Scientific American has a 60-second science. My name is Ashleigh Papp.
Imagine a small creature that is not an insect or animal. It is about one millimeter in length and is covered in scales that look like they are hard to pick out. The tardigrade is for ladies and gentlemen.
They look like something between a worm and a bear. The name water bears comes from the fact that they sway from side to side while walking.
Jessica Ehmann is a research scientist and former student researcher at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.
When I fell in love with the tardigrade, it got up in the front of the body and waved at me, because it sat under my binoculars.
It has been 200 million years since the dinosaurs were last seen. They have developed a number of nifty ways to survive in harsh environments. Tardigrade can go dormant if things get too dry or cold.
You can't see their arms anymore because they look like small tongues. They pull in all of their body parts. They stop their metabolism to a halt.
Sleeping Beauty was asleep for a century before her prince arrived, but she woke up and went on with her life.
Papp explains why that matters. The researchers are interested in what happens to tardigrades when they are in a state of inactiveness. The tardigrade may hold the keys to the Disney princess hibernation palace if everything can be turned off and turned back on.
There was a study done in 2008 about how long tardigrades can live in crazy dry conditions. Ehmann did the exact same thing. She turned the temperature down.
She and her colleagues split the tardigrades into four groups. The control group enjoyed ambient temperatures, which gave the researchers a baseline for their survival rates and how long they live under normal temp conditions.
The other three groups were put through a gauntlet, where the researchers slowly thaw the tardigrades and then freeze them again to see how many were still alive.
For those six to eight months, I only froze and thaw and fed and cleaned the tardigrades.
The team kept up with the freezing-thawing cycles by using 700 tardigrades.
The tardigrades that were frozen lived longer than the control group.
When we looked at the survival of the tardigrades, we found that they lived twice as long as the control group.
As long as they were frozen, they were still young.
The experiments were very long because they just lived twice as long as we expected.
The longest living tardigrade was 169 days old when it died. The longest-lived animal in the control group was 93 days old. The results were published in a journal
The internal clock of the tardigrades didn't seem to be affected by the time they were frozen. Potential applications to humans can be explored in this way.
Many people will start thinking about freezing humans and sending them into space. We don't need to go that far yet. Stem cells can be used for medical purposes if we freeze and thaw tissues or cells.
If a cancer patient were able to have their healthy cells removed and put into a tardigradelike state of dormancy, those cells could possibly be replanted once the harsh treatment was complete.
There's still a long way to go. Before we can explore the human side of the story, researchers need to understand how the tardigrades shift between being awake and asleep. This work shows that solutions for a healthy future can be found in unexpected places and even in a sleeping Beauty.
I'm Ashleigh Papp and I'm for Scientific American's 60-second science.
This is a transcript of the show.
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