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Worm Descendants From Columbia Disaster Relaunched
astroengine writes "In 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry, killing all seven astronauts on board. However, from the wreckage, a sample of C. elegans worms survived. On Monday, descendants from the worms that survived the disaster were launched on board Endeavour for experiments on the space station. 'C. elegans is a common, well-studied organism used in biomedical research as a model for human development, genetics, aging and disease,' says NASA. 'The organism shares many essential biological characteristics found in human biology.'"
At first I thought it was related to Columbia, the country.
Then I was like, heh, maybe it's about the Worms videogame (Worms: Descendants?)
Finally, after RTFS, I still don't know what this means for space exploration or the earthworms in specific.
I guess this will force some folks to RTFA...
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We are talking about worms from space. Worms so tough that you can blow them up and have them tumble miles to the ground in a giant collapsing fireball...and they come out basically unharmed.
I don't know whether they caused the crash or not, but I am pretty sure that if they ever turn against us, we're fucked.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Sorry...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I've worked with C. elegans before. It gets worse.
They have males and hermaphrodites. The males can fertilize the hermaphrodites, but the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves as well. This is gross, and as a guy, kind of feels like nature telling me I'm non-essential.
In lab, the worms eat lawns of e.coli. They'll eat up all the bacteria on a petrie dish in a week. If you leave a plate of worms on ecoli and come back a month later, you'll see the worms have made balls of themselves, but are still alive. Worm biologists call that "dauer," and one was trying to explain something about it to me, but all I got out of it was the terrifying fact that even starvation can't kill them.
Holy water does not kill C. elegans. It just makes them sparkle.
Certain mutations cause the worms to be born without neurons. They survive, they're just "uncoordinated." Neurotoxin wouldn't be able to stop them either.
Certain other mutations cause the "bag of worms" phenotype. Remember how I said the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves? If the worm can fertilize the eggs but not lay them... the embryos will eat their way out. It's like Aliens.
If you want a plate of worms all at the same age, you just soak them in bleach. One stage of development is evidently resistant. To bleach. Bleach even kills ebola. Not C. elegans.
Lastly, scientists have recently discovered that at night, the worms crawl into our eyes and control us like puppets, erasing nearly all evidence of it before dawn.
Mod parent traumatizing.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
When asked about this achievement for C. elegans, the species did not respond, instead opting to reproduce asexual for a period of three to five days.
Ok, I'm going to need $250,000,000 right away to get "Project Early Bird" up and running... let's just hope we have enough time to breed the correct giant mutant birds.
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"If you want a plate of worms all at the same age, you just soak them in bleach. One stage of development is evidently resistant. To bleach. Bleach even kills ebola. Not C. elegans. "
It's the eggs - they have an eggshell that's more resistant to bleach than the organism. If you let it sit in bleach for an hour it'll eat through the eggshell and kill the embryo, but there's a short period of time where the adult has dissolved but the eggshells are basically intact
"In lab, the worms eat lawns of e.coli. They'll eat up all the bacteria on a petrie dish in a week. If you leave a plate of worms on ecoli and come back a month later, you'll see the worms have made balls of themselves, but are still alive. Worm biologists call that "dauer," and one was trying to explain something about it to me, but all I got out of it was the terrifying fact that even starvation can't kill them."
This is actually two different phenotypes. Bags of worms are because the worm doesn't lay eggs if it's starving. The problem is that if they starve long enough, the eggs will hatch inside the mother, and... start crawling around and eating things. They can't get out because the worm has a strong skin, so until they're able to basically eat a hole out of the skin, they just crawl around inside
Dauer is a completely different and even more bizzare thing - the worm develops from an embryo to an adult in ~3 days normally, and then can survive as an adult for ~2-3 weeks. Without food, though, it halts mid-way in development as a "dauer", which can live for MONTHS with absolutely no food. Then if you give it food, it resumes development normally, becomes an adult, and has perfectly normal offspring
I've also worked with c.elegans before, and it gets better. You can freeze them in liquid for indefinate amounts of time, and unthaw them and they work great. You can also dessicate them completely, keep them around, again for indefinate amounts of time, then sprinkle some water on them, and they resume crawling and laying eggs. Having murdered about half a million of them in bleach, I'm going to hell. P.s. the bleach resistant part the parent mentioned are eggs. To extract them, you just collect worms, wash them in bleach so they melt away, leaving only eggs (including unlayed ones) .