They have, we are told, survived five mass extinctions:
After a month, though, Suma found the sweet spot for growing the tardigrades and began to investigate their hardiness to various environmental stressors. He and Eswarappa were particularly curious about the critters’ resistance to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Placed under a germicidal UV lamp for 15 minutes—an exposure that would kill most microorganisms—the tardigrades came out unscathed. Curious if they could confer the UV protection to C. elegans and another species of water bear, the researchers ground up the new tardigrade to create a paste with the mystery UV-resistance substance that they could slather on the other creatures. As they were doing this, they noticed that the paste fluoresced under UV light.
Ashley Yeager, “Tardigrades’ List of Super Powers Grows Ever Longer” at The Scientist
They couldn’t withstand humans grinding them up but hey… .
This is especially interesting:
“Fluorescent molecules absorb light at higher wavelengths than they emit and prevent the harmful radiation from damaging animals’ cells. ”
A similar trick is common in acoustics. Damping a harmful or annoying frequency down to a harmless intensity is hard, but transforming the energy into a resonance at a different frequency is easier. Trees transform DC wind into a broad range of vortices, each carrying only a small proportion of the energy. Grass blades do the same thing to a DC water wave, breaking it up into eddies that stay in one place and absorb into the soil.
Natural superhet.
They also had a starring role in Star Trek: Discovery.
It’s sort of surprising that health food and supplement companies haven’t tried selling Tardigrade Paste. They’ve been selling all sorts of dubious things, including silver compounds, to boost long life. Why not try Extract Of The Immortals? This research indicates that it might even work.
Amazing! Bummer for the tardigrades though.
Interesting comparisons, Polistra. You remind me of what people experience as they walk through Muir Woods in Mill Valley, California. There’s a massive sense of peacefulness, quiet, and eternity.
https://www.nps.gov/muwo/index.htm
Believe it or not, people used to ingest radium or radon-gassed water, administer electric currents, and swallow bits of Egyptian mummies for health and longevity.
-Q
>Placed under a germicidal UV lamp for 15 minutes—an exposure that would kill most microorganisms—the tardigrades came out unscathed.
But they did come out with a nice tan.
as to:
Actually there is a nuance to this. A nuance that directly undermines the ‘bottom up’ materialistic explanations of Darwinists in which they hold that DNA is the ‘blueprint’ for life:
Oh well, so much for the Darwinian claim that DNA is the ‘bottom-up blueprint’ for life.
Of supplemental note to bottom-up vs. top-down causation