Tardigrades Walk | Hacker News Reader

Tardigrades Walk

sciencealert.com

193 pointssuperhumanuser29 comments

If you think that’s cool you might also like to see the motor proteins that walk along inside our cells. There are a few types including the ones that make muscles work.

Kinesin is fun because it has little legs made of proteins. It gloms onto big bubbles of stuff inside the cell and carries them along pathways to their destination. Chemical reactions cause the proteins to fold in the right way to take each step.

This shows how they look. https://youtu.be/y-uuk4Pr2i8

This explains the mechanisms that they use to walk.

https://youtu.be/9RUHJhskW00

I fully expected to click on the article and see zero videos of them walking. Not because I didn’t think tardigrades walk but because science articles often lack media for whatever reason. Kudos to sciencealert

The "unhappy" tardigrade on glass made my day.

> Tardigrades went for a walk and you'll never guess what happened next!

My point is, even with titles like that, there’s usually no media.

It’s hard because the default medium for science communication is a journal article. We’re getting better at including more video when appropriate. But even then unless you can quantify something, it’s hard to analyze, so most figures end up being data plots instead of images or video.

It’s funny, because even for a paper like this where the foundational data of the study are videos of tardigrades walking, the videos are still listed in the publication as supplementary material!

For those interested in the microcosm, there is a youtube channel with high quality footage of lots of things: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbnbBWJtwsf0jLGUwX5Q3g

Easily one of my favourite YT channels. This is the sort of thing that inspires kids to get into science.

There's probably a ton of topics where this sort of production could be used, where you combine deep technical stuff + humanizing stories to make it accessible and highlight the most interesting things we've learned from it, and wrap it in ~10min videos with nice graphics.

I'm a dedicated carnivore. I used to work in a lab that did experimental brain surgery on cats. I trap and kill the rodents in my basement with something like glee. But I'm watching a tardigrave having trouble walking across glass and thinking "animal abuse! Someone give that poor little water bear a little traction!"

Emotionally, I am not consistent.

That title is unconscionable. Here's a link to the actual paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/35/e2107289118

edit: title was edited

> the article is very low quality. Here's a link to the actual paper

I appreciate the link to the paper. But I consider the article superior in a few ways:

(1) It is brief, and targeted to an audience that is not a specialist in this field.

(2) It includes the video clips (which, to be honest, speak for themselves) and does not require any special credentials or university affiliation in order to view.

> That title is unconscionable

Yeah... the title is rather stupid. It should have gone with just "This Is How Tardigrades Walk".

Also, the simple question that the article presents is a good one.

Did insects and tardigrades develops their walking similarities by a common ancestor or separately?

Regarding point two, the videos are all linked from the paper and require no special access:

https://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2021/08/26/2107289118.DCS...

What does 'We Were Not Ready for the Footage' mean?

It means that when they saw the video it provoked an unexpected emotional response.

As others have said, it's not a good title, but I'm treating this as a sincere question because I know there are many non-native speakers that could get confused by this stuff.

The title is garbage. lol The rest was easy to consume though and the footage was much appreciated.

It is a new version of the “we didn't believe number 4 when we saw it!” method of click-baitery.

Not sure if the footage is worth the hyperbole, I was not ready for clicking “no” to every single partner on their list.

Unconscionable is surely a step too far? Translating "Tardigrades exhibit robust interlimb coordination across walking speeds and terrains" into the title of the article seems like a reasonable thing for a pop-sci publication to do. Appreciate the link to the actual article!

Genocidal to the English language might have been a step too far. And even then I'm not really sure if it would be.

But unconscionable is a perfectly valid description of the title.

BioRxiv paper's on this work is here[0].

This is some pretty interesting work. It'd be interesting to figure out how they adapt walking to traverse 3d terrain, because robots are really bad at this. Tardigrades have about 200 neurons and probably don't have much of concept of proprioception so figuring out how they work would be useful for robots. They might 'cheat' at walking by being able to adhere to the surface though.

[0]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.19.436228v1....

I vow to never put a tardigrade on to a glass surface, watching the little thing struggle for some reason made me feel bad.

Couldn't help to mentally complete the video of the tardigrade in glass with the sound of 'Macarena'

The interesting part is that they remember a lot to prehistoric mammals like Cynognathus or to moles walking, but then you realize the eight feet.

It's amazing how few atoms you need for a fully functional, fully articulated animal.

Interesting videos but I always assumed they somehow walked since they seem to have legs.

How many flightless birds have wings?

It may turn out that these little guys are the real dolphins from Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.

So long, and thanks for all the phyta!

Of course they walk, it's in the name! Seriously speaking, very cool stuff.

> We Were Not Ready For The Footage

feels like a very tabloidy headline. Why exactly am I not ready?

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