Scientists finally figure out why the water bear is nearly indestructible (2017)
bigthink.comIntersting, however, there is something about this format of headline that always makes me twitch a bit inside. There should be a law of scientific headlines, something along the lines: Whenever a reporter writes, "Scientists finally discover why...." you can be sure to interpret as "Scientists have even more questions about why...". The phrasing confuses the understanding of the general public about how sciences and scientists actually work.
One analogy I like is to imagine our scientific knowledge as on a land map.
We have a large sheet of all there is to know. There is a small area in the middle that is mapped, that's what we know, it is surrounded by blank space, that's what we don't know. As we explore further, the small area expands, but by doing so, its border also expands, meaning that the more we know, the more unknown we are exposed to.
We expanded the area a little on the tardigrade side, so as expected, it revealed more areas to explore than what we discovered. As a general rule, science more often expands our borders than fills up holes, meaning that the more we know, the more we realize the extent of what we don't know.
"Knowledge is like a sphere, the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown." – Blaise Pascal
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
> Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.
> It's hard to describe it in words.
> So, I use pictures.
Yep, it's the same pattern of thinking generally in the media and populous. Some law or politician 'solved' some problem. Then you dig deeper and see they changed how they count the stats to hide it, or just shifted the problem to some other part of the system that isn't really any better. Or eating eggs will kill. Next they're healthy so eat as many as you want. No, let's go back to them being unhealthy.
The main problems is that hides the name of companies and laboratories under an anonymous goop. Is not different than saying: "programmers invented a phone called i-phone" or "politicians gave an speech". Is stupid.
The second problem is that gives the false feeling that science works like a religion, where everybody has the same ideas and moves in the same direction as in a priesthood following divine rules. Couldn't be more wrong and damaging.
Saying "scientists" does not add relevant info. "We finally figured out why..." or using the passive voice would be the same, but less insulting. "A team in the university/company X" would be even better. Is the right way to show a minimum respect by all the hard work of this people.
Journalists don't do this by inertia because science was never in their pool of potential customers paying for advertisement, so they traditionally "don't deserve" the right to be treated as individuals.
And when they pay, here comes the overcompensation. The equally annoying opposite effect, where entire articles are centered around worshiping the person. Building a polished public image of TV celebrity. All his bullshit about their epic journeys and how they managed to help everybody despite everybody putting obstacles in the path. If you are lucky, you can find a couple of lines about the real discovery, placed between a photo of somebody eating ramen and another doing surf.
I think it's a fair headline, since they did find out why. It's just that, in science at least, every answer opens up a new set of questions, indefinitely IMHO.
Interestingly, that's my main gripe about scientists. Rarely does any of them actually dare to find anything out and settle a case. You can bet your aunt that the conclusion ends with "further research is warranted"... how better to secure your job!
Not the same but analogous to Betteridge's law of headlines[0]:
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
> If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant
Well I have a newfound fear of humans creating a bacteria as hard to kill as a tardigrade…
I mean all we need now is to find out how to make a prion that forms TDPs so we can glue it to the outside of COVID-19 in some twisted gain of function research.
This is such a sad exemplar of where we've gone as a technological society. Thirty years ago, you could have suggested releasing a virus that destroyed cancer, and people would have cheered.
I think people have just had to become a bit more realistic after having their eyes opened. Right now my imagination says that this virus might destroy cancer, but who knows what else it's going to do?
Clinical trials know what else it's going to do.
This reasoning is like the fear of a some random TESTED C++ code destroying the internet, because "it might do things that you don't expect in the long run". Well yeah... it might... but...
And after 30 years many of us have seen enough corporate propaganda to weary of any so called technological promises.
There is even a worse example: imagine a protein that locks onto pieces of DNA that are only present in people of a certain race, etc.
The worst part is, we can stop building the foundations of this type of technology, but our geopolitical opponents will not.
> imagine a protein that locks onto pieces of DNA that are only present in people of a certain race
The good news is that "race" is a social construct, not a genetic one. Very little genetic variation differentiates between groups of people, and the differences that exist do not map onto socially recognized categories of race.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23882
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1078311
https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1438
I can help you access the full text of all cited research if you can't get it through your library or employer.
Won't theoretically stop someone from discovering the genetic signature for a certain natural skin pigmentation, or slanted/smaller eyes. Sure it won't be perfect, but people who would create and use such a weapon probably wouldn't care about collateral damage.
I can certainly see it being China's final solution to the Uyghur question. They have a long history of callously and needlessly killing large swaths of their own people toward nationalistic ends, and not just under Communist rule.
There is more genetic variance within "races" than between them. Your imagination is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to be possible, let alone feasible.
I also honestly do not understand why China is the bogeyman here given that Long Island, NY was the eugenics capital of the world within living memory. Utah, the state in which I live, didn't shutter its own eugenics program until the 1960s. I'm trying to recall when China dropped nuclear ordinance on civilian populations and really failing here.
I figured it's probably a western bubble thing and sure enough most people in most countries don't view China as the obstacle to world peace. https://fullfact.org/news/america-world-peace/
China is the bogeyman here because they are the only major economic power currently running a large-scale state-sponsored genocide, unless you count Russian attempts in Ukraine. They're also one of the few nations with the scientific expertise and resources to potentially create such a virus.
And just because we haven't figure it out doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you take a baby born to two sub-Saharan African parents and a baby born to two Northern European parents, and keep them in boxes with identical stimuli from birth, they will have drastically different skin tones. If that's not genetic, then what is it?
> the genetic signature for a certain natural skin pigmentation
Such a thing does not exist:
> Our understanding of the genetics of melanin formation and distribution within cutaneous and follicular tissues has recently greatly expanded through the power of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) using large databases such as those of the UK Biobank (22) and 23 and Me (51). This research has provided new insights into the biology of skin and hair color and underscores the highly polygenic nature of these two traits, with complex epistatic interactions apparent between the genes involved.
(https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-genom-0831...)
Again, there's no biological basis for "race":
> People today look remarkably diverse on the outside. But how much of this diversity is genetically encoded? How deep are these differences between human groups? First, compared with many other mammalian species, humans are genetically far less diverse – a counterintuitive finding, given our large population and worldwide distribution...
> Early studies of human diversity showed that most genetic diversity was found between individuals rather than between populations or continents and that variation in human diversity is best described by geographic gradients, or clines. A wide-ranging study published in 2004 found that 87.6% percent of the total modern human genetic diversity is accounted for by the differences between individuals, and only 9.2% between continents. In general, 5%–15% of genetic variation occurs between large groups living on different continents, with the remaining majority of the variation occurring within such groups (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a; Hinds et al. 2005). These results show that when individuals are sampled from around the globe, the pattern seen is not a matter of discrete clusters – but rather gradients in genetic variation (gradual geographic variations in allele frequencies) that extend over the entire world. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between peoples on different continents or "races." The authors of the 2004 study say that they ‘see no reason to assume that "races" represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history. An exception may be genes where different selection regimes have acted in different geographical regions. However, even in those cases, the genetic discontinuities seen are generally not "racial" or continental in nature but depend on historical and cultural factors that are more local in nature’ (Serre and Pääbo 2004: 1683-1684).
(https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/human-skin-col...)
It must. If you take a baby born to two sub-Saharan African parents and a baby born to two Northern European parents, and keep them in boxes with identical stimuli from birth, they will have drastically different skin tones. If that's not genetic, then what is it?
I'm not saying it wouldn't be an unbelievably complex signature, but it would be a signature nonetheless.
Naomi: FoxDie is a type of retrovirus that targets and kills only specific people. First, it infects the macrophages in the victim's body. FoxDie contains smart enzymes, created through protein engineering. They're programmed to respond to specific genetic patterns in the cells.
Snake: Those enzymes recognize the target's DNA?
Naomi: Right. They respond by becoming active, and using the macrophages, they begin creating TNF epsilon. It's a type of cytokine, a peptide which causes cells to die. The TNF epsilon is carried along the bloodstream to the heart, where they attach to the TNF receptors in the heart cells.
Snake: And then...they cause a heart attack?
Naomi: The heart cells suffer a shock and undergo an extreme apoptosis. Then... the victim dies.
This is actually super trivial with today's technology.
It's a little too late to "stop building the foundations". That's like wanting to "stop building the foundations" for the tech that allows governments to spy on civilians. We're about 20 to 30 years passed that.
> our geopolitical opponents
Who are they?
Pretty sure OP is referring to the Chinese.
Australians. Argentina? Could be anybody.
Could be the NIH too, I suppose!
I don't know. My neighbor has been acting pretty sketch lately...
We did globally coordinate and deploy a vaccine campaign with little spare time.
which was the most technologically positive and futuristic thing that's happened in a long time. Thank you for stating it.
We don't need humans for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonas_aeruginosa
Eventually we'll get to a point where nothing will work against these
P. aeruginosa is an incredible organism. Not only is it antibiotic resistant, but it also is starvation resistant. So even when you have antibotics that work, it's often to difficult to get them to all the cells, since cells at the bottom of a biofilm just shut down completely for weeks on end. End the course of antibiotics, and they pop back up and start growing again.
Thankfully, there are major tradeoffs associated with those traits, which makes them not particularly virulent to healthy people.
The real question is, if these genes are spliced into a human do they awaken post-dessication craving human blood? :)
Craving for human blood said to be "within acceptable tolerance". Every technological step forward has it's pros and cons.
This is the purpose of Marketing. Feature, not a bug.
In the future you will eat the flesh of your fellow man and you will like it.
Nature is already doing this experiment, right now, and has been for billions of years. This couldn't cause problems even if we wanted it to.
That feels like fatally flawed reasoning. Nature took billions of years to sequester carbon. It’s taken a few hundred to release an amount that’s permanently altered the climate of the Earth.
There’s lots of problems humans can create that “nature” couldn’t precisely because we drastically compress time scales that make adaptation exceedingly difficult.
But it took no time for the universe to come into existence. In a bang and flash.
Since time stretches out to infinity as you approach a singularity, if we assume all matter started out compressed at the Big Bang, then actually it took forever amount of time for the universe to come into existence. I’m not a physicist though so I may have gotten the relativity aspect wrong.
Climate has been changing since the planet exists and you benefit from everything that a modern society has to offer. Better if you become the example of change in society and go live inside a cave to reduce your own carbon footprint.
Instead of comics, better understand that climate has always changed and will continue to change.
Not that long ago that parts of the globe were for centuries warmer up to 5 degree celsius and then fallen into a mini ice-age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
Reality is quite cold, literally.
Did you even look at what I posted? It addresses what you're saying, and it shows the Medieval Warm Period on the graph. In fact, even the article you posted has a similar graph as the first image on the page.
The medieval warm period and following "little ice age" are not even visible on the xkcd graph, that's how small they are compared to massive recent changes. You're looking at micro trend with a magnifying glass and macro trend with a distorting lens if you think the medieval events are anywhere close to what's happening. No recorded climate change happened as fast as the current one, there have been wilder changes but they happened over centuries, not decades
Saying climate always changed so it's ok is like saying you'll die eventually so it's ok if you die tomorrow
> better understand that climate has always changed and will continue to change.
I think virtually no one ever argued against that: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=48
Little Ice Age is on graph and is labeled. Medieval warm period is mentioned but too regional to show up in global temps.
But Little Ice Age lasted centuries and was only .5C. I hadn’t realized it was still happening until global warming erased it in 150 years. Then we added another 1C in less than 50 years. We are on track to warm another 3C by 2100, the amount of warming from real ice age in century instead of millennium.
> Little Ice Age is on graph and is labeled.
Yes, then look 3 cm down and see a massive fucking swing with 20 times more amplitude than both of the mentioned events...
I stand by what I said, without the labels you wouldn't see these two events, meanwhile even without the label you can see the current trend is absolutely nowhere close to any other past changes
Come on. You can both dig deeper than a single biased source. The world isn't turning into hell within a century, as certain as the sky won't fall on top of our heads.
If you are old enough, at least learn from the past two decades. Every single time that our goodwill was placed to believe the news drama, the end-result are overwhelming taxes on the west while forgetting about the major culprits of pollution in India and China.
Where are the XKCD man-child cartoons teaching about that?
Our society today doesn't behave that differently from medieval scientologism. In that sense humans are just like the climate, changing only ever so slightly.
A different article from 2022 claims that following work found a different mechanism. """However, last year another team of Japanese scientists called this "vitrification" hypothesis into question, citing experimental data suggesting that the 2017 findings could be attributed to water retention of the proteins. This latest study supports that counter-hypothesis. "Our data suggest a novel desiccation tolerance mechanism based on filament/gel formation," the authors of the new study wrote."""
Article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/scientists-glean-new...
In such situations it is usually a good guess, both mechanisms occur simultaneously.
> tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs)
Going from "Tartigrade-specific intrinsically" to a single T in the acronym is rather interesting...
What acronym?
The one in my quote, that's used in multiple places in the very article...?
I think it's a pedantic attempt to bring up the whole "initialism vs acronym" thing. You know, kinda thing that makes you real fun at parties.
Oh yikes. I've never even heard of the term "initialism" before.
I guess that's because it's barely used:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acronym%2Cinit...
Maybe some people have tried to push it as a new word in common usage but they don't appear to have succeeded.
Yeah, I kind of figured that out as you responded - see my other comment hehe. For what it's worth, Merriam Webster seems to agree that the distinction is basically arbitrary, and OED has the more general definition first lol
I would say it's only an acronym if it's pronouncable.
Maybe that's what they mean.
pronounces the relevant initialism as a series of transients, Czech-style
That acronym.
> ... that looks like something out of a Disney nightmare scene: strange but not particularly threatening.
Funny, I always thought the electron microscope images of tardigrades looked like the monsters in HAZMAT suits from Monsters Inc.
https://www.intelligentliving.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/...
It turns itself into glass.
When desiccation begins and TDP is activated, it engages a process known as vitrification. Boothby said, “The glass is coating the molecules inside of the tardigrade cells, keeping them intact.”
Glass as I encounter it is a form of silicon dioxide, and not particularly soluble. What new meaning of the word "glass" is being used here?
Can this be used to store larger organisms for prolonged duration? Maybe instead of cryochambers the future space travelers will use drychambers.
That's an excellent observation, but I suspect it will get much more difficult as the ratio between volume and surface gets dominated by volume.
Not that cryonics are necessarily in a better position about that, so I guess for comparison between those methods the point stands regardless.
they hinted at that in the article. said there's a lot of work before that
That really brings to mind the various vampire tropes... ;)
So that's how the paperclip maximizer nanobots are going to look like.
Great! Looking forward for hand-sanitizer-proof virus in the next GoF research.
Wouldn't be much point. Most viruses who don't envelop themselves in cell membrane taken from the host are already pretty much impervious to it already.
Drinking bleach won't help then?
No one ever claimed it did.
Trump did not explicitly recommend ingesting a disinfectant like bleach. Nevertheless, his remarks led some companies and state agencies to issue warnings about ingesting disinfectants.
Reminds me of the people who dehydrate to survive the chaotic eras in Three-Body Problem.
Headline is misleading. Waterbears are quite fragile, albeit tougher than most. I bought some and found nearly all would die after short exposure to low vacuum. Manuscripts seem to corroborate our findings. It is the exaggerated headlines that lead me to believe they are indestructible.
Yes, the exaggerated headlines ARE indestructible!
"This article was originally published in Big Think." In 2017. Word for word copy.
Ok, we've changed to that from https://www.veterinarydaily.com/2023/03/scientists-finally-f.... Thanks!
Being pre-Covid-pandemic casts the casual mention of pathogen gain-of-function research in a different light.
Nothing changed for everybody who actually understands gain of function research and does work with it though.
It's just another tool to understand how virusses work. Always has been.
Thank you for pointing out - added 2017 to the title.
@dang (2017)
LOL
ain't nothing like flipping 6-year-old news articles, right lads?