Tardigrades, aka water bears, are tiny microscopic animals with an incredible superpower among living things, namely that they're nearly indestructible.
Tests have shown that tardigrades can survive temperatures up to 300℉ or near zero, being fired out of guns at 2,000 miles per hour, and even the radiation in outer space.
And through it all, there's one thing humans have always wanted to know about these freaky little creatures - how can we make their superpowers our own?
Well, scientists at MIT may have discovered a way to at least co-opt the tardigrade's resistance to radiation, using tardigrade RNA.
It turns out, tardigrades make a protein called Dsup that protects their DNA from radiation. They can handle 2,000 to 3,000 times the amount of radiation a human being can, which would be a benefit for things like chemotherapy or traveling to Mars.
Scientists replicated the RNA that creates Dsup and injected it into a mouse and the results were shocking.
They injected the particles into either the cheek or the rectum several hours before giving a dose of radiation similar to what cancer patients would receive. In these mice, the researchers saw a 50 percent reduction in the amount of double-stranded DNA breaks caused by radiation.
Not only that, but the protein production did not spread beyond the injection site, which is good because during cancer treatment, you would still want the cancer to be exposed to the radiation.
‘This study shows great promise and is a really novel idea leveraging natural mechanisms of protection against DNA damage for the purpose of protecting healthy cells during radiation treatments for cancer,' says Ben Ho Park, director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.
And while that would be amazing for cancer patients and maybe even astronauts someday, I've read enough comic books to know we need to pick the right guinea pig for the first human trial.
Someone who will become Water-Bear Man, the friendly hero, and not Tardigradius, destroyer of worlds.
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