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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.'"
Columbia is not a country.
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.