Charles Choi,
LiveScience Contributor
Date: 15 April
2013 Time: 03:00 PM ET
A suit a
thousand times thinner than a human hair or more can help microscopic animals
survive a harsh vacuum, such as would be the case in outer space, researchers
say.
These newly
developed "nano-suits" could help biologists investigate creatures in
exquisite detail in a vacuum that would normally kill the animals. The
discovery might even suggest alien
life could survive journeys through space, researchers speculated.
Moreover, the
scientists note the level of vacuum they experimented with is nearly the same
level of vacuum experienced by the International Space Station. "We want
to send animals wearing nano-suits to space," biologist Takahiko Hariyama
at the Hamamatsu University School of Medicine in Japan
 |
When zapped with plasma radiation, tiny critters
like a fruit fly larva (A-C), larval mosquitoes
(F-H and K-M) develop a gooey nano-suit that
seems to protecte them that seals their bodies
from the harsh vacuum conditions.
CREDIT: T. Hariyama et al., PNAS. |
Scientists
would like to analyze live organisms with scanning electron microscopes,
devices that can yield images with better than 1 nanometer, or billionth of a
meter of detail. However, the electron beams these microscopes use to scan
objects need to work in a vacuum, which is hostile to most life, rapidly
causing dehydration and death as vital bodily fluids and gases leak out.
Hariyama and
his colleagues were curious how long animals might live while analyzed with
scanning electron microscopes. The researchers hoped they might have enough
time to make valuable discoveries about the fine details of how these creatures
behaved before they succumbed to a vacuum.
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