Malia Hopper

Tardigrades: microscopic animals that can survive space, and now can they help treat cancer?

Biology, Editors Pick, Science / By

What are Tardigrades?

Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are microscopic, aquatic animals that are only about .5 mm long. They thrive in mosses and lichens, but they can survive in any environment, from temperatures near absolute zero to being near volcanic ocean vents. 

They were discovered in 1773 by Johann August Ephraim Goeze, a German zoologist, who called them “little water bears” due to their appearance. Shortly after that, Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian scientist, named them “tardigrada,” or “slow steppers.”

These little creatures may look cute and squishy, but they have a hard cuticle around them, like grasshoppers do, that they have to shed in order to grow. Additionally, they’re something between an arthropod and a nematode, so their classification is often debated amongst scientists.

One thing is for sure though, and that is that these creatures are very strange, between having a hydrostatic skeleton instead of bones and ventral nervous system instead of a spinal cord. Another thing we know is that they will probably outlast humans, as they’ve been around since about 400 million years before the dinosaurs and the species has also been able to survive every one of the five mass extinction events that have happened. 

Scientists have only just started researching these little creatures to see what makes them so tough, and they’re making surprising discoveries about this almost unkillable creature and how it could have life-saving impacts. 

Their “Superpowers”

Scientists have really been putting tardigrades to the test over the last few decades. For example, they have had them survive at .05 Kelvin and at temperatures as high as 150 degrees Celsius. Also, they’ve survived 40,000 kilopascals of pressure. That’s as much pressure as 80 elephants! When scientists shot them out of a high speed gun, they also survived speeds of about 3,000 feet per second. 

Despite their ability to survive these environments, they don’t thrive there. In fact they are far from immortal and only live for a few months while they are in their active state. However, they usually have long periods where they “die.” This is called their “tun” state and it happens when they are away from water. In this state, they stop metabolizing and shrink. Whenever they are exposed to water again, they then go back to their metabolizing state.

This process where they suspend their metabolism for only a period of time is called cryptobiosis. Tardigrades can stay in their “half-dead” state for over 30 years. There is also a debate over if this “half-dead” state is actually them being dead because in their “tun” state, they are no different from dead matter.

In another experiment, they sent tardigrades to space and put them into space’s vacuum for ten days. Once they returned to Earth, they only had to be rehydrated to become reanimated again. Through experiments like this, researchers have found that tardigrades can survive 2,000 to 3,000 times more radiation than humans.

Applications

These “superpowers” that tardigrades have can be applied to people’s everyday lives, although a lot of ideas are still under development. First of all, because they can survive very low temperatures, scientists are looking to use their hardy proteins for vaccines because, as many people learned during the pandemic, a lot of vaccines have to be stored at low temperatures, which makes distribution difficult. 

Researchers also think that they can use tardigrades that have been mashed into a paste to make a kind of sunscreen. They were inspired to do this in 2020 when they found that tardigrades can survive a lot of ultraviolet radiation because they emit the longer wavelengths of light while absorbing the shorter ones. So, scientists made tardigrades into a paste which they put on worms. This paste made the worms able to survive a lot more ultraviolet radiation than normal.

Some other applications span from creating more drought resistant crops to protecting astronauts from radiation damage. However, the focus of recent tardigrade research has been treating cancer. 

In all, about 60% of cancer patients in America use radiation therapy as a means to help them beat their cancer. However, this radiation can harm the DNA inside the cancer cells and inside healthy cells too. This can hurt patients’ quality of life by making basic tasks such as eating difficult due to swelling. Because of these damaging side effects, a lot of patients either stop or delay treatment.

A team supported by the National Institutes of Health was inspired by tardigrades’ hardiness, especially their protein that suppresses damage called Dsup. Dsup is able to keep DNA strands from breaking, so researchers made nanoparticles with mRNA that carry instructions to make the Dsup protein. They used mRNA instead of DNA because it only expresses the Dsup protein temporarily instead of incorporating it into the genome of a cell. 

In February of 2025, this team published what they found, which was that with this mRNA, Dsup was brought to healthy tissues to minimize the damage of radiation treatment. To test this method, scientists used mice. In these mice, they found that the production of Dsup peaked six hours after it was injected and this peak was followed by a decline that ended about four days after injection, leaving no Dsup behind in the mouse. In mice where they injected the Dsup into them before radiation therapy, there was significantly less DNA breakage. 

In the mice, the amount of DNA that was broken by radiation was reduced by 50%. Thankfully, these effects were contained to the place that was injected, which means that these particles are not likely to accidentally protect tumor cells. The problem that scientists will have to solve now is how to not cause an immune response in humans because using tardigrade’s original protein could do that. Despite this problem, it shows promise as a way to protect patients while they are getting treated for cancer.

Conclusion

Tardigrades are an example of how even the smallest creatures can be the toughest and have the greatest impact. So, next time you are looking at moss on a log, think about how there could be thousands of lifesaving creatures right there. Overall, tardigrades really are wonders of the microscopic world, and hopefully, someday, they will make space travel more possible and cancer more treatable. 

References:

National Institutes of Health. (2025, March 25). Tiny tardigrades may hold clues to cancer care. National Institutes of Health. Retrieved March 30, 2025, from https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/tiny-tardigrades-may-hold-clues-cancer-care#:~:text=Researchers%20found%20that%20a%20protein,radiation%20therapy%20to%20treat%20cancer

Robertson, L. (2022, October 18). Everything you need (and want) to know about tardigrades. Front Line Genomics. Retrieved March 30, 2025, from https://frontlinegenomics.com/everything-you-need-and-want-to-know-about-tardigrades/

Trafton, A. (2025, February 26). A protein from tiny tardigrades may help cancer patients tolerate radiation therapy. MIT News. Retrieved March 30, 2025, from https://news.mit.edu/2025/tiny-tardigrades-protein-may-help-cancer-patients-tolerate-radiation-therapy-0226

Italian Scientists “Freeze” Light to Make a Supersolid for the First Time

Must Read, Science, Technology / By

Introduction:

When most people think of light, they may think of things like rays of sunlight or what they see when they flip on a light switch, but they definitely don’t think of it as a solid, and they shouldn’t have, until now.

On March 5, 2025, Italian researchers published a paper in the Nature Journal about how they “froze” laser light into a supersolid that has extraordinary properties. 

A supersolid is a state of matter where particles condense to make crystalline solids but they move as if they are a liquid without viscosity (internal friction). In order to be formed, it has to be cooled to almost absolute zero. According to Bob Yirka, “a supersolid is a seemingly contradictory material- it is defined as rigid, but also has superfluidity, in which a liquid flows without friction.”

History of Research in Supersolids:

In the 1960s, supersolids were first predicted and they were first observed in 2017, but only in special gases. 

They were also observed in 2024 by physicists in China. In order to form this supersolid, scientists had a compound of atoms which were positioned in triangular lattices which, when in a magnetic field, spin the same way. However, when they are not in a magnetic field, the atoms try to have a spin that opposes the spin of neighboring atoms. That’s where the triangle shaping comes in because it limits how many ways the atoms can orient themselves. With this shaping, researchers predicted that a supersolid with this material was possible, but only under the proper conditions. So, they put the material in an apparatus that allowed them to see the spin states and transitions of the atoms. After comparing several results to different theoretical calculations, they came to the conclusion that it was a supersolid. 

How Light was Turned into a Supersolid:

At CNR Nanotec, Institute of Nanotechnology, in Lecce, Italy, Antonia Gianfate and Davide Nigro led a team of scientists with the goal of “freezing” light. However, the researchers didn’t simply lower the temperature to “freeze” light. Instead, they used quantum techniques such as using a photonic semiconductor platform that conducted photons similarly to how electrons are usually conducted.

To make a supersolid, the scientists fired their laser at gallium arsenide that had special ridges. When the light hit the ridges, it interacted with it and made polaritons (hybrid particles) that the ridges constrained, forcing the polaritons to become a supersolid.

The amount of photons (particles of light) increased and satellite condensates formed, which indicated that it was a supersolid. Since these condensates had opposite wavenumbers while having the same energy and having a specific spatial structure, it was confirmed that it was in a supersolid state.

Conclusion:

This recent breakthrough is a big step forward in the research into supersolids and the quantum world. In the future, supersolids could be crucial to doing things such as making more stable quantum computers and improving energy storage and materials.

The ability to “freeze” particles of light may seem to be something out of a science fiction book, but in 2025 it is the reality and this revolutionizing experiment will make supersolids easier to study so scientists can continue unlocking the secrets of the quantum realm. 

References:

ET Online. (2025, March 12). Scientists freeze light: Researchers discover a rare state of matter where it flows like liquid but holds shape like a solid. Economic Times. Retrieved March 15, 2025, from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/scientists-freeze-light-researchers-discover-a-rare-state-of-matter-where-it-flows-like-liquid-but-holds-shape-like-a-solid/articleshow/118928851.cms

HT News Desk. (2025, March 14). Scientists manage to freeze light, convert it into a solid: Here’s how they did it. Hindustan Times. Retrieved March 15, 2025, from https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/scientists-manage-to-freeze-light-convert-it-into-a-solid-heres-how-they-did-it-101741943981846.html

Pine, D. (2025, March 13). Scientists turn light into a ‘supersolid’ for the 1st time ever: What that means, and why it matters. Live Science. Retrieved March 15, 2025, from https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/scientists-turn-light-into-a-supersolid-for-the-1st-time-ever-what-that-means-and-why-it-matters

Yirka, B. (2024, January 29). The first observation of a material exhibiting a super solid phase of matter. Phys.org. Retrieved March 15, 2025, from https://phys.org/news/2024-01-material-supersolid-phase.html#google_vignette

Yirka, B. (2025, March 6). Laser light made into a supersolid for the first time. Phys.org. Retrieved March 15, 2025, from https://phys.org/news/2025-03-laser-supersolid.html#google_vignette

Breaking the Mold: the Slime Mold That is Forcing Researchers to Rethink What it Means to Think

Biology, Medicine / By

Meet the Blob:

In 1958, the horror movie classic The Blob took the world by storm, depicting a large blob that had intelligence and had a hunger for people. What if that blob exists, intelligence and all, and its favorite food is oatmeal? This blob is called slime mold, and it is changing scientist’s very idea of intelligence. Not only can this unicellular organism make decisions, but it can learn from its mistakes. With new revolutionary discoveries being made with it, the possibilities of what we can do with it are endless, from having it solve problems it took humans decades to figure out, to computing, and even to medicine. 

Despite the name, slime mold is not mold at all. Instead, it is a protist. Protists are kind of the junk drawer of classifications since it is what something is classified if scientists have no clue what else to call it.  

There are more than 900 types of slime mold and over 720 sexes. Its scientific name, Physarum polycephalum, means “many headed slime,” which is fitting given how the slime mold branches out to traverse its environment. It’s also fitting because it is made up of thousands of individual nuclei who come together to make a super-cell that makes decisions to benefit the whole group. They are also extremely versatile creatures and can live in almost any environment, from jungles to the arctic and even to outer space on the International Space Station.

Slime Mold in Technology and Engineering:

At Hokkaido University in Japan, a team put slime mold in a maze and put food at two points. The slime mold made a connection between these two points and retracted itself from areas where there was no food. Even though there were several ways to get through the maze, the smile mold always found the shortest route.

To expand this experiment, they put oats at every major city on a map of Japan. They then put slime mold on this map, and within two days the slime mold had created a route that was nearly identical to the transportation network it had taken engineers more than 100 years to figure out. Now, civil engineers can use slime mold to figure out the most efficient routes faster than any human could. 

In the UK, scientists created Plasmobot, a computer that runs on oak flakes and slime mold. This computer can do math problems and pull or push objects all by the power of slime mold. 

Another application to technology is using slime mold to create accessible biosensors that enable citizen scientists and students to be able to gain access to and use sensors affordably. In Europe, the project PHYSENSE made a prototype biosensor that does exactly that. The prototype uses slime mold’s response to stimuli to control the sensor. In the future, these sensors could be applied to security, the discovery of drugs, food safety, and monitoring the environment. 

Slime Mold in Physics and Medicine:

Even NASA has “hired” slime mold to help it tackle the challenging physics problems. They found that there could be a cosmic web throughout the universe that is mainly made of dark matter, a mysterious substance that can’t be seen. When observing this cosmic web and slime mold, NASA claimed that “there is an uncanny resemblance between the two networks: one crafted by biological evolution, and the other by the primordial force of gravity.”

So, NASA made a slime-mold inspired computer algorithm that they applied to data about nearby galaxies. This created a 3-D map of dark matter filaments in the surrounding universe.

For medicine, biophysicists in Singapore and Germany looked at slime mold’s patterns and found that the way it grows is remarkably similar to a tumor, allowing them to study how tumors supply themselves with blood. This lets them create new solutions that will cut off a tumor’s blood supply, stopping it from growing and eventually killing it. 

Source: Murugan, N., Levin Lab, Tufts University, & Wyss Institute at Harvard University. (2021). Slime mold sample exploring a petri dish. Harvard Magazine.

Rethinking Intelligence:

When you think about the word intelligence, what comes to mind? Is it the ability to make decisions? To remember? To problem solve? Maybe you think that the most inherent part of intelligence is the ability to think, most likely with a brain. Before slime mold, almost everyone, including scientists, believed that to be intelligent something had to have a way to think. Now, slime mold is sparking debates because it can do everything listed above without a brain or even neurons.

For example, slime mold was once exposed to the cold every half an hour. When it encountered the cold, it would slow its growth to conserve energy. Then, scientists stopped exposing the slime mold to the cold, but it had remembered the timing and anticipated it, showing that it has some sort of memory.

Harvard also found that slime mold can sense objects before even coming into contact with them. To discover this, they put three glass disks on one side of a petri dish and one glass disk on the other. The majority of the time, the slime mold strongly favored the side with three glass disks, but only when the disks were put side by side. When stacked, the slime mold showed no preference, leading the scientist to determine that slime mold decided where to go in this instance based on the amount of the horizon the glass disks took up. This begs the questions: how does the sightless slime mold make these decisions and why?

In the end, there is a lot more research to be done about this confusing protist. Whether you think that it is intelligent or not though, one thing is for certain, and that is that this unicellular organism is changing society for the better.

References:

Barnett, H. (2014, July 17). What humans can learn from semi-intelligent slime. TED Talks. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://www.ted.com/talks/heather_barnett_what_humans_can_learn_from_semi_intelligent_slime/transcript

Bland, E. (2009, September 8). Plasmobot computer runs on slime mold. NBC News. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32736017

Shrourou, A. (2019, April 16). Using slime mold to produce accessible biosensors. News Medical. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://www.news-medical.net/news/20190415/Using-slime-mold-to-produce-accessible-biosensors.aspx

Slime Molds Help Show How Cancer Grows. (2012, August 24). WIRED. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://www.wired.com/2012/08/slime-molds-cancer-growth/

Slime Mold Simulations Used to Map Dark Matter Holding Universe Together. (2020, March 10). NASA Science. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/slime-mold-simulations-used-to-map-dark-matter-holding-universe-together/Walecki, N. (2021). Can Slime Molds Think? Harvard Magazine. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/10/right-now-can-slime-molds-think

Could the New State of Matter be the Future of Quantum Computing?

Science, Technology / By

Definitions

  • Fermions- particles that have a mass and are one of matter’s two main building blocks.
    • Composite fermions- combinations of these fermions.
  • Superconductors- according to Cade Metz of the New York Times, “are materials that conduct electricity without losing the energy they are transmitting.”
  • Majorana- a particle that is its own antiparticle
    • Antiparticles- subatomic particles that have the same masses as corresponding particles, but they have opposite charges

We’re all told growing up that the states of matter are solid, liquid, and gas. As we grow up, plasma and Bose-Einstein Condensates are added to that list, but what if I were to tell you that a new state of matter was just created, and it’s being used to advance quantum computing. 

On February 19, Microsoft published a research paper in the science journal Nature, announcing that they created the Majorana-1 chip. The Majorana-1 chip is a microprocessor that uses a topological superconductor that yields particles that aren’t solid, liquid, or gas. Could this new state of matter be the key to the future of quantum computers?

History:

Thirty years ago, Jainendra Jain, a physicist at Penn State, pioneered a theory about a new state of matter. They called this theory the fractional quantum Hall effect and said that it was a liquid of composite fermions. These fermions can create a superconductor under the right conditions. Theorists then predicted that under the right conditions, these composite fermions could make a superconductor that encloses a Majorana. 

Image Source: Hu, C. (2022, September 7). IBM’s quantum computer. Popular Science.

Standard Versus Quantum Computing

Normal computers use “bits.” These are the 0’s and 1’s that make up data. On the other hand, quantum bits, or qubits, can be a 0, a 1, or a superposition, such as being a 0 and a 1 simultaneously. Together, these qubits drastically increase how quickly calculations can be made. In fact, if every computer in the world worked together, it would take decades to do what a quantum computer can do in just one day. 

One of the main challenges in the world of quantum computers is interference either from the environment or from within the system itself. If there is interference, qubits can collapse and cause errors by going into a definite state, meaning they would turn into only a 1 or a 0. That’s where theorists bring in these strange Majorana particles.

Theorists believed that these Majorana particles could be applied to quantum computing to make them more fault-tolerant. This happens because when there are two Majorana particles together, they either make a whole fermion or nothing, acting as the 0’s and 1’s of a standard bit. However, unlike most other qubits, Jainendra Jan says “the information here can be stored non-locally in a topological fashion.” What this means is that the two Majorana particles making up a qubit can have distance between them. Since neither of them have all the information, local interference can’t turn them on or off. So, the qubits won’t lose their data because it can correct errors as it calculates, allowing quantum computing to be used by industries in the future.

The New Quantum Computer

In 1997, Alexei Kitaev, a Russian American physicist, first came up with the idea of combining superconductors and semiconductors. Microsoft has worked toward this idea in what has been its longest-running research project by combining the superconductors most quantum computers use with the classical computer’s semiconductor’s strengths.

Experimentalists have found that in the right conditions, such as being cooled to about four hundred degrees below zero, composite fermions can pair up to form a topological superconductor that contains the highly sought-after Majorana particles. 

This topological superconductor, also called a topoconductor, is the new state of matter they created. A topoconductor is formed when a superconductor and a semiconductor are cooled to extremely low temperatures and then tuned with a magnetic field.

Far from the future?

Even with this exciting news involving a new state of matter that could revolutionize quantum computing, people shouldn’t get too excited yet. In fact, Microsoft’s Majorana-1 chip doesn’t actually show that composite fermions work as qubits because Jainendra Jain says it “focuses on Majorana particles in superconductor-semiconductor hybrid nanowires, not on Majorana particles in a composite-fermion superconductor.” However, it shows that the needed measurements for a Majorana particle-based computer are possible, showing a pathway to the future. 

Also, the Majorana-1 chip is still in development. It is designed to have up to one million qubits, but right now it only contains eight. Microsoft claims that it has to put one hundred qubits into the chip to make it commercially viable. They are predicting that this will come in the near future, and based on their predictions this technology may be possible by 2030. 

This technology could be used to advance research, improve energy efficiency, develop medicine, and much more. Some are still skeptical about it though because these computers are extremely powerful, so in the wrong hands the technology could pose a threat to national security.

Conclusion

While some scientists try to figure out if they should be developing this technology or not, others are off to the races, with Mirosoft, Google, Intel, IBM, and several foreign governments all trying to be the first to crack the code of quantum computing. 

If Microsoft’s data is verified, it could revolutionize technology and make the future of science come much sooner than originally predicted. Whether one believes we should develop this technology or not, everyone can agree that these incredible leaps in technology showcase how much we have furthered our understanding of the quantum world. Now, we just have to wait and see what the future has in store for this exciting new technology. 

References:

Fiveable. (n.d.). Antiparticle. Fiveable. Retrieved March 4, 2025, from https://fiveable.me/key-terms/principles-physics-iii-thermal-physics-waves/antiparticle

Klebanov, S. (2025, February 21). New state of matter just dropped? Morning Brew. Retrieved March 4, 2025, from https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025/02/21/new-state-of-matter-just-dropped

Metz, C. (2025, February 19). Microsoft Says It Has Created a New State of Matter to Power Quantum Computers. The New York Times. Retrieved March 4, 2025, from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/technology/microsoft-quantum-computing-topological-qubit.html

Porschke, T. (2025, February 26). Solid, Liquid, Gas, Plasma… Topoconductor? The Log. Retrieved March 4, 2025, from https://www.thelogcchs.com/post/solid-liquid-gas-plasma-topoconductor

Unacademy. (n.d.). Fermions and Bosons. Unacademy. Retrieved March 4, 2025, from https://unacademy.com/content/upsc/study-material/physics/fermions-and-bosons/

WennersHerron, A., & Berard, A. (2025, February 26). Q&A: Will Microsoft’s quantum ‘breakthrough’ revolutionize computing? Penn State. Retrieved March 4, 2025, from https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/qa-will-microsofts-quantum-breakthrough-revolutionize-computing