Put them in freezing ice or boiling water, they refuse to die. These death-cheaters of the animal world can survive in minus 200 degrees Celsius or in the blazing heat of 300 degrees C. The piglet-shaped animals called Tardigrades can grow up to a millimetre and mostly live in sediments at the bottom of a lake. But they can also live a decade without water.

There are a thousand species of Tardigrades. These eight-legged creatures thumb their noses to extreme adversity by curling themselves into a ball and getting into a state of deep-sleep — called cryptobiosis — in which the body’s metabolic activity comes down to 0.01 per cent of normal.

Scientists at Kent wanted to see how much of high-speed impacts the Tardigrades could take. They wanted to test the limits of their endurance to determine where else in the universe they could be found. The researchers froze the animals into cryptobiosis, put them in canisters and shot them with a gun. Tardigrades shot at speeds of 825 metres a second made it; those at higher speeds died.

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