Dirt, leaf litter, and patches of moss are favorite hangouts. But those are just the tardigrade’s preferred habitat; these tiny animals could easily live in the fires of Mount Doom if they had to.

A model of a tardigrade at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Tardigrades turn out to be masters of molecular repair. Tardigrades are a reminder that even the smallest creatures ...

Any habitat with water is a potential home for tardigrades. They can be found in oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams. Even the thin water films coating mosses and lichens are sufficient for them ...

In our roundup of 2024's top science stories, we feature particle physics research to two-billion-year-old rocks that yielded live microbes.

An enlarged image of a microscopic tardigrade. These invertebrates are ... Only an estimated 2,500 remain in the wild due to habitat loss from logging, minding, and other human activities.

Among the oddest she has seen: a stuffed version of a water bear, a type of microorganism also known as a moss piglet or a tardigrade. “It doesn’t necessarily inspire you to cuddle with them ...

The rock’s unchanging formation provided a stable habitat for these ancient microbes ... higher than humans Representative image of a tardigrade. One of the most extraordinary abilities of ...

A study analyzing Cambrian fossils uncovered that the ancestral ecdysozoan likely had a single ventral nerve cord, ...

In 2019, former President Jimmy Carter showed up at a Habitat for Humanity site in Nashville with a smile — and a black eye. One day earlier, Carter, then 95, had fallen and needed 14 stitches ...

Don’t be intimidated by the science — Ward helps break down even the most complex topics (like math and tardigrades) so that you won’t need a scientific background to follow along.