gurguliare:

etirabys:

youzicha:

Tardigrades may be tough, but they were still not tough enough to survive in The secret Google project to put an aquarium full of tiny, wiggly water bears inside your phone.

But is this an example of Google spending their resources on a public good (modular cellphone tardigrade aquarium technology), or should we condemn it as a strategic move to obtain monopoly in the hand-held tardigrade space?

well they’re not wrong

“It’s sort of like bears hibernating, where they need the environmental signals to tell them to do the thing. And they need time to do the thing. We kept being like, ‘Why are all these guys dead?’ And it was like, ‘Oh, it was a 70-degree day. That’s why they’re all dead,’” said Borgatti.

…

“The first time that we discovered that the camera being on was an obstacle for these guys staying alive was a little bit of a frightening moment. It got to such a temperature where these guys were dying off, and if you don’t think about it too hard, that’s almost like, ‘Oh my gosh, how are you going to take pictures of these guys if they can’t survive for a long period of time when the camera’s on?’ That’s kind of a mini-crisis that sort of requires a lot of rethinking,” said Gonzalez.

…

The engineers designed the experience around nudges that let you “play” with your tardigrades without killing them with love. “If you’ve been looking at [them] too much, we’d have a control that says, the next time you try to open the app if it hasn’t cooled down enough, it would say ‘They’re resting right now, why don’t you see some videos that we’ve taken before’, or what-not,” said Feehan.

(via transgenderer)