The Tardigrade, World's Cutest Microscopic Animal, is Filled with Alien DNA

[rcs619]

Such a baffling piece of non-news riddled with non-scientific bullcrap. Brittle DNA? What the heck does that even mean?

To be fair, it's not non-news, the article on this site was just handled very poorly.

An organism with so much of its genome made up of foreign DNA acquired from elsewhere is super interesting from a biological standpoint. It challenges some preconceptions we had about how an organism's genome works, and may shed some light on how foreign DNA can be acquired in other organisms (albeit to a much less extreme degree), and how that might influence overall evolutionary trends.

Also, considering that tardigrades are nigh-indestructible and capable of surviving such extreme conditions, figuring out which genes contribute to that and where they originated from could lead to potentially interesting applications down the road.

 

[lacktheknack]

That said, that water bear is kind of adorable (albeit not as cute as the OP wants me to believe).

 

[FalloutJack]

uhm yeah...no. cute is not a word I would ever use to describe it, it looks like some B version of a monster from an alien movie that latches on to suck your blood or something.

Or maybe the things from Blue Gender?

Always wondered what those doohickeys on their face came from.