{"id":20247,"date":"2015-12-26T10:47:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-26T18:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/water-bears-turn-into-glass-when-they-dry-out"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:17:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:17:10","slug":"water-bears-turn-into-glass-when-they-dry-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/water-bears-turn-into-glass-when-they-dry-out","title":{"rendered":"Water bears turn into glass when they dry out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/water-bears-turn-into-glass-when-they-dry-out.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Tardigrades \u2014 known affectionately as water bears or moss piglets \u2014 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/the-tardigrade-genome-has-been-sequenced-and-it-has-the-most-foreign-dna-of-any-animal?utm_source=Article&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=InArticleReadMore\">have pretty much got it all<\/a>. These microscopic invertebrates are capable of surviving the most extreme conditions you could dream up, including prolonged desiccation and near-100 percent water loss, freezing and boiling temperatures, intense ionising radiation, and the vacuum of outer space.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists have discovered that to survive extreme desiccation, tardigardes produce a special type of \u2018bioglass\u2019 to hold essential proteins and molecules together until they\u2019re rehydrated back to life. Now they\u2019re figuring out how to use this mechanism to develop drought-resistant crops and longer-lasting vaccines.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.futurity.org\/glass-tardigrades-water-bears-996212-2\/\">Back in September<\/a>, researchers from the University of Chicago announced that they\u2019d discovered a new type of glass \u2014 one produced internally by the tardigrade during desiccation. While they\u2019re yet to figure out exactly how the glass is formed, they concluded that it\u2019s produced as a protective mechanism to ensure that tardigrades can survive losing pretty much all of the water in their cells.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/water-bears-turn-into-glass-when-they-dry-out\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tardigrades \u2014 known affectionately as water bears or moss piglets \u2014 have pretty much got it all. These microscopic invertebrates are capable of surviving the most extreme conditions you could dream up, including prolonged desiccation and near-100 percent water loss, freezing and boiling temperatures, intense ionising radiation, and the vacuum of outer space. Scientists have [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1506,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-food","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20247"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68960,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247\/revisions\/68960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}