from Hacker News

Tardigrades Walk

by huntermeyer on 9/1/21, 2:21 PM with 29 comments

• by dopylitty on 9/1/21, 3:21 PM

  If you think that’s cool you might also like to see the motor proteins that walk along inside our cells. There are a few types including the ones that make muscles work.

  Kinesin is fun because it has little legs made of proteins. It gloms onto big bubbles of stuff inside the cell and carries them along pathways to their destination. Chemical reactions cause the proteins to fold in the right way to take each step.

  This shows how they look. https://youtu.be/y-uuk4Pr2i8

  This explains the mechanisms that they use to walk.

  https://youtu.be/9RUHJhskW00

• by johnwheeler on 9/1/21, 2:58 PM

  I fully expected to click on the article and see zero videos of them walking. Not because I didn’t think tardigrades walk but because science articles often lack media for whatever reason. Kudos to sciencealert

• by okl on 9/1/21, 2:50 PM

  For those interested in the microcosm, there is a youtube channel with high quality footage of lots of things: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbnbBWJtwsf0jLGUwX5Q3g

• by hirundo on 9/1/21, 2:56 PM

  I'm a dedicated carnivore. I used to work in a lab that did experimental brain surgery on cats. I trap and kill the rodents in my basement with something like glee. But I'm watching a tardigrave having trouble walking across glass and thinking "animal abuse! Someone give that poor little water bear a little traction!"

  Emotionally, I am not consistent.

• by phpnode on 9/1/21, 2:44 PM

  That title is unconscionable. Here's a link to the actual paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/35/e2107289118

  edit: title was edited

• by gene-h on 9/1/21, 4:06 PM

  BioRxiv paper's on this work is here[0].

  This is some pretty interesting work. It'd be interesting to figure out how they adapt walking to traverse 3d terrain, because robots are really bad at this. Tardigrades have about 200 neurons and probably don't have much of concept of proprioception so figuring out how they work would be useful for robots. They might 'cheat' at walking by being able to adhere to the surface though.

  [0]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.19.436228v1....

• by pope_meat on 9/1/21, 3:06 PM

  I vow to never put a tardigrade on to a glass surface, watching the little thing struggle for some reason made me feel bad.

• by pvaldes on 9/3/21, 11:01 PM

  Couldn't help to mentally complete the video of the tardigrade in glass with the sound of 'Macarena'

  The interesting part is that they remember a lot to prehistoric mammals like Cynognathus or to moles walking, but then you realize the eight feet.

• by webwielder2 on 9/1/21, 3:07 PM

  It's amazing how few atoms you need for a fully functional, fully articulated animal.

• by Ftuuky on 9/1/21, 3:04 PM

  Interesting videos but I always assumed they somehow walked since they seem to have legs.

• by ajju on 9/1/21, 3:48 PM

  It may turn out that these little guys are the real dolphins from Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.

• by Grustaf on 9/1/21, 6:11 PM

  Of course they walk, it's in the name! Seriously speaking, very cool stuff.

• by anonu on 9/1/21, 3:08 PM

  > We Were Not Ready For The Footage

  feels like a very tabloidy headline. Why exactly am I not ready?