How Tardigrades Bear Dehydration | Hacker News Reader

How Tardigrades Bear Dehydration

u-tokyo.ac.jp

69 pointsgmays21 comments

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This is my favorite scientific article title.

This and the one where they fire the poor lil bears out of a gun (most of them survived luckily).

And appropriately, from U. Tokyo. (Kawaii, kawaii!)

Is it because of the "water bear" nickname?

I came here for same bear necessities!

How Tardigrades Bear Dehydration? Similar To How Bears Bear Hibernation

Ticks also bear dehydration - it’s called desiccation - and become less active during dry periods

I'm guessing the "bear" in the title is a pun, but it slightly degrades comprehension of a scientific article title.

Definition of bear (Entry 2 of 2) transitive verb

1a: to accept or allow oneself to be subjected to especially without giving way

To add to this, you're probably using "bare with me" incorrectly if you think this is a pun. It's definitely wordplay, but as tardigrades aren't known to wear clothing, I don't think they have much more to bare.

I assume they knew that already, since they identified it as a pun!

Sorry, no, it was more that it was a bit of a garden path sentence (not quite, but cognitively). But I'm hoping a more interesting comment bubbles to the top of the HN thread, it was a bit of a throw-away comment.

For me one more word (e.g., "bear with", "bear being dehydrated", etc) makes it a bit easier to parse while preserving the pun--and the literal meeting.

Definition of pun, noun:

a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings.

Puns can be homonyms as well as homophones.

Neat! I thought it was just for homophones.

For example, I red that Moses was found in a read basket.

Really? I love the title. Perfectly informative, accurate to the content, and grabs the attention. I wouldn't put this in the "clickbait"/marketing category whatsoever.

Tardigrades are incredible creatures! Resistance to dehydration barely scratches the surface of their durability feats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade#Physiology

Title really made me laugh, but progressing beyond, I'm wondering if any science people found the article as amazing as I did?

If there's one thing you can be certain of it's that for the discovery of any fact, however obscure or trivial seeming, somewhere there is a scientist who is extremely excited about it. I'm sure there are a lot of tardigrade fans out there who are thrilled by this.

> “I’ll never forget New Year’s Day 2019, when I received an email from Tomomi Nakano, another author of the paper. She had been working late trying to see the condensation of CAHS proteins and observed the first CAHS filament networks in human cultured cells. I was astonished at seeing such clearly defined microscopic images of these. It was the first time I had seen such a thing. It was a very happy new year indeed!”

I was likely either still drinking or sleeping it off while others were working away and emailing colleagues about fascinating discoveries.

I have a bit of a tardigrade obsession- so much so that I built my own motorized microscope (far cheaper than scientists use) and trained an object detector so I can track individual tardigrades as they move around a large area. Eventually a friend who knows one of the world's leading tardigrade researchers and introduced me and now we have a plan to do some more experiments using the tech I built.

It takes up many late evenings but the resulting imagery is indeed fascinating- I managed to image tardigrades egg grow and hatch in realtime.

I'm a bit worn out by all the "tardigrades are indestructible" articles but as long as people are actually doing biophysics experiments to understand the mechanism I'm interested. In this case I don't think this is the only mechanism they use but it's interesting that it's a gel, which are an underappreciated phase of matter, whereas most of the tardigrade desiccation literature I've read remarks that it looks more like they're virtrifying.

For popular science articles about tardigrades it's hard to beat Ars Technica:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/scientists-glean-new...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/nifty-biomechanics-o...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/water-bears-can-repl...

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