probably it's just an artifact of it, like, rehydrating. Like if you poured water on a dried up leaf, it would change its shape also, and you might interpret that as motion, but it's definitely not alive. Yes, exactly. And so that's a possible scenario.

But there has been a specimen collected from Antarctica where it was two tardigrades that had entered this dormant state and an egg that hadn't happened. yet. And the specimen was put in cold storage at like, I think negative 20 for 30 years and then removed. And they came out of their ton state, became adults. One of them croaked, but the egg hatched. And then the two individuals who were still alive went on to like reproduce, I think more than once even. And so they were like definitely alive. Like not maybe waved at you and then croaked. Like they're definitely alive. So decades. Now the adult, that's really impressive, right? To freeze an adult and have it then reanimate and survive. That's amazing. Eggs are a different story, right? Because like human eggs, you can freeze. That's not such a big deal. But why is that? I've never

really understood. Like I thought if you freeze any cell, the water inside of it expands and bursts the cell membranes. And that's why it's like hard to freeze a cow and then like reanimate it. Why is it possible to do for eggs or sperm or stuff like that? Why doesn't that same physics apply? Yeah. So I am not an expert on cryopreservation, but I think that it has something to do, when you're freezing human eggs, if you freeze them really fast, the cells don't lice the same way. This is part of why, like, if you get meat,

you don't want to, like, slowly freeze it and then de-frost and do that over and over again because the cells lice and the meat tastes less good. I think something about freezing them really quick, but I don't know why it is that they can come back after that. Yeah, because even human embryos can do that, right? Even fertilized eggs, it's sort of amazing. It is.

We should have a whole episode on cryopreservation. Yes, let's do it. it. All right. But it's definitely not something you can do to like a human adult, right? Yeah. At least not yet. People are working on that, right?

Preserving the brains of old baseball players for the future. Ooh. All right. So you're telling us that this is real, that tardigrades really can go into this crazy state and survive insanely long exposure to really difficult conditions and then be alive again and reproduce and be happy. What's going on during that state? Like, are they alive?

or things paused? Like, is there some metabolism happening? Like, what's going on? I'm going to tell you the answer to that, Daniel, after the break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers. or I get students who would be like,

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Okay, so you wanted to know what happens when the tardigrades go into this, like, semi-dormant state. So first of all, they, like, kind of squish up into a ball. And so they, like, pull their heads in, they pull their legs in, and they, like, expel, and they lose almost all their water. By the end, they have something like 2 to 3% of the water they started with. Just to be clear, that would kill humans. Like, we're, like, what, 70% water or something? If we went down to 3%, we'd be goners. would be goner's way before then. So as they lose that water, they start producing something

called trehalos, which is a sugar, and it ends up forming kind of like a glass like structure that holds everything together and gives it like structural integrity. And this has long been the explanation for why tardigrades are able to survive such incredible conditions, including the explanation you gave five years ago on Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe when I listened to that episode. Oh, all right. Doing some research. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I needed something to listen to while I was walking around the other day. But so here's the thing, though, about trehalos, lots of tardigrate species. Some of them make trehalos when they go into this ton state.

Some of them make quantities so small that we're not actually sure that it can do the function of making this glass structure that protects the organism. And some of them don't appear to even have the equipment at all to make trehalos. which suggests maybe it's part of the picture for some species, but that's not like an across-the-board answer for how tardigrades are able to do this. So it's complicated. And they make a bunch of other proteins. So cryptobiosis is a term.

It means hidden life. And so it's another way for describing this ton state. And I found a line in a 2017 paper that said, mechanisms that protect tardigrade cells during cryptobiosis are still poorly understood or completely unknown. Oh, that sounds like a fair description of all biology. and physics and physics and you guys only have like six questions you need to answer fair fair get to work on that guys and that's my favorite thing about the universe that it's

poorly understood or completely unknown because otherwise it would be boring right i feel the same way about biology dude all right so some of these guys have these weird glass-like proteins It's called trehaloses, which maybe provide some internal scaffolding that, like, support the cell when it's all dried out. But some of them don't even have it, but they can still do this ton state weird survive for everything. Yeah, right. And so we don't really know what's happening there. We felt like we had a handle on it. And then we were like, oh, wait, some of these don't make that at all.

So I don't know. Back to the drawing board. Do you think that means that other tardigrades have different strategies or that this glass-like structure has no connection to their ability to survive? I bet it's both. So it could depend a lot on the ecology of the animal. So some animals that are in these environments with no water for longer might need sort of more extreme solutions to this problem. And so it could be something about like what kind of environment you tend to be in,

whereas if like, I don't know, maybe you're at the edge of a lake and, you know, every once in a while you find yourself dry for five minutes, you can just kind of like get through that. And so it might depend on your ecology, how frequently you encounter these weird situations. or it could be different solutions entirely. I don't think we know yet. All right. And then I have a basic biology question, which is like, in biology, how do you answer the

question, this is how they're doing it, or that's how they're doing it? Do you have to develop an alternative where you're like knocked out that capability and show that like if they don't have this protein, then they can no longer do this thing? And that's how we know? Because biology is such a huge, complicated Rube Goldberg machine. How can you point to any one bit and say, this is the essential bit? Yeah. So it's super complicated.

So sometimes you can say, like, you know, if trehalose is produced by a gene or something, you could go in and turn that gene off and then put the tardigrade through a drying cycle and see how it does and measure like, okay, definitely it didn't make Trehalose anymore and it died. But even then, maybe Trehalos is just a precursor to something else, which is actually doing the frucial function, right? I mean, there's just such a complicated series of events. It seems to me hard to ever point to one and say, this is the explanation. Do you think it's just that we always want a simple explanation and there really aren't any

or that sometimes there really are simple explanations and we can find them? There are probably rarely simple explanations, but I think that's pretty rare. Like when we did the human genome project, I think we expected we would like immediately understand the cause of cancer and a bunch of other diseases because now we have the whole genome and it's going to be super easy. But no, it depends on like how the genome is expressed. Lots of complicated extra bits. And, you know, like for the Trehalos example, if you knocked out Trehalos and the tardigrades died, maybe it's because Trehalos does something else earlier, like even when it's not in desiccation mode and you've killed it in some way that has nothing to do with desiccation.

So ideally, you try to address the question from a bunch of different angles and see what the picture you put together tells you. But usually the answer is like it involves 5,000 different genes that are all upregulated and different. And, you know, some of them are cell signaling genes. it's almost never like the answer is x but you know you guys have complicated answers too sometimes yeah we do absolutely and sometimes you look at a big complicated system and there is no simple story that you can tell or model that you can use to understand it but sometimes you can right like 10 to 29 little molecules can all fly through the air together following f equals m a it's a very simple story about a lot of complicated things that are all happening in concert and somehow simplicity emerges so

I was sort of wondering how often that happens in biology, that you can pull one strand of a story and say, this is the role, this is playing, or if it's always just a huge chorus. Yeah, no, it never happens that it's one string. I like to joke that in ecology, like, you know, the only quote unquote theory that we have is, it depends. See, that's my problem with biology, exactly. But, you know, if you don't try to figure out all the things it depends on, then you never cure cancer or, you know, you never save the endangered animals or whatever. So, you know,

you got to dig in anyway. No, exactly. Biology has no clear answers, but the questions are super duper important and interesting. And so they're worth going after anyway. I appreciate the effort you're making to understand my perspective. I'm trying so hard. You're doing a great job. You're doing a great job. All right. So I forgot to answer a question that you had earlier, which was like, what is happening to metabolism and stuff when they're in this tonstein? And the answer is, It depends, right? This might be pretty straight forward. All right, tell me.

They reduce their metabolism. They reduce their oxygen use, and it's almost like they're frozen in time. So they're not doing a lot of biological stuff when they're in this desicated state. But to me, there's a difference between actually frozen, like there's no motion and very slow. Like, are they alive? Is there some consumption of energy? Are they going to run out of energy at some point? or is it really just paused?

I think it's got to be the case that there's still some consumption of energy. So one, otherwise you'd expect that they could live forever. And so I think at some point they kind of run out of their stores. But of course, during that time, they're also like accumulating radiation damage

and other sorts of problems of just being alive. They're amping it down, but I don't think it's completely zero. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. And so because they're resistant to things like desiccation,

actually I wish I knew the history of the first time somebody was like, let's throw these guys in liquid nitrogen. It doesn't seem super nice, but they've got this sort of reputation for being super environmentally resistant. We've exposed them to pressures of seven and a half gigapascals, which is equivalent to being 180 kilometers below the surface of the Earth. And this is an environment that I just can't imagine you would expect that selection would be preparing these organisms for it because it just doesn't come up. But they mostly did okay. At six hours they were alive.

And so here's the thing. You'll hear like a list of like, they can survive. 7.5 gigapascals of pressure, blah, blah, blah. They can survive 7.5 gigapascals of pressure for six hours. That's pretty good, though. Six hours is a long time. Like, we're talking essentially like a hydraulic press. You know, like this is serious stuff.

No, that's a good point. Like so every once in a while, though, you'll see like a YouTube headline that's like, they're immortal. This is incredible. You're right. It's incredible they can survive this. But they can't survive it for long. If they're exposed to it for 24 hours, they've kicked the bucket.

All right. And I can understand why evolution wouldn't need them to, like, like be able to survive 100 kilometers underground for a thousand years. But it's not that hard to imagine why it would be useful to survive high pressure briefly, right? You can imagine some high pressure situation, comet impact, a dinosaur steps on you. I don't know, right? These things do happen. I suppose evolution can select for them, no.

You're looking skeptical over there. If you are a tardigrade living in the Marianas Trench, and I don't know if we have tardigrades in the Marianas Trench, then you would have experienced. selection for being able to handle extreme pressures, but I don't know if, like, a once in many millions of years comet would still be exerting selection pressure now for 7.5 gigapascals of pressure. Well, if we had, like, lots of pianos dropping out of buildings on people's heads, the way I always thought we were going to have when I was a kid, I thought that was like a feature of adult life, you know, quicksand, pianos and anvil dropping on people.

If that was happening more often, then you would expect evolution to somehow select humans to be able to survive, you know, anvils and pianos and stuff like that. So, you know, there must be some biological equivalent to anvils and pianos. First of all, I think Looney Tunes gave you a distorted view of adulthood. Fair, fair. I feel like the strategy could just be like you have eye spots that detect a shadow overhead. And when that happens, your brain is just like, piano, move. And you get out of the way. That seems like an easier path for selection to take than being able to withstand a piano dropping on your head. Also, it probably takes a while to get into this ton state. So it's not like,

Tardigrade is swimming along, sees a comic coming down, and then, like, switches into a ton state like a superhero. This is like already happens to be in this state and then survives the impact, right? Yep. Yes, exactly. Okay. They can get into it like, I think a couple hours pretty quick, but not like immediately, not like snapping your fingers. It takes some work. A couple hours isn't great for our superhero movie plot.

Yeah, that's true. But, you know, if Michael Bay contacts us, we can like change some biology stuff. Like, as we've talked about in the past, what's important is you're consistent. That's right. So, you know, we will consistently change their biology. Another incredible stressor they've been able to survive is a bunch of different kinds of radiation at levels that certainly would have killed people. Amazing. And we think that we know partly how they do this one.

So tardigrades produce a class of proteins called intrinsically disordered proteins. And you're like, why are you making me hear that multisyllabic phrase? That is in fact exactly what was going through my mind. Yes, I know. I've gotten to know you pretty well. But so the fact that they're disordered and like kind of all over the place is important. And so if you think of this like blobby thing, this blobby protein is attracted to DNA. So your genetic material that codes for everything else. And it binds to the DNA like electrostatically.

And because it's sort of like this blobby all over thing and, you know, I wish the listeners could see the beautiful things I'm doing with my arms right now. You're basically Italian right now. I was just going to say that. Yeah, you beat me to it. And so this blobby thing is able to just kind of like fall over the DNA like a coat. And then it appears to provide like a physical barrier to the radiation and protect the DNA from breaking. And in fact, they were able to get bacteria by like moving some genes around to produce these proteins. And then they mix them in to human cells.

And these proteins bound to human DNA. And when you blasted the human DNA with radiation, they were protected. protected by these disordered, blobby kinds of proteins that were like coats for the DNA, radiation shielding for the DNA. Oh my God. This is our superhero origin story. Bitten by a radioactive tardigrade, Kelly gained that critter's ability to withstand radiation. It's going to be amazing.

Coming in fall 2025. Tarticle. So let's remind our listeners exactly what radiation is and how it damages the cell, because we're talking about x-rays and ultraviolet light and gamma radiation. Those all sound like very different things, but they're all just photons. We're talking about very high energy photons. Photons like the ones emitted by your lamp or your screen or by the sun, just higher energy. So they, like, penetrate deeper.

And the problem, of course, is that when these things penetrate into your cells, they can, like, blast open, delicate stuff like your DNA. And that's how you get cancer, right? Or also, sometimes that's how your kids end up being, like, amazing cross-country. runners, even though you have no athletic skills yourself, hypothetically speaking, right? Mutations are sometimes good and sometimes bad. You never know. But it's like going into computer code and just like randomly changing a few things and hoping that it gets better. Sometimes it gets worse. And so that's what we're protecting against, right? That's right. And the study that I was

reading, it was looking at breaks in the DNA. So DNA is like a double-stranded helix. It's almost like you took a ladder and then sort of twisted it so that it's like a spiral staircase. And they're looking at do you get one break in the ladder or two breaks in the latter? So does one of the long poles break or both of them? And so they were able to find that you get fewer breaks overall when you have this like radiation coat protecting it. So why don't we all have this radiation coat? Is it like good to be susceptible to radiation because then you get these mutations

or is this radiation coat like expensive in some other way that's usually not worth it? I think it'll probably surprise some people to learn that usually when you get blasted with radiation you get like cancer, but not superpowers. You probably generally want to avoid it. But to be clear, we don't actually know the answer to this because we don't understand this system very well. But one hypothesis that I read about was that, you know, probably we don't all have

these because if you've got something that's like a coat over your DNA, you know, like the way your DNA replicates is like stuff comes in and opens up the double strand and like there's machinery that starts replicating stuff. And if you've got like a big coat covering it, you can't do that stuff. It like gets in the way. And so it might be. be nice to protect you during a period where you're not doing a lot of replicating your DNA because you're just kind of hanging out waiting for the awful situation you find yourself into

past. So it's sort of like you're locking down your DNA but then you can't really use it. It's like when you freeze your credit and then you can't like open a new bank account because you're protected yourself against yourself. That's right. You shouldn't have sent your social security number to that person over email Kelly from the past. Anyway, so they're surprisingly radiation resistant. let's talk about what happens when you dip them in liquid nitrogen or expose them to the vacuum of space next. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like,

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Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps and their lives and career. years. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweeten, Monica Penn, Elaine Welteroff. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots. Now on the IHeart Radio

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your Podcasts. Hello, Puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy Truthers, who say that you are given all the answers, believe in... I guess they would be Kenspiracy theorists.

That's right. Are there Jeopardy Truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like. They gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like. They gave you the answers, and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings

on our special game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix. Listen on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it.

It can be as simple as talking to someone, or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have reached. resources available for you at love your mind today.org. All right, we're back. We've talked about how tardigrades are amazingly resistant to high pressures, amazingly resistant to radiation, although not completely resistant. You can kill them eventually, but they're impressively resistant.

Also, weirdly, we've been very interested in exposing them to temperature extremes. And so, Daniel, I have a question for you. There's this commonly made claim that you can expose tardigrades to very close to absolute zero, and they survived. Cool. This was from a paper in the 1950s in a language I don't speak, and I couldn't find the original. How long have we been able to create temperatures close to absolute zero? Has it been since the 1950s? So the history is that colder earlier than you might expect?

Like Faraday, Michael Faraday, who like did so much amazing work on electromagnetism, he got stuff down to like negative 130C, so that's 140 degrees above absolute zero. That was in 1845. And then a guy named Dewar, after which the doers are named, liquefied hydrogen down to 21 Kelvin in 1898, right? So this is already just 20 degrees above absolute zero in the 1800s. And then it was just 10 years later, we got down to 40. degrees Kelvin, won the Nobel Prize in 1913 for that one. Oh, wow.

And the current record, the closest we've ever gotten is 100 pico-kelvins. That's 0.000-000-0-0-0-0-0-0-1 Kelvin. And there's an instrument on the International Space Station that's going to try to get to one pico Kelvin. It's called the Cold Adam Lab. All right. Okay. So definitely by the 1950s, you could be testing how tardigrades survive to close to absolute

zero. And Daniel, what is absolute zero? I believe that's the temperature at which molecular stuff just stops and everything's frozen in place. Is that right? Absolute zero is a theoretical limit we've never achieved and don't know if it's actually possible. And essentially the argument is when things get colder, velocities internally slow down. It's a model of temperature that says things are hot because the stuff inside it is moving fast or wiggling a lot. And so what happens when things get colder? They move slower. They wiggle less. Okay, make them colder. All right, they wiggle less? Is there a point at which all wiggling stops? And so sort of the way like when you learn calculus in high school, you could ever actually approach infinity. You like approach it

and see what the tendencies are. In that same way, we estimate that absolute zero might be the place where everything stops. But that's extrapolating and it's all kind of classical physics. And quantum mechanics says you can never actually get there because there's a minimum energy to all the fields in the universe. So everything has to be buzzing. Because if anything was ever completely motionless, it would have no uncertainty. And there's a minimum uncertainty to the fabric of the universe. So we don't know if anything can ever get to absolute zero, if it's a real thing or not. But we've gotten pretty close. Okay. And tardigrades were able to handle it for at least a little while, even though I couldn't find the original paper. Wow. So how cold did they get these

tarned grades? So the paper that I was able to find, both because it was online and in my native language, They dipped them in liquid nitrogen, so it's negative 196 degrees Celsius. Pretty cold. Super cold. And 90% of them survived. Wow. Yeah. It was for 15 minutes.

I don't think many Californians would survive at that temperature for that long. You know, even though Virginians are a hardier bunch than you all Californians, I don't think we could have survived that either. That's because you have to wrap your heart in so many layers of protection that it's not available during normal use. See? That's why Californians are friendlier. that doesn't make sense no no no no no that's not how this works all right but one point that I want to make here

is that some of the tardigrades that were not in the ton state also survived and that was also true during the radiation experiments too oh wow and that makes us wonder like those disordered proteins that we were talking about maybe they help but maybe that's not the whole picture because

you wouldn't expect the like active untunned individuals to be surviving if those proteins were the whole picture because they're not making a bunch of those when they're not in the ton state. So everything's complicated. Okay. But now let's get to the juicy stuff. Space. Some scientists have wanted to figure out if tardigrates can survive the super extreme environment of space. So first we sent them up into spacecraft and expose them to microgravity and some space radiation, but they were still like in this temperature controlled container thing, they did pretty well in response to microgravity. Like, whereas humans, our bones and our muscles fall apart in the ton state, they're just

kind of chilling. And let's remind ourselves, what is the extreme environment space? What's difficult about space? So there's high radiation because we don't have the magnetic field of Earth to bend those particles away and we don't have the atmosphere to shield us. Then there's microgravity, but that's not so extreme. But then there could also be low temperatures if you're out in space, low pressure, and then, of course, no oxygen.

Yes. And so this first experiment was replicating the microgravity problem, but they weren't exposed to the vacuum of space. They weren't experiencing full radiation. And they were in low Earth orbit, so they were still protected by the magnetosphere. And they weren't experiencing the kind of temperature extremes you usually experience in space. So another experiment or a set of experiments amped things up. They put them in a container that had holes in it. And then they had a variety of UV filters on top of the different containers. So some of the tardig grades were exposed to the vacuum of space well having their temperature controlled but not being exposed to UV radiation and then others experienced various kinds of UV radiation well being exposed to the vacuum of space while still having their temperatures controlled in a nice way does that all make sense? Vacuum of space they rocked at which to be clear would kill people right the three Soviet cosmonauts who were exposed to the vacuum of space did not survive the experience And that's pretty much what you should expect for the rest of us, too.

And the thing that first kills you there is what? Is it the low pressure that like your eyeballs are boiling and your blood is boiling because you're used to being squeezed in by all the air? I think what killed them in particular is that the nitrogen boiled out of their blood and it happened in their brains and they had a bunch of brain hemorrhaging. That does not sound good. No. And so tardigrades don't have the same circulatory system, the internal goo that keeps these little guys going.

It's not the same system as ours. So you might not have to worry about nitrogen bubbles. but also they've gotten like a bunch of the water out already. And so you're probably not going to have like stuff that could bubble out. So they did great in the vacuum of space. But as soon as you opened those filters so that UV radiation could get them to, they started dying in droves. Like I think maybe four of the like 60 survived that exposure.

And that wasn't like a whole lifetime. I think it was like one of the things that frustrates me about papers that are published in really high impact journals is that they give you a short page limit. And so important details get left out. And I couldn't figure out how long they were exposed. But it couldn't have been more than 10 days because that's how long the entire mission lasted. We heard earlier that they can survive UV radiation on its own. And we heard just now that they can survive the vacuum of space.

But you're saying if you combine them, then that snuffs them out. So they can't survive the combination. So here's the problem. All these studies that we've been talking about, all looking at different species of tardigrades. So because a tardigrade, could survive some high radiation doesn't mean that the next species that you expose it to could survive. And also, not all of these studies have the exact same experimental design. So it could be that a bunch of the tardigrades that were exposed to radiation,

we're exposed to it for like five minutes. But when you're exposed to it for 10 days, then you start dying. And so, you know, when you hear someone like rattling off a list of all the extreme stuff that tardigrades can do, some species can do some of those things for some lengths of time. but it's not like all of them can do all of those amazing things indefinitely. So that's like saying, oh, polar bears can swim in cold water and grizzly bears can run really fast and doesn't mean that they can do both. Yes, exactly.

Or that they could do both like forever. Like eventually the polar bear is going to need to find land and stop swimming. So the space people don't invite me to their parties, the tardigrade people aren't going to invite me to their parties. Anyway, it's all right. I'm a downer. Physicists will always invite you to their parties, Kelly, because we don't have any. Oh, oh.

That's probably not true. maybe. So here is the question everybody's been dying to know the answer to. In 2019, the Beresheet lunar lander crashed on the moon. It contained tardigrades, although the government officials who approved that launch did not know that because the company that had bought space on the lander did not disclose that they were sending biological specimens, which they are supposed to do. And why were they sending biological specimens? Was this some can tartagrate survive experiment or were they hoping to populate the moon? I hope that it was a Ken Tardagrade survive experiment and also like that probably would have

been a pretty cool PR move for their mission to be able to be like, oh, Tardagrade's in space. They really can survive everything. But for whatever reason, they decided to not disclose that it was happening. And I was not able to figure out what species they sent. I spent a long time asking. I asked blue sky. Nobody knew.

And if you know, let me know. But so part of figuring out whether or not they can survive involves knowing the tolerances for that species in particular. Right. But I don't know what species it is. So the answer is it depends. Well, we were talking about biology. So, of course, the answer is it depends. Biology doesn't disappoint.

But I think probably not. And here's why. All right. So first, somebody decided to stick tardigrades in bullets and then shoot them at sandbags to try to figure out if they could survive the impact and the subsequent shot. shock wave that would have been experienced when the lander crashed into the moon. This was an experiment done in response to the crash, like just to answer this question, not an independently motivated experiment? That's exactly right.

Wow. It doesn't say that in the paper, but I found a interview with the authors. It sounds like that's true. And so there's a sentence in the paper that says, accordingly, we have fired tardigrades at high speed in a gun onto sand targets, subjecting them to impact shocks and evaluating their survival. Actually, this paper was all about if something hit the earth and disqualingly. lodged Earth that had tardigrades, could the tardigrades survive space and survive so that they

could land on like the moon or Mars or populated? So it was a study about pan-spermia and the possibility of tardigrades becoming, you know, interplanetary before the rest of us. I found an interview where the author said probably they wouldn't have survived because of the shockwave. So it seems unlikely that they survived, but let's go ahead and assume that maybe they got lucky and they survived the initial shockwaves. Because we don't know the speed of the descent of the lander, right? It depends on when it failed. If it fails just before it hits the surface,

it's going to be a pretty gentle crash. If it fails really far away, then it's going to plummet towards the surface. But the moon's gravity is still not very strong, so it's not going to be going that fast, right? But still, it depends. This paper that I read had a bunch of different impact speeds and shockwaves that they looked at,

and I looked on the internet to figure out what we think the impact speed was of the bear sheet lander. And based on their table, I think it's possible it survived. But then in an interview with the authors, they said, no, no, no, the shockwave, it wouldn't have survived. But then I found another paper that was like, no, it might have survived based on the info in the table. So, you know, it depends. Were any of these papers written by anonymous authors from the moon? Oh, I don't know.

Yeah, the tardigrades achieve sentience. I think we have to worry about them sending like moon rocks down at us as punishment for all the things that we've done to them in the lab. All right. So you think it's unlikely they survive? the impact on the moon. Once they're on the moon, say they happen to survive or if you do, then what did they have to put up with? So now they've got to worry about radiation. So the moon doesn't have a strong planet-wide magnetosphere like Earth does or a thick atmosphere. So they'd be exposed to all of the space radiation. And as we saw in those earlier studies, space radiation,

solar radiation is bad for them. So that would kill them if they were exposed to it. But let's say, well, what if maybe when they crashed the little container that was holding them ended up burying itself under the regolith. And so now the regalith is protecting them from radiation. Creative. Let's imagine that. Okay, so now you've got to deal with temperature. We know they can handle really cold temperatures. The moon at night has about a two-week period where it's negative 133 Celsius, which is negative 108 Fahrenheit. That's at the equator. We know that they survived negative 196 Celsius, which is more than that, but for 15 minutes. So we don't know if they could survive the long

polar nights, which are the equivalent of two weeks on Earth. But I think the bigger problem is, one, temperature swings back and forth between extreme heat and extreme cold. But two, the fact that the moon does get really hot. So without that atmosphere, things just heat up a lot. So without an atmosphere, things get really hot and really cold. There's nothing to sort of dampen the temperature swings. And as we saw previously, tardigrades don't do great at really high temperatures. They do pretty well with cold temperatures, but with hot temperatures, they can't survive for super long. But let's imagine, hey, we said that they're underneath the regolith. They're protected from radiation. Underneath the regalith, you're also to some extent protected from temperature

extremes. So maybe they're still alive there. But now you've got a problem with water. So in order to come out of their tonne state, they need to be hydrated. And the lunar regalith is as wet as cement. So not super wet. So say it got hit by a comet that was bringing water. First of all, I that impact and the like heating up that happens when the comet hits the surface could kill the tardigrades but also if you get water you're only going to get it temporarily and then it's going to like be lost the vacuum of space so i don't see them getting out of their ton state and then the final big problem is food if they did get out of their ton state they don't have anything to eat like i don't know what species this is if this is the carnivorous ones and there was enough of

a size variability maybe the big ones could eat the little ones but eventually you're going to run out of food. So I don't see the tardigrades permanently settling the moon. So it's unlikely that the tardigrades are like water bearing around being cute and bouncing around the surface of the moon living happily. But it's possible that some of them are in the ton state, survive the impact, are buried in the regolith, and don't need water or food because they're just basically paused for a long time, but maybe not forever. I feel like that is a very low probability scenario, but it depends. I don't know that I can rule it out entirely.

Maybe they're still in their ton state. We'll find them. I mean, we know that they can't be in that state for forever, and it's already been like five years. So I'm not super hopeful. Sorry. But if a huge impactor slams into the earth and like completely demolishes it,

so there's no record of life left on Earth, there could still be on the moon, some basically like frozen proof that there was once life on Earth so that aliens visiting in the deep future could be like, look, there was something here once. Maybe, or those incredible temperature swings have killed them and the bacteria that live in their guts have consumed them and they've become liquid much because biology's gross also.

All right, well, I guess we're just going to have to wait millions of years for a huge impact and alien arrival to find out the answer to that one. Aw, and people say I'm the negative one. All right, well, thank you, Tim, for your really fun question. I think Kelly had a lot of fun digging into the research on Tartagrides. I did. It distracted me while I was sick and couldn't get out of bed, so thank you for this wonderful question. I had a blast. If you have a question about something in the universe that fascinates you, physics, biology, even gasp chemistry. Write to us, we'd love to dig into it. We love hearing from all of you at questions at danielandkelly.org.

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Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on She Pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweetie. Monica Patton. Elaine Welteroth. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots, now on the IHeart Radio app,

Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer-free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Deadwell Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose.

that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure, and of course the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network.

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