Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What are Tardigrades?

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

How did tardigrades end up on the moon? Today we're joined by special guest Prof. Brian Keating Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, how long do you think life on Earth will last? You mean human life or just life in general on Earth? Now, let's assume the humanity somehow manages to off itself. What do you think is going to survive? I'm not sure we have to assume that. It's looking pretty probable these days. Probably some of the stuff in the back of my fridge that looks pretty hardy.

It's been there for thousands and millions of years. Well, my wife would like that answer since she's a microbiologist. They are a tough bunch, microbes. But let's think bigger. What about multicellular life? Do you think anything like that could survive? Like an actual animal organism? Yeah.

Don't they say cockroaches can survive in nuclear explosion? But I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure that's true either. I think it's just good PR by the cockroach lobby. But there is something on Earth that is even tougher than the cockroach. I hear it's cuter, too. That's not a very high bar to pass. Hi, I'm a cartoonist, and the creator of Ph.D. Comics.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we go all around the universe and find interesting, weird, crazy little creepy. creepy, crawly stuff to talk to you about and explain it to you in a way that hopefully you find entertaining. Cute little creatures and also horrifyingly scary looking creatures. Sometimes they're even the same organism. That's true.

You know, there are lots of things which look scary when they're big and that are just cute and cuddly when they're small. Like, if you walk next to a mountain lion, you'd be freaked out. But everybody's house cat is basically a miniaturized mountain lion. It's all about the scale. It's all about the scale. The opposite is true also. So take anything you find cute, a dragonfly, and make it the size of a school bus, and all of a sudden it's terrifying. It's terrifying, yeah.

So some things are cute when they're tiny and terrifying when they're huge. Yeah. It's kind of like children, too, you know. They grew up into teenagers, terrifying. Cute as toddlers, terrifying as teens. Exactly. And especially terrifying if your toddler grows up to be the size of a school bus. So today we're going to talk about something that's been on the news lately, right, Daniel?

It's been, apparently, it's now been colonizing the moon lately. That's right. This is a fascinating little creature. It's a bit of a departure for us because it's not quite physics, but it appeared in the news recently. And also, we had a listener write in and say, this is her favorite thing in the whole world. And could we please talk about it on the podcast? Her favorite thing in the world is this creature that we're going to talk about. Yes, exactly.

Is this tiny little creature? That it may now be colonizing the moon. Exactly. So today on the program, we'll be talking about. Tardigrade. What is the tardigrate? And why are they so interesting and how did they end up on the moon?

That's the question we'll be talking about today. Yeah, turns out they're a crazy little creature that can do things. No other creature we know of can do. So it's quite amazing. Yeah, and it's also a little bit cute slash terrifying at the same time. So if you are not driving right now

and have a moment, you're welcome to pause our podcast right now and just go on the internet and search for images of tardy grades. And what you will find will both make you go awl and, oh. If you imagine one the size of a school bus. So yeah, tardigrades are these creatures

and they look wild, right? Like if you can look at a picture of them, they look like monsters from a science fiction movie. They do look like crazy little creatures. And, you know, usually at this point in the podcast We go out and we ask people on the street what they know about the subject. But today, we're doing something a little bit different. Today, instead of starting with asking people on the street what they think a tardigrade is,

we're going to try a news segment today called Ask the Wrong Expert, which we bring somebody on who's a world-class expert on one topic and ask them about something completely different. That's right. And I feel like this is only fair. Since I'm always springing questions on random people at UC Irvine, they're not experts in what I'm asking them about and we hear them speculate and sometimes

struggle and guess. So I thought it might be fun to also hear what happens when you ask an expert, a scientist, about something they don't know anything about. And so to the end of the program, we have our good friend Brian Keating. Welcome, Brian. Hi, guys. Great to be with you again virtually through the ether. All right, so Brian

is a professor of astrophysics at UC San Diego's Department of Physics. He has over 100 scientific publication and holds two U.S. patents. Tell us, Brian, what are you, what are you in My specialty is experimental cosmology. So I build new universes. No, I don't do that.

I build telescopes that can see invisible radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. And my number one project now is going to be one of the world's highest altitude observatories on Earth called the Simons Observatory. I'm the director of it. And it's a collaboration of about 260 scientists on all seven continents on planet Earth.

Brian, you're also the author of a book called Losing the Noble Prize. That book was published in 2018, and the paperback edition, the new and improved paperback edition, is about to come out any day now. It's a really fun book for those of you who haven't checked it out. It chronicles Brian's Adventures and Misadventures in physics, which I think is really fascinating. I think it's really brave of you to talk all about how your experiment thought they saw something and then turns out they didn't. This is two-part memoir, really. Part of it's a story about what it's like to actually do experimental science. A lot of our colleagues, Daniel, you excluded, but a lot of our colleagues, brainiac scientists, as they are, are theoreticians, which means that they deal with the esoterica between their ears and perhaps to be discovered centuries long after they're gone. And these include wonderful writers, Stephen Hawking, Brian Green, Lisa Randall, et cetera, et cetera.

And they're wonderful, as I say. and they inspire us. But an experimentalist in some sense has a unique vantage point on the process of how science is done. So I want to chronicle what it's like to do experimental science at the world's extremes

and how it took me from a small telescope as a 12-year-old kid all the way to the bottom of the earth at the South Pole, Antarctica, where I've been several times and done research along with the team that thought we had glimpsed

the afterglow of what's called inflation. I know you guys have done some podcast episodes on that. I won't get into too much detail, but suffice it to say inflation is the epoch theorized by theorists, our friends, Alan Gooth and others, to have produced the bang in the Big Bang, what caused the expansion of the universe to accelerate incredibly rapidly at extremely early times. And when we made this announcement on St. Patrick's Day, the world was really in awe that we had discovered, as they say, the aftershocks of the Big Bang itself, so to speak. This set the world.

attention and media on fire with millions and millions of people around the world excited about these discoveries. And as I recount in the book, the extraordinary experience that it was like to be, once be the leader of this team and then go to being kind of on the outskirts of it, just as we were being positioned to potentially be the recipients of the Nobel Prize for the magnitude of this discovery. So it's a memoir of that process. And then along the way, immediately after the de numont, as they say, of that episode, I was asked by the sweet British Royal Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize that I potentially could have been eligible for. So it'd be kind of like, you know, somebody coming up to you and saying,

you know, guys, you guys have a great podcast, but can he introduce me to Neil deGrasse Tyson because I'd really rather be on that show. So it's kind of humiliating in a sense, and because I'd aspire to win a Nobel Prize for a long time. And it really impelled me to look at the Nobel Prize and what it did to me personally and perhaps other scientists around the world, too. So it was sort of cathartic in a way, and many scientists have written to say that they agree with the kind of conjectures and proposals that I put forth to reform what's arguably not just science's highest honor, but humanity's highest honor. There's really, you know, nowhere to go from there but down in terms of accolades that a human being can receive. So it's a, it's a memoir coupled

with a little polemic, you know, dash, side order of polemicism on the side. And have you received any feedback from the Nobel Prize Committee themselves? Are they open to your reform proposals? Oh, yes. They embrace it wildly. They want to adopt them. Completely change it to the Keating Prize. They want to give you Nobel Prize in literature just for the book. Well, that's what somebody said.

In Nobel Prizes. Sabine Hassenfelder, I'm sure you guys know. She wrote a kind of a critical review of my book, but in the end she said the writing is so good, you know, maybe he'll win. He'll lose the Nobel Prize in literature next. But, no, they have not been, they have not. Losing a

losing a second Nobel Prize. Exactly. All right, Brian, so you are an expert in astrophysics and the Big Bang and cosmology and experimental physics. But today we are going to be asking you about today's topic,

which is about tardy grades. Have you heard of tardy grades before? Yes, I used to receive a lot of negative ones in school for being late. Get it? Get it? That's quite good.

Yes, I know about tardigrades. I don't call them tardigrades. I call them water bears. all right and I understand there's not only plenty of them on earth but there's also a few in the heavens that's right they have established a base maybe you are an expert in tardigrades then well let's find out the point of this game ask the wrong expert is to see how scientists think when we take them out of their you know the little niche that they've developed an expertise in and ask them to think carefully about something else and so that's why brian we wanted to ask you

questions about something that wasn't your field so feel free to answer why wildly and share your thoughts. Okay. And you haven't had time to look this up in Google or anything, right? No, I promise. I'm not Googling aloud. I'm not looking on Wikipedia right now. I promise you.

First question is true or false. Tardigrades are sometimes called moss piglets. Moss piglets. I'll say true. All right. True or false. The name Tardagrade means slow moving. That sounds about right.

True. All right, true or false, Daniel named one of his children after tardigrades. No, but I know that you have some rats in the house. So maybe you named a rat after a tardigrade. You have water bears in your house? He has water rats in his house. I'm sure, actually, everybody does have water bears in their house. That's probably true, yeah.

All right, well, you are three for three on that one, Brian. I'm very impressed. Wow. Thank you. I'd like to thank the Academy, the Nobel Academy. Oh, you're not done yet. We've got more questions. Oh, okay.

All right. There's a Nobel Prize for podcast guessing. I'll take it. Well, podcast guessing. All right. Second question, Brian, is, which evolves first, tardigrades or dinosaurs?

Oh, that's a good one. You mean, which is older, not, I mean, presumably co-evolved at some point. Which came first? The water bear or the dinosaur? I'm going to say some form of dinosaur, some form of creature.

That would have predated them, maybe. So you're going with dinosaurs? I'll go with some form of, well, actually, you're making any of it. I'll go toardigrade. He's hedging. He's hedging. I'm hodgeying. I'm off-pigleting.

Well, I appreciate your change of direction there. You were correct in your final answer. They're not your preliminary one. Tardagrade, do outdate the dinosaurs. Wow. They don't look a day over 68 million years. All right. Next question.

Tardigrades can live almost anywhere, but where do they love? like to live. A. Volcanoes. B. Under vending machines. C. A two-bedroom condo in Hollywood. Or D. Anyplace damp. I'm going to go with the last one, D. I think lots of two-bedroom condos in Hollywood are probably pretty damp also. That's true, too. Yeah. Maybe, yeah, that's true. They can live wherever they want, probably. They can live in space. They don't need water. So I'm going to revise my answer. The C, then. No, your first answer was right. It's a damp place.

All right. All right, next question is, what's the highest temperature a tardigrate can tolerate? Is it, A, 100 degrees Fahrenheit, B, 300 degrees Fahrenheit, C, 1 million degrees Fahrenheit, or D, they have even survived LHC collisions at 5.5 million degrees. I'm going to go with B. You are a good guesser, Brian. That way you have a very, very deep knowledge. Our fast internet connection.

Just kidding, I don't. Are you feeding all these questions into Siri? Is she listening in and picking the answers? All right. Last question. Which of the two scenarios is more likely in your opinion? A, a robot revolution in which we all become slaves to artificial intelligence. Or B, tardigrades building a civilization on the moon and becoming our lunar overlords.

Well, we know that they're living there now. They got their courtesy of an Israeli spacecraft. I'll say A is more likely, because these little tardigrades are. you know, we're going to keep them at bay on the moon. All right. Well, it's good to know that you worry more about AI revolution than the coming of our lunar apocalypse. I want to see that movie where we become slaves

to the artificial intelligence robots. But then the tardigrades come down from the moon to save us. And it's all just this great giant battle between water bears and robots. Maybe even some dinosaurs you get thrown in. This is giving me an idea for a new book. The tardigrade hypothesis. That's a literature Nobel Prize right there.

That's right. Yeah, team up with Michael Bay. I'm sure that'll be a big hit. That's right. I'll share the opening credits with you guys. All right. Thank you very much for playing our silly game. And doing so well, we need to come up with some sort of prize.

How about 10 tardigrades? Are you going to record his answering machine, Daniel, or maybe? All right. Well, thanks very much for being a guest on the podcast. And folks, check out Brian's book. Tell us, again, Brian, what it's called. It's called Losing the Nobel Prize. And it is available in paperback.

as we speak, hopefully. All right, so check that out, and you can lose your own Nobel Prize. All right, so Brian did pretty well in our quiz. I was impressed with how well he was able to answer questions about something he does not have a PhD in. And so we'll get into what a tardigrade is. Where can it survive and where can you find them? But first, let's take a quick break.

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That's Lenovo. Lenovo. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for. extra credit. Well Dakota, it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each

other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person, to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive

finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping

their new Christmas toys. Then, at 633 Pee, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our front. focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about tardy grades. What are they? Why are they so funny looking?

Why are they so cute and scary at the same time? They are crazy little creatures. And so for those of you who don't have a Google image in front of you, let's try to sketch it out for you in your mind. Oh, man. Let's try to paint a nightmare. Yeah, exactly. And remember, they're tiny.

All right. So first of all, these things are tiny. They range from 0.3 to 1.2 millimeters. So they're absolutely microscopic. But they do look a little bit like bears. I mean, except that they have eight legs. Yeah, I think if anyone's not seen in these before, I would describe them as like little plush teddy bear animals

with like giant claws and horrifying mouths with teeth. That's kind of... Yes, it's the face. The face is horrifying, right? You got the legs, so they've got eight legs four on each side with little claws in them, and they're sort of poofy like a pillow, you say. But the mouth, the face, that's the part that's terrifying because there's no discernible eyes. It's just like this sucking thing in the front.

Relying with teeth all around. Yeah. Have you, are you a watcher of stranger things? I am. Yeah, I'm a huge fan. Yeah, I think that these things might have been the inspiration for the demigorg or whatever that thing is that comes out of the upside down because it also has this eyeless face that's featuring just a big mouth. Yeah, line with a bunch of teeth.

Yeah, exactly. So I think this thing would be really terrifying if it was the size of a school bus or, you know, even like a red wagon. It would be pretty scary. But the fact that it's microscopic means that, you know, it can't really do you any harm. But still, it's pretty scary. And even though I know that they're only like a millimeter or less than a millimeter in length, it's scary to think that those things are out there. It could be on me, inside of me, maybe. I don't know.

You tell me. There are almost certainly some on you. I mean, these things are found everywhere. They are in sand dunes. They're in soil. They're in leaf litter. They're in water. Especially like any sort of damp place at all.

You'll find them. And if you scoop up like, you know, a liter of sort of gunky water near the edge of a pond, you probably get about 25,000 of them in a liter. Like any old pond all over the world? From the tops of mountains to, you know, wet goopy places to basically everywhere. These things have adapted to live in almost every environment on Earth. And just to be clear, are they insects, are they bugs, are they like bacteria? what are they? What did they officially classify under? Well, they are not bacteria, right? They're multicellular. They are actually are an animal.

They're officially categorized as an micro animal, but they're in the kingdom of amelia. They're not an insect. They're not bacteria. They're not a microbe. But they are just a tiny, tiny, tiny little animal. And genetically, people think that they evolved to be tiny from something larger. Oh, no kidding. They started out bigger. Yeah. That's not scary at all. Exactly. It's an example of miniaturization. And, you know, I love what. when this happens in evolution, when things like change dramatically in scale, you know, like horses used to be much smaller and whales evolved from something much smaller. And these tardigrades evolve from something larger. Like, we don't know exactly how much larger that there are some

fossilized versions, but it's a bit of speculation. But imagine like, you know, there could have been like a time when there were big tardigrades roaming the earth. Yeah, like a hand-sized tardigrade or maybe even bigger. But yeah, these are one of the tiniest little animals on Earth. And they've been on the news lately because apparently they've made it all the way to the moon somehow. There is now life on the moon. There is now life on the moon. Yes, this Israeli lander. They sent up to the moon.

Had this project on it to sort of record human and Earth DNA. And they said, you know, if something goes wrong on the Earth, they might be good to have sort of like a backup copy of people and all sorts of other stuff somewhere else that's protected. So they were flying to the moon and they thought, oh, let's put some in a human DNA to bring up to the moon. moon. And while we're at it, we'll bring some tardigrades. What could go wrong?

What could go wrong. And then, of course, it crash landed, right? And a lot of it was vaporized. And people think that nothing survived except maybe the tardigrades because they are really tough little critters. They are really, really hard to kill. Yeah. So that's kind of what they're known for, right? It's their hardiness and their ability to survive even the craziest of environments. Yeah, they are really hard to kill. And people have found them in all sorts of places on earth like they found them in hot springs they find them in the Himalayas they found them on the bottom of the ocean they find them in layers of solid ice and they've done all sorts of crazy experiments on them just to sort of test how far they can push

the survival of a tardigrade wow so what are some of the most extreme conditions that we know that they can survive well one thing they've done is just like dose them with radiation because you know radiation is one thing that kills people and it kills people when you're in outer space or when you're on the surface of the earth and so what they've done. So just like, stick them in the microwave, see what happens, with some grapes, which is more exciting. Yeah, exactly. No, they just like blasted them with gamma rays, you know, and it turns out that tardigrades can survive radiation doses that would kill humans and even more. Like, they can survive radiation doses that are hundreds of times the radiation dose that would be

deadly to a human being. Wow. But my question is, how can they do that? How can they survive all of that radiation? Are they just made out of like tougher materials or the DNA is just more, I don't know, more like redundant? Or what's their secret? There are some organisms that are called extremophiles that are adapted to live in crazy environments like high radiation, et cetera. And some of those bacteria, for example, they have extra copies of their DNA. Just in case one of them gets blasted, they can recopy them, right? And so that's adapting for living in those environments. Tardagrades aren't like that. They're not adapted to live in these environments. They just sort of can survive because they're extra tough. And the way they do is they have this special protein inside their body

that protects them. And these proteins can like turn into glass and helps them survive when it gets really, really dry or when there's a lot of radiation or basically when anything happens. They have armor. Yeah, exactly. But it's bio armor. It's inside. It's not like a shell. It's something inside the body because the thing that happens when you get hit by radiation is that the stuff inside your body gets torn apart, right? It's the same problem that when you freeze, for example, why can you not freeze a human being and then thaw them out? The reason is that when water freezes, it gets bigger, right? Ice is bigger than liquid water. And so each of your cells, for example, is a little bag of water. And when it freezes, it turns into ice, which is bigger

than the cell membrane, it basically bursts the cell. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You mean, Captain America could not have survived being frozen in the Arctic? The Marvel Cinematic Universe, not a documentary. Sorry to break to you. That's right. That's right. But somehow

these little animals, they can survive being frozen and they can survive super high temperatures and pressures and radiation. And you're saying it's all because something in like the liquid of their cells or something surrounding their cells kind of gives them that protection?

Yeah, it's like the liquid that's inside their cells is different from the liquid that's inside our cells and it's hardier in that. It's not heartier like you make a better soup though. Maybe it would. I don't know what tardigrade soup tastes like, but it's hardyer like it's more robust. Well, chances are you are probably eating a couple of tardigrades when you drink your soup, right? I mean, statistically. Every soup is tartigrade soup.

Is that what you're saying? Every soup ever. Yeah, but it's the soup of the inside their cells. that's more robust. So, for example, when they freeze, these proteins inside their cells turn into a kind of glass that protects the cell, right, from the inside. Like it crystallizes into something unbreakable. Yeah, it's described as turning into glass.

I know the glass is not a crystal. So I'm not sure if crystallizing is exactly correct. But essentially, yeah, instead of turning into an ice cube, which is bigger than the drop of water it originated from, it turns into this little bit of glass. and they call this, it has this awesome name, they call it Cryptobiosis, right? Oh, man. And so to survive these environments,

the tardigrades, you know, these proteins turn into glass, and then they can do crazy stuff. Like, they can survive outer space. You can just, like, throw tardigrades into space, collect them again and add water, and they wake up. Put them in the microwave. What we haven't done is put them in the LHC. That was a funny suggestion,

but it's not something I'm aware that we've actually done. It's like, well, put it in the next proposal, Daniel. You could make a cryptobiotic breakthrough. I'm going to build a tardigrade collider. I want to see what happens when you accelerate tardigrades to the speed of light and collide them against each other. So it's kind of almost the opposite. When they freeze, instead of forming crystals that might break the cells,

you're saying that it has some sort of something inside of their bodies that somehow hold it together so that you maybe don't get those crystals. That's right. You don't get sort of ice crystals. exactly. You get this other stuff which doesn't expand. Because remember, ice is sort of special, right? Ice is one of the few things that when you freeze it, it gets bigger. It's a special property of water. Most things in the universe, when you freeze and they get smaller. And so this has some other stuff inside its cell so that when it freezes, it doesn't get bigger and so it avoids

popping, even though we are mostly water. And then how do they survive the high temperatures then? Is it just like a thick skin or like everything just held together better or what? They're just held together better. And so they can survive these high temperatures. They can survive these super low temperatures. They can even be dried out. And you can, you can suck all the water out of these tardigrades. And it doesn't, again, it doesn't like rearrange what's inside them in a way that breaks them. It like naturally zips it up. And so they've seen these tartagrades. They can get down to like 1% of the normal moisture they have. You know, it's like beef jerk. It's like tardigrade jerky. and then you add water back

and it just like flips up and goes about his business happily chumping away. Do you think it'd remember? Like, do you think it's still thinking when it's dehydrated? I think we need to have one on the podcast so we can ask it these kind of questions.

Yeah. What is it like to be a tour of doing? It's great for them to evolve the moon. And then we'll ask him a question. So they can survive in, you're saying volcanoes even, like hot springs kind of up in the mountains, the bottom of the sea.

Yeah, they can survive to 420 degrees Kelvin. What? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Down to 1 degree Kelvin, all the way up to 420 degrees Kelvin. It's really hard to kill these things. What is 420 degrees Kelvin relative to like water boiling or a fire? 420 degrees Kelvin is about 150 degrees Celsius, which is higher than the boiling point of water.

So you can make tardigrade soup, and the tardigrade's will still be happily swimming around inside. Swimming around. Drinking it with their horrifying mouth full of teeth. That's right. So when you eat tardigrade soup, are you eating the tardigrades or are they eating you? All right. And so they somehow ended up in space because the Israelis put him there as an experiment to see if they would survive the moon trip or in the moon. So they were kind of thinking about landing these things on the moon or not. They intended to land these things on the moon. That was the idea, right? But they had them sort of contained in a special little device. And they were, of course, in their cryptobiotic state. But when it crashed landed, you know, all that whole thing got ruptured.

and they got tossed out and they're tumbling along on the surface of the moon now. And so, you know, if the right drop of water hits them, then they could wake up. And you might think, well, there's no chance you're going to get water on the moon, right? But that's not that unlikely because the surface of the moon is pelted constantly by a rubble from outer space. And some of that is ice, right? A huge bracket into the stuff that's out there in the solar system is ice. So you have this momentary impact of basically high speed ice on the surface of the moon. If it just happens to hit a tardigrade, it could melt, turn into water, wake up that tartagrade.

Hello, you're on the moon. What? What's going on? Where am I? What? I'm on the moon? Last thing I knew I was in Israel. Yeah, because when they go into this cryptobiotic state, they're not dead, right?

They're, and they're not totally paused. Their metabolism is actually still going, but it goes down to 0.01% of its normal metabolism. So it's like 1 in 1,000. It's like your body is running at 1-1-1-thousand-th of its normal speed. Wow, that's amazing. I don't know what that's like, though, but I'd love to know. All right, let's get into what it means we have tardigrates on the moon. But first, let's take a quick break.

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Maximize your edge by shopping at Lenovo.com during their back-to-school sale. That's Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back-to-school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging. out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about tardy grates on the moon. And so there are now tardy grates on the moon, kind of on purpose, but kind of by accident also, right? I mean, we meant to send them to the moon, but they got out. That's right.

They got out. Like in a bad science fiction movie. Nobody could imagine this stuff. And if they did, nobody would believe it, right? But it is our life. This is our universe. There are tardigrade's on the moon. We don't know if they're walking around.

We don't know if they're munching on stuff. But they are there. And can they survive? Is there stuff for them to eat? What do tardigrades eat? Yeah, that's a great question. Tardigrade, they eat plants. And they eat little bacteria because remember, they're super tiny.

and sometimes they also eat tardigrades. So maybe there's only one tardigrate on the move right now. It's one big tardigrade now and it's hungry. It ate all the other ones. It's a grumpy tardigrade and it's looking to come back to Earth for lunch. All right. Well, good job, humans. You've now colonized the moon. That's right. Or our little allies, hopefully our friendly little allies have colonized the moon. And, you know, it's funny to joke about like tartagrades on the moon surviving sort of

some sort of global apocalypse or catastrophe the humans bring on. But, you know, Tardigrates have already survived a lot of global catastrophes. Yeah, that's right. They've been around. I mean, we said it before. They've been around longer than the dinosaurs, which means they've seen it all. They've seen it all. They've seen everything else come and go.

They're bored, right? They're not interested in climate change and nuclear apocalypse. To them, that's no big deal. They've seen crazier stuff. You know, in the history of our planet, we've had. five of these things we call mass extinctions, where something happens that changes the climate or the environment and a lot of species die. And we've had five of those so far. And Tardigrades predate even the first one. They evolved before the first mass extinction and they're still here,

which means they've survived all five of them. Right. That's a little suspicious if you ask me, if you think about it, isn't it? You think that makes them suspect number one? Yeah, I mean, there isn't any other suspect. I think it's pretty awesome. I'm amazed. I love these little creatures. I mean, I don't want to see one the size of a school bus walking into my backyard. And they are a little creepy, but they're also sort of awesome.

Like, what evolutionary path led to them? Could we survive this way? Like, could we copy this technology somehow to become more radioactive, more protective from radiation? It just seems so awesome when evolution finds a little niche to reveal secrets to you. And it's amazing to think about what we must look like to them, you know. Imagine being such a hearty being and seeing all these other animals around you that are really, if you think about it compared to them, we're super fragile and really vulnerable. That's right. We're these huge, squishy meatbags, right?

All you have to do is poke us and boom, it's over. Yeah, just a little poke. These are crazy little creatures. There's also a lot of really other fun little facts you can learn about them. Like, they actually molt like snakes do. You know, they shed their skin. What? Yeah.

They really are tiny little creatures. I mean, they're the size of microbes, but they really are animals. It's sort of like Ant Man, you know, like actually getting shrunk down to the microscopic world and living among these creatures. Like they have organs inside and everything? Oh, yeah. No, they poop and everything. Like, they eat, they poop, they are little creatures, yeah, absolutely. There's tardy poop.

There might be tardy podcasts for all we know. So there's molt like snakes. Yeah, they molt like snakes. And there's lots of little versions of them. There's one that I find particularly hilarious that doesn't poop except when it mults. It's like it holds it in for months and then it gets rid of its skin and just leaves it all behind. So I'm not sure we really want to adopt like all of the culture of these tardigrades, you know. There's some things we just want to pick and choose.

It's like a buffet. Well, I don't know, you know. If you only had to go to the bathroom once every couple of months, That would save you a lot of time. And conserve water, which might be in low supply in the future. Yep, that's true. If you're holding that all in, you might also want to leave that skin behind because it seems kind of soiled. All right.

So those are tardigrates, little tiny actual animals, not insects, not bugs, not bacteria, but actual little animals that will probably outlive all of us. Almost certainly outlive all of us. And, you know, each individual tardigrade doesn't actually live that long. They only live for like three months, maybe up to two years. Really? Yeah, they reproduce. I mean, unless they get frozen in space or something. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, then they can live longer. But sort of like a live time, unfrozen time is not that long. So it's not like there are like thousand-year-old tardigrades combing the earth, you know, with ancient wisdom in them or anything. Oh, man. They're busy. Busy getting busy. They are. They're male tardigrades.

They're female tardigrades. as a whole society, you know, they probably have dating apps. They've been around a lot longer than us, so they've got this thing figured out. Oh, wow. Yeah, to survive at that scale and that they must be pretty busy reproducing, right? There are definitely more tardigrades are on earth than people. All right. I'm just going to go have some nightmares right now.

Well, you know, just like your house cat would be terrifying if it was larger. These things are tiny, and so you don't have to worry about them. Well, thanks to Jaisel for writing in and asking us to talk about. about target grades. They're a really fun subject. Hope you enjoyed it. And when next time you look up at the moon, you can know that we have some neighbors out there. And wave to the moon and be friendly because we don't know what their intentions are. You hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,

and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance

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December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. in its wake a new kind of enemy emerged terrorism listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota luckily it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.