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These microscopic creatures can survive in the vacuum of space, inside a volcano, and in an Antarctic lake nearly a mile underground...So when an Israeli spacecraft carrying a horde of hibernating tardigrades crashed on the moon in April 2019 because of a computer glitch, scientists thought the animals would surely have survived...Scientists found these creatures couldn't survive speeds above 2,000 mph when shot out of a gun...

A newfound species of tardigrade, or "water bear," with tendril-festooned eggs has been discovered in the parking lot of an apartment building in Japan. The newfound tardigrade, Macrobiotus shonaicus, is the 168th species of this sturdy micro-animal ever discovered in Japan. Tardigrades are famous for their toughness: They can survive in extreme cold (down to minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 200 Celsius), extreme heat (more than 300 degrees F, or 149 degrees C), and even the unrelenting radiation and vacuum of space, as one 2008 study reported. They're bizarre and adorable at the same time, with eight legs on...

Tardigrades are microscopic animals that survive a remarkable array of stresses, including desiccation [extreme drying]. How tardigrades survive desiccation has remained a mystery for more than 250 years. Trehalose, a disaccharide essential for several organisms to survive drying, is detected at low levels or not at all in some tardigrade species, indicating that tardigrades possess potentially novel mechanisms for surviving desiccation. Here we show that tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs) are essential for desiccation tolerance. TDP genes are constitutively expressed at high levels or induced during desiccation in multiple tardigrade species. TDPs are required for tardigrade desiccation tolerance, and these...