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Live Worms Found in Columbia Wreckage

Posted by michael on from the now-we-just-need-some-tequila dept.

Scoria writes "CNN is reporting that hundreds of live worms, fourth or fifth generation descendents of the subjects of a scientific experiment conducted aboard Columbia, have been discovered amongst the shuttle wreckage. The worms, C. elegans , share many biological characteristics with humans and are the size of a pencil tip."

8 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Land as Worms or eggs? by fdiskne1 · · Score: 0, Interesting

    I'm thinking the worms they found were probably eggs when accident happened. I'm no expert, but I'd think worm eggs would be more likely to survive than worms.

    Oh yeah...FP!

    --
    But why is the rum gone?
  2. Re:It's not one way.. by Aztaroth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Isn't that statement kind of redundant? :P

    --
    God, root, what is difference?
  3. The worms by subzero_ice · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I am no expert but I think these worms must be tolerant to high temperatures because the space shuttle gets really hot when entering the Earth's atmosphere. God know what else are they tolerant to?

    1. Re:The worms by Mezzrow · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sounds like they were pretty well contained. I worked on C. Elegans in the past. They are not heat resistant at all. They can go into an alternate life stage called the 'Dauer' stage, which is essentially a toughened hibernatory stage, but still not heat resistant.

      Sounds like the container they were in just got lucky.

  4. sex by p01 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    C. elegans have two sexes: males and hermaphrodites, which are females that produce sperm.

    females that produce sperm ehh...
    umm.. easier to say that the worms are monoecious? having both teste and ovaries! duh!

  5. Re:Interesting Implications by tegeus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm not sure that this could be considered "proof" as such. Nothing in the article says anything about how much actual heat they were exposed to. Not being a biologist I have no idea if these worms could survive such temperatures or if there was some other factor that they survived. Plus they were in a "mid-deck" of the shuttle so that could be another factor. I think that when people talk about life originating from other than the Earth (such as the some theories to do with Mars), they are thinking more along the lines of microbes, which would be more feasible. As I said I'm not a biologist, but did they have a headache after the impact is what I want to know :)

  6. CNN math wizzes by bigfatlamer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As they state in the article, C. elegans have a life cycle of 7-10 days. As they also state in the article, the shuttle, at the end of its mission, crashed on Feb. 1. That was 89 days ago. But somehow they've only managed to go through 4-5 generations? It's a pretty simple calculation.

    More interesting (like CNN hasn't ever had a problem with pretty obvious facts) however is the survival. If we were talking about fungi or bacteria, organisms which are able to enter a dormant/stationary phase of the life cycle, it wouldn't be too surprising that they could survive. But C. elegans just have a pretty basic (egg-->larva-->adult) life cycle so they don't have a mechanism for surviving extreme situations (like a flaming fireball smashing into earth).

    One of the great things about C. elegans is that they're easy to mutagenize and determine which genes give rise to characteristics such as resistance to UV/ionizing radiation, long life, ability to consume large volumes of alcohol, etc. I hope that some of these super space worms get into the hands of folks like Leon Avery or Tim Schedl so they can figure out what helped these guys survive.

    --
    There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
    --Doug Copland
  7. Re:Size matters? by Mezzrow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Right.

    One of the coolest things about C. Elegans is that scientists are able to, using a laser, kill single neurons in a living worm. They then can watch the effects of that missing single neuron on the rest of the pathway and on the worm as a whole.

    Daniel, do you know if they've determined whether the other neurons compensate for killed neurons cells yet? I've been out of the game for a while.

    thanks. -mezz