Luckily for them, this is a Chinese research team. An US based team doing this would get the tardigrades deported because the tattoo allegedly said "MS-13".
This is a funny joke, but I wish there was a rule about introducing the theme of contemporary US politics/culture wars in threads where they are not already present. It seems to serve as high-vcass flamebait.
(I know there is already a rule about metaposting to complain about rules, please consider this well-intentioned civil disobedience.)
I find humor to be a welcome breath of fresh air in a room full of stale hot air. I reject the view that this forum has to be a dry meeting of the minds.
I work with live tardigrades under a microscope and you could easily squish them with a little metal pick, or by pressing on the glass coverslip.
Tardigrades are very different from amoeba. They have a well-defined cuticle exoskeleton surrounding a liquid space, about 1000 cells, while an amoeba is single cell and highly deformable.
I suspect if you really tried to deposit a pile of tardigrades on your finger and squeezed really tight you could probably damage them with the ridges of your fingerprints. I don't know enough about the biophysics of finger pressure and how the surfaces interact, and I wouldn't really want to do this (feels cruel, even if they have very limited nervous systems).
I'm trying to think of practical use cases for this. Is surveillance one of them? Could you drop a bunch of these marked tardigrades on an object or on money and later identify it?
Doesn't seem like a very efficient way to accomplish the goal, but it would make for a great plot line in a spy movie.
"After this first step, Zhao and Qiu hope that this work could enable advancements such as microbial cyborgs and other biomedical applications in the future."
I'm not sure if i shoud be happy microbial cyborgs exist.
Here's a fun thought-experiment: imagine that NASA began with the truism that tardigrades are the best fit candidates for astronauts[1]. They put all their effort and money into robotics and tech to support little tardigrade colonies on The Moon and Mars.
Present day, this alternate universe has the same boring space tourism for humans that we have. But they also have a vibrant inter-planetary research program with robot-assisted colonies of tattooed tardigrades, doing all kinds of experiments, most of which are broadcast back home.
And honestly, by the time we get tech to figure out how to terraform Mars, we'd probably also have the tech to make humans more tardigrade-like. So the tardigrade astronaut program (TAP for short) would provide an important body of knowledge for the necessary biological changes.
Just seems like a better use of astronaut dollars all around[2].
1: I mean, they come standard with little space suits! C'mon!
Edit:
2: And think of the savings: I just found the first batch of candidates for the TAP's Mercury project by picking up a wet leaf.
by the time we have the tech to figure out how to terraform Mars
A billion year oxidization event that forms an atmosphere, creates water from nothing, and ignites the core of the planet triggering tectonic activity?
The myth of humans "terraforming Mars" is so far from reality it makes me question the aptitude of anyone suggesting it.
Presumably it's at least worth considering if such a pessimistic attitude is warranted. Such a slow oxidation rate is certainly not warranted on a chemical process level. The trick is performing this chemical process 1.5 AU away.
Absolutely, don't mistake my cynicism for defeatism. I want it as badly as anyone else, but the chemical and thermodynamic makeup of Mars does not warrant optimism (given present knowledge).
Bezos's vision is better than Musk's. This plan to gravitationally disrupt Ceres and turn 100% of it into habitat strictly dominates all other space colonization ideas in our solar system not least that it can provide more square feet of habitat than Earth does but probably not the 0.2 km^3 of ocean per person or the 0.7 million tons of atmosphere per person that we have, areas where Biosphere 2 fell tragically short. [1]
[1] CO2 levels swung violently from day to night in Biosphere 2 because they didn't have enough atmosphere relative to plants and animals; Biosphere 2 probably shouldn't have tried to simulate oceans at all
Identifying tardigrades seems like obvious problem for this solution. You are doing experiments and want to track individuals overtime I don't think there is that many identifying features in them. So you need something.
I was thinking we could use tattoos to identify tardigrades, like how they tag animals for research purposes, but this is next level.
reply