The world’s toughest animal has been sent into space. Tardigrades can survive incredibly harsh conditions, including freezing to near absolute 0, extreme vacuum and radiation. Exposed to open space on the Russian FOTON M3 satellite, tardigrades are the first animals tested and perhaps the best candidate on earth for surviving space travel.

I wonder how much of their hardiness is a function of their size, and how much of superior genes
2021-12-23: And now they’ve demonstrated another feat:

To perform their entanglement experiment, Dumke and co cooled their tardigrade to below 10 millikelvin, almost to absolute 0, while reducing the pressure to a millionth of that in the atmosphere. In these conditions, no chemical reaction can occur so the tardigrade’s metabolism must have entirely halted stopped and the processes of life halted. “This is to-date the most extreme exposure to low temperatures and pressures that a tardigrade has been recorded to survive, clearly demonstrating that the state of cryptobiosis ultimately involves a suspension of all metabolic processes given that all chemical reactions would be prohibited with all its constituent molecules cooled to their ground states”

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