Hacker News Reader

Comment by mousethatroared | Hacker News Reader

You're right but, usually, life is more fragile than chemistry for no other reason that life is built on chemistry. There are animals with exceptional capacity to survive radiation, but they accomplish this by redundancy and quick repair.

So it comes down to picking the dose that doesn't kill your but does kills what would other wise kill you... radiation cancer therapy.

View on HN

Well, the plan is to suffocate the books, which can hurt the beetles (since they're alive) but can't do anything to the books (since they aren't).

The only obvious advantage of irradiating them would be that it will kill eggs; if the eggs will still hatch in an oxygen-free environment, there's no advantage and plenty of downside.

Big if. Insect eggs are very often meant to withstand long periods of dormancy.

Anyway, I wouldn't suggest irradiating them either. Just the volume of required handling would ruin them.

Yes and no. On the fundamentals, environments never really become oxygen-free, and so it would be unexpected for beetles to have an adaptation to the scenario.

You could have an environment that was consistently oxygen-free, but it would make no sense for eggs laid in such an environment to refuse to hatch there.

Bacterial spores do, so some bugs do for some reason. Probably because of the small % chance variation in the atmosphere. Life is incredibly robust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com