It is one of the oddest creatures on the planet.

Microscopic animals known as water bears, or the the more formal name of tardigrades, have a remarkable ability to withstand extreme environments of hot and cold, and even the vacuum of space.

Now, researchers studying them believe they have created a new type of 'superglass' that could change computing forever.

Microscopic animals known as water bears, or the the more formal name of tardigrades, have a remarkable ability to withstand extreme environments of hot and cold, and even the vacuum of space.

Their results potentially offer a simple way to improve the efficiency of electronic devices such as light-emitting diodes, optical fibers, and solar cells.

They also could have important theoretical implications for understanding the still surprisingly mysterious materials called glasses.

Professor Juan de Pablo'ssays he was inspired when he read about what happens when scientists dry out tardigrades, then revive them with water years later, his interest was piqued.

'When you remove the water, they very quickly coat themselves in large amounts of glassy molecules,' says de Pablo, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

'That's how they stay in this state of suspended animation.'

This spring de Pablo and his collaborators at UChicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madisonpublished their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. News of the breakthrough recently went viral online.

A new paper bolsters the earlier glass research, which found indications of molecular order in a material thought to be entirely amorphous and random.

'These are intriguing materials.

'They have the structure of a liquid, and yet they're solids.

'They're found everywhere, and we still do not understand how this process of turning from a liquid into a solid occurs,' says de Pablo.

THE WATER BEAR Tardigrades (Tardigrada), also known as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of small invertebrates. They were first described by the German pastor J.A.E. Goeze in 1773 and given the name Tardigrada, meaning 'slow stepper,' three years later by the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani. They are short (0.05mm - 1.2mm in body length), plump, bilaterally symmetrical, segmented organisms. They have four pairs of legs, each of which ends in four to eight claws. Tardigrades reproduce via asexual (parthenogenesis) or sexual reproduction and feed on the fluids of plant cells, animal cells, and bacteria. They are prey to amoebas, nematodes, and other tardigrades. In 2007, thousands of tardigrades were attached to a satellite and blasted into space. After the satellite had returned to Earth, scientists examined them and found that many of them had survived. Some of the females had even laid eggs in space, and the newly-hatched young were healthy. They have been discovered 5546m (18,196ft) up a mountain in the Himalayas, in Japanese hot springs, at the bottom of the ocean and in Antarctica. They can withstand huge amounts of radiation, being heated to 150 °C, and being frozen almost to absolute zero. There are 900 known species. Most feed by sucking the juices from moss, lichens and algae. Others are carnivores, and can even prey on other tardigrades. They are truly ancient. Fossils of tardigrades have been dated to the Cambrian period over 500 million years ago, when the first complex animals were evolving. All Tardigrades are considered aquatic because they need water around their bodies to permit gas exchange as well as to prevent uncontrolled desiccation. They can most easily be found living in a film of water on lichens and mosses, as well as in sand dunes, soil, sediments, and leaf litter. Advertisement

The molecular order that the researchers found came as a big surprise.

'Randomness is almost the defining feature of glasses,' de Pablo says.

'At least we used to think so.

'What we have done is to demonstrate that one can create glasses where there is some well-defined organization.

'And now that we understand the origin of such effects, we can try to control that organization by manipulating the way we prepare these glasses.'

In a follow-up paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, de Pablo and five co-authors from UChicago, Wisconsin, and France show how the vapor-deposition process can create new glassy materials by manipulating their molecular orientation.

Using vapor deposition, Wisconsin's Mark Ediger and his team create glasses in a vacuum chamber by heating a sample material, which vaporizes, condenses, and grows atop an experimental surface.

The new type of glass developed by Juan de Pablo and his associates resembles this sample, which was produced at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in connection with a related project.

In their latest work, the researchers compared three data sets with each other: the simplified computer model of their earlier paper; a new, much more sophisticated computer model; and the experimental results.

The similarities between the data sets are striking, notes Ivan Lyubimov, lead author of the follow-up study and a postdoctoral research associate in molecular engineering at UChicago.

The experimental results require some interpretation of the molecular configuration because of inherent limitations of optical measurement techniques.

But in the atomic-scale simulations rendered by UChicago's Midway Computing Cluster, 'we can exactly specify the molecular configuration,' Lyubimov says.

'The area of uncertainty now is whether the model is accurate or not.

'Running these two models allows us to improve the certainty that this mechanism which we found is probably real.'

'The result is here,' de Pablo says.

'We have been able to generate new glasses with new and unknown properties through this combination of experiment, theory, and computation.' Pursuing development of new materials through laboratory experiments alone would be more time-consuming and costly, de Pablo says.