What is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Don’t look up to the sky. It’s not a bird, not a plane, not Superman. It’s the ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Imagine a creature so small it can fit between the grains ...

Learn how water bears (tardigrades) reacted to simulated Martian regolith, what the results reveal about toxic compounds in ...

Tardigrades are eight-legged, translucent, microscopic animals. They crawl within dirt, moss, and lichen, and also live in the world’s harshest regions such as mountaintops, the deep sea, and the ...

Tardigrades – also known as moss piglets – prefer damp environments, but they can survive just about anywhere. Thomas Shahan/Flickr, CC BY-SA A newly discovered protein from Earth’s toughest animal is ...

Watch out, tardigrades: The first life form to colonize Mars may be a hardy desert moss, according to a recent study. A team of researchers recently put a desert moss called Syntrichia caninervis ...

The moss isn’t quite as hardy as the reigning king of extremophiles, the tardigrade, but it put up an impressive showing in an experiment where scientists exposed sporophytes (the reproductive ...