{"id":19593,"date":"2019-08-13T09:19:20","date_gmt":"2019-08-13T09:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.englishforums.com\/news\/?p=19593"},"modified":"2019-08-13T09:19:20","modified_gmt":"2019-08-13T09:19:20","slug":"tardigrades-life-first-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/tardigrades-life-first-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"Tardigrades: First life to survive on the moon?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists speculated that the minuscule hard creatures called tardigrades may be the first life to survive in the barren surface of the moon. To this day, experts have been keeping tabs on how these beings walk on their own.<\/strong><\/em>
\nNova Spivack<\/span><\/a>, the co-founder and chairman of Arch Mission Foundation, speculated that tardigrades have \u201cextremely high\u201d chances to survive<\/strong> as he mentioned in a talk to <\/span>BBC<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>
\nIt was then revealed tardigrades are very well built to withstand any climate on Earth which includes high-level radiation and pressure, as well as in various harsh conditions.<\/strong><\/span>
\nTardigrades may look odd at first. But it has, in fact, been actually nicknamed as water bear<\/strong> since it has been discovered back in the 1980s. According to <\/strong><\/span>Vox<\/a><\/strong>, it was first discovered in Antarctica and have miraculously survived even after being frozen for about thirty (30) years<\/strong>. With only a few millimeters long, these creatures came back to life as if time didn\u2019t matter to them when the ice was thawed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Demystifying tardigrades<\/h2>\n

Japanese scientists have previously found in 2016 a new tardigrade protein that probably explains why the tiny animals are resilient to extremely high amounts of radiation.
\nTakuma Hashimoto<\/a>, a Project Researcher at the University of Tokyo\u2019s Graduate School of Science, performed the tolerance experiments on the tardigrade Ramazzottius varieornatus<\/em>\u00a0that is known to survive exposure to high doses of radiation.
\nThey decoded the full genome and found a new protein they have named Dsup (Damage Suppressor) that protects the DNA when it is irradiated.
\nWhen human cultured cells were exposed to X-rays their DNA was damaged. However, when those same human cells were given the ability to create the Dsup protein, they showed approximately half the DNA damage. Further, and most surprisingly, the cultured cells that could create Dsup were still capable of reproducing.<\/p>\n

Tardigrades as the first living species on the moon<\/b><\/h2>\n

The <\/span>Arch Mission Foundation<\/span><\/a> believes that storing humanity in a virtual library can save the entire species\u2019 extinction when this possibility came to rise. The company aims to incorporate the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of humans remotely in space via the virtual library. This virtual library is called the Arch Library,<\/strong> and have been working diligently with the tech billionaire, Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX.<\/span>
\nEarly this year, a lunar Israeli lander which carries a couple of thousands of dehydrated tardigrades, crashed into the moon. This lunar lander was called Beresheet which was created by SpaceIL. It had been the first full-sized library to be set into space prior to SpaceX Roadster which was done with a partial library when it launched.<\/strong>
\nHowever, what will happen if the mission didn\u2019t turn out well in the end? The digital library that has DNA samples of tardigrades were left to uncertainty if it\u2019s still intact as it was mentioned to Wired. If it isn\u2019t, experts can just bring the samples back to Earth to let the tardigrades be rehydrated again with little risk involved.<\/span>
\nBut if the crash landing turns out to be successful, the purpose of preserving the biology of humanity is one step closer for preparing the future species\u2019 heritage in space.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists speculated that the minuscule hard creatures called tardigrades may be the first life to survive in the barren surface of the moon. To this day, experts have been keeping tabs on how these beings walk on their own. Nova Spivack, the co-founder and chairman of Arch Mission Foundation, speculated that tardigrades have \u201cextremely high\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":19603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[761,1350,1407],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19593"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}