Recent posts

#1

Laid Back Lounge / Re: Ban The Poster Above You

Last post by Tank - Today at 12:19:26 PM

Plantain ban.

#2

Laid Back Lounge / Re: Ban The Poster Above You

Last post by Ecurb Noselrub - Today at 12:08:24 PM

Banana ban - nana bana bobana, fee-fi-fobana.

#3

Music / Re: What are you listening to?

Last post by Asmodean - Today at 09:44:13 AM

The Asmo be listening to obscure Norwegian Pop.

#4

Science / Re: Intriguing Idea About the ...

Last post by Tank - Today at 08:54:47 AM

Interesting. I didn't follow the Youtube link at the end 

#5

Media / Re: What Are You Reading?

Last post by Tank - Today at 08:47:13 AM

The rise and fall of the dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte.

Just googled this and saw all the glowing reviews. Sounds like a good one.

It is good. It's written in quite a conversational style, not at all academic. But equally it brings the fossils and timelines together in a very understandable way. He puts dinosaurs into their evolutionary context with other species. Eye opening.

#6

Laid Back Lounge / Re: animals in your life

Last post by Anne D. - Today at 02:55:41 AM

Oh no, that's too bad about the baby armadillo. I did not realize you could send bees through the post.

#7

Media / Re: What Are You Reading?

Last post by Anne D. - Today at 02:43:31 AM

The rise and fall of the dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte.

Just googled this and saw all the glowing reviews. Sounds like a good one.

[Abstract:]

#8

Science / Re: Intriguing Idea About the ...

Last post by Recusant - Today at 02:41:40 AM

Further discoveries about these intriguing animals. . . .

"Scientists finally figure out why the water bear is nearly indestructible" | Big Think

The tardigrade, also known as the moss piglet or water bear, is a bizarre, microscopic creature that looks like something out of a Disney nightmare scene: strange but not particularly threatening. The pudgy, eight-legged, water-borne creature appears to be perpetually puckering. It's the farthest thing from what you'd expect an unstoppable organism to look like.

Yet, water bears can withstand even the vacuum of space, as one experiment showed. A sort of microscopic Rasputin, tardigrades have be frozen, boiled, exposed to extreme doses of radiation, and remarkably still survive. How they do this has been a mystery to science, until now.

Being a water-borne creature, scientists in this experiment examined how it survived desiccation, or being completely dried out. When it senses an oncoming dry period, the critter brings its head and limbs into its exoskeleton, making itself into a tiny ball. It'll stay that way, unmoving, until it's reintroduced into water.

It's this amazing ability that piqued Thomas Boothby's interest. He's a researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Boothby told TheNew York Times, "They can remain like that in a dry state for years, even decades, and when you put them back in water, they revive within hours." After that, "They are running around again, they are eating, they are reproducing like nothing happened."

Originally, it was thought that the water bear employed a sugar called trehalose to shield its cells from damage. Brine shrimp (sea monkeys) and nematode worms use this sugar to protect against desiccation, through a process called anhydrobiosis. Those organisms produce enough of the sugar to make it 20% of their body weight.

Not the water bear. Trehalose only takes up about 2% of its entire system, when it's in stasis. Though employing a sugar to preserve one's body sounds strange, the newly discovered process that the water bear goes through is even more bizarre. It turns itself into glass.


[Continues . . .]

The paper is open access:

"Tardigrades Use Intrinsically Disordered Proteins to Survive Desiccation" | Molecular Cell

Abstract:

Tardigrades are microscopic animals that survive a remarkable array of stresses, including desiccation. How tardigrades survive desiccation has remained a mystery for more than 250 years. Trehalose, a disaccharide essential for several organisms to survive drying, is detected at low levels or not at all in some tardigrade species, indicating that tardigrades possess potentially novel mechanisms for surviving desiccation.

Here we show that tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs) are essential for desiccation tolerance. TDP genes are constitutively expressed at high levels or induced during desiccation in multiple tardigrade species. TDPs are required for tardigrade desiccation tolerance, and these genes are sufficient to increase desiccation tolerance when expressed in heterologous systems.

TDPs form non-crystalline amorphous solids (vitrify) upon desiccation, and this vitrified state mirrors their protective capabilities. Our study identifies TDPs as functional mediators of tardigrade desiccation tolerance, expanding our knowledge of the roles and diversity of disordered proteins involved in stress tolerance.

#9

Music / Re: What are you listening to?

Last post by billy rubin - March 27, 2023, 11:38:40 PM

even better

#10

Music / Re: What are you listening to?

Last post by billy rubin - March 27, 2023, 11:36:36 PM

amazing talent