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#extremelife
Meet the Tardigrades: The Solar System's Most Extreme Survivors
There is an organism living on this planet who can travel through space without a suit. Cute, unassuming little invertebrates, these organisms are called tardigrades, or water bears, and usually spend their days crawling around on a piece of nice wet moss in a forest, or meandering through our vast oceans. They only grow to be about 1.5 millimeters long, but over 1,000 species of them inhabit the planet, and they all have a superpower unmatched by any other species on Earth. No now knows why, but tardigrades can withstand temperatures as cold as liquid nitrogen, radiation doses that would kill a human 100 times over, thrive in an outer-space-like vacuum, and survive without water for years. More » -
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#madplatetectonics
Students and Faculty Reenact 500 Million Years of Earth History in Stanford Field
Somewhere around 200 students and faculty gathered on a field at Stanford University last Saturday to re-enact half a billion years of plate tectonics. Costumed and organized in color-coded groups to represent the continents and oceans, the groups moved in sync to simulate Earth undergoing continental drift, complete with asteroid impacts, mass extinctions, and Coast Guard emergency flares to simulate volcanoes. More »
