🌱 Moss survives 9 months in the vacuum of space and lives to tell about it

Remember when the bar for biological resilience was surviving a few hours without your phone charger? Well, science just raised it considerably. This week Japanese researchers strapped moss to the outside of the International Space Station for nine months and it came back asking for more, Tibetan women are literally evolving before our eyes to survive 14,000 feet like it's nothing, scientists figured out how to make people smell things by zapping their brains, and Washington announced bold plans to phase out animal testing without bothering to track how many animals are actually being tested. You know, standard Tuesday in biotech.

RESEARCH

Picture this: You're a moss spore, chilling in your protective casing, when suddenly you're strapped to the outside of the International Space Station. No spacesuit. No life support. Just you, the vacuum of space, cosmic radiation, and temperatures swinging from -196°C to +55°C. Nine months later, you come home and start growing like nothing had happened. That's exactly what happened to Physcomitrium patens, and over 80% of the spores survived.

Researchers at Hokkaido University sent moss spores on a 283-day vacation outside the ISS, fully expecting them to die horrible deaths. When lead researcher Tomomichi Fujita saw the results, his scientific assessment was simply: "Beautiful." The spores didn't just survive. 86-89% of survivors germinated normally once back on Earth, as if their extended space vacation was just a particularly aggressive spa treatment.

Here's the kicker: the protective spore casing (sporangium) that evolved 500 million years ago to help plants transition from water to land turns out to be an accidental space suit. It absorbs UV radiation and provides physical shielding, which means evolution solved space travel before we even invented the wheel. The researchers project these spores could potentially survive up to 15 years in space, though that's mathematical extrapolation rather than anyone actually testing it (because apparently nine months of space torture wasn't enough).

The implications for terraforming are genuinely exciting. Mosses need minimal soil, extract nutrients from rock, and were among Earth's first land colonizers. If we're serious about Mars or Moon bases, we might want to pack some moss. Though, to be fair, they survived space in dormant form. Nobody's tested if they'll actually grow up there. Baby steps toward making Mars green, apparently.

RESEARCH

Textbook evolution says natural selection takes thousands of generations to notice. Tibetan women just said "hold my yak butter tea" and did it in a few hundred years instead. New research from Case Western Reserve University tracking 417 Tibetan women found that those with specific genetic variants enabling optimal oxygen transport at altitude have significantly more surviving children. This is natural selection happening so fast that you can measure it with a stopwatch and a census form.

The secret sauce is two genes that Tibetans carry at wildly different frequencies than lowlanders: EPAS1 (present in 45-87% of Tibetans versus 0.3-9% of Han Chinese) and EGLN1 (88% in Tibetans). The EPAS1 story is particularly wild: Tibetans inherited it from Denisovans, an extinct human species we only know from a finger bone and a tooth. Turns out that one-night stand between early humans and our evolutionary cousins 40,000 years ago gave Tibetans the strongest signature of positive selection ever documented in humans.

Here's how it works: Normal humans at 14,000 feet respond to low oxygen by cranking out red blood cells, which thickens the blood and strains the heart. Tibetans' genetic variants prevent this overproduction while maintaining optimal oxygen delivery—like having a smart thermostat instead of someone frantically spinning the dial. The EGLN1 variant keeps working even in hypoxic conditions because it has a lower Km for oxygen, and this particular mutation appeared about 8,000 years ago.

The research, published in PNAS in October 2024, shows that women with the optimal genotype combination have more kids who survive to adulthood. Evolution isn't some abstract force from the distant past. It's happening right now at altitude, giving us real-time data on how human populations adapt to extreme environments. Though to be fair, the study was cross-sectional, so we're comparing women of different ages rather than tracking them over time. Still beats waiting 10,000 years for evolution to maybe show up.

RESEARCH

Remember when Smell-O-Vision was a gimmick from the 1960s that everyone mocked? Well, 2025 just said, "actually, that, but make it medical." Multiple teams have simultaneously cracked different versions of artificial smell, and it's either the future of sensory prosthetics or proof that science has finally lost its mind. Possibly both.

The breakthrough that'll make you question reality: Researchers created a device that lets people with complete smell loss detect and distinguish odors by translating smell into touch sensations. An electronic nose captures odor molecules, converts them to digital codes, and then delivers electrical pulses to your trigeminal nerve via a magnetic clip on your nasal septum. Your brain learns to associate the zapping patterns with different smells. All 65 participants, both with and without working olfactory systems, could detect odorants, and most could tell two distinct odors apart. Published in Science Advances this November, it's sensory substitution that actually works.

Meanwhile, Korean researchers discovered they can enhance smell sensitivity in healthy people for up to a week using radiofrequency stimulation. No surgery, no drugs, just some targeted RF waves, and suddenly your nose works better. And City University of Hong Kong built a wearable that delivers 32 different scents in 70 milliseconds (faster than you can blink!) for VR applications and olfactory training. A COVID-19 patient with severe anosmia used it for 14 days and improved smell recognition from 0.25 to 0.97.

For the truly ambitious, Virginia Commonwealth University researchers are developing a full cochlear implant-style electrode array for your olfactory bulb. It's still 10-15 years from patient availability, which is science-speak for "we're working on it but don't hold your breath." Given that 20% of people globally have smell dysfunction and roughly 3% have complete anosmia, there's a massive market for technology that lets people smell roses again. Or at least detect when the milk has gone bad.

NEWS

The Trump administration announced bold plans to phase out animal testing this year while simultaneously maintaining a system that doesn't track the 111.5 million rats and mice used annually in U.S. labs. It's like promising to lose weight without owning a scale: ambitious, unverifiable, and conveniently immune to accountability.

The FDA announced in April that it would phase out animal testing for monoclonal antibodies, with NIH following in July by barring funding for animal-only studies. FDA Commissioner Martin Makary talks about leveraging "AI-based computational modeling, human organ model-based lab testing, and real-world human data" to get safer treatments to patients faster. Sounds great, except rats, mice, and birds bred for research are explicitly excluded from the Animal Welfare Act (thanks to a 2002 Farm Bill amendment), which means they represent 95-99% of lab animals but zero percent of the official count.

Here's where it gets fun! The administration proposes cutting NIH's budget from $48.5 billion to $27 billion. That’s a 44% reduction. Luckily, this was already rejected by Congress. The Wyss Institute, which pioneered organ-on-chip technology, saw its research grants terminated. Around 4,000+ NIH and NSF grants were cut already to numbers known in July. The USDA's Livestock Behavior Research Unit was decimated to one scientist. USDA-APHIS has lost 15% of inspectors in 2025 alone, with only 5 Animal Welfare Act fines issued in 14 months. It's a master class in announcing progressive policy while defunding the infrastructure needed to implement or verify it.

Animal Welfare Institute's assessment: "The Trump administration's actions suggest it is working at cross-purposes: It proclaims a mission to advance science through nonanimal methods while simultaneously slashing funding for research, including for nonanimal methods." Meanwhile, companies dealing with alternative testing platforms like Emulate and CN Bio are optimistic, calling it a "historic moment" and "key watershed." To be fair, technologies like organ-on-chip are inherently more transparent and trackable than animal studies. It's hard to lose 111.5 million microfluidic devices after all, even if for a lack of legs. But without baseline data on current animal use, declaring victory on reduction is like announcing you've solved traffic without counting cars.

So there we have it once again. Moss is tougher than astronauts, humans are speedrunning evolution, scientists figured out how to hack your sense of smell through your skin, and animal welfare policy is now Schrödinger's regulation - Simultaneously progressive and non-existent until someone actually checks the numbers.

Did the moss survival rate make you reconsider what counts as "extreme conditions"? Ready to volunteer your genome for the Tibetan adaptation lottery? Wondering if we should just strap some moss to the next Mars rover and call it terraforming? Drop us a line. We read every email while contemplating which of this week's breakthroughs sounds most like a rejected sci-fi plot.

Forward this to someone who thinks evolution is too slow to observe, or who needs to know that moss is officially the toughest organism in the solar system. We're still going strong with that 70%+ open rate, which suggests you're all as delightfully unhinged about the intersection of biology and absurdity as we are.

Keep questioning everything (especially governmental math), Prateek & Jere

P.S. If you're planning any extended space travel, consider bringing moss. It's apparently more reliable than most of NASA's equipment and requires significantly less maintenance than humans. Plus, at this rate, it might evolve intelligence before we figure out propulsion.