Kozmos

Antalya | Build a Space Biology Superhero

Kozmos, Upper-Grade

High-Level Project Summary

Our project was to think of a creature that can survive in the harshest conditions, even space. After doing some research we learned that tardigrade also known as the water bear was the best living being to withstand the hard conditions of space. It could already live up to 10 days. We wanted it to live way longer. To achieve that we made some tweaks and added some features to tardigrade. With our changes our creature can hold much more water, detect acidic and basic (alkaline) liquids, detect high density liquids(they drown in mucus), use way less evergy for moving and can suply energy almost forever.

Link to Final Project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-053kf9MLI

Link to Project "Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0nmXcD29ao

Detailed Project Description

ATTENTİON: Before you get to reading our project, visit our website. In the website every single bit of information is explained and backed with photos.

the website: https://kozmos.club/index.html

WHAT CAN OUR ANIMAL DO

As some of you may know tardigrade is one of the most durable animals in the world, so we built our animal on top of tardigrade with little tweaks and upgrades.

These are the features that we got from tardigrade:

Their lenght is between 0,05 and 1,2 milimeters.
They can live between -272 °C and 150 °C .
They are spineless.
They can live in most places in earth and space.
They have a little layer of water on top of their skin.With the absence of this layer, animal gets into a passive state, in this state metabolismic events are slowed/stopped like people being frozen in a capsule in sci-fi movies. (This part will again be mentioned in "receptors" part)
They are oviparous which means they reproduce with mother laying eggs and with no embryonic develpment within the mother.
The disgestion sytstem.(which you can look at the anatomy site in resources part)
It has dsup protein. this protein helps the animal withstand tremendous amounts of radiation. The amount of radiation is between 1500Gy and 10000Gy. Humans cannot live over 10Gy. Since radiation is mostly harmless to our creature, we think of using it. How we use it will be explained in our ideas part.

here are our ideas:

Water and mineral storage:

Like hearth is the core of our body, this storage is the core of our creature. It has vein-like pipes connecting legs and outer layer to storage. Usages of this part will be mentioned in other parts of the animal.

2. Movement system:

At first we were going to use the usual fiber muscled leg system but we tought of a more energy-efficient way. Tardigrade had 8 legs and it moved its legs with a big amount of muscle fibers throughout its body. Rather than hundreds or even maybe thausands of fibers in the body like tardigrades, we used 6 muscle fiber like strings to surround around the storage. these muscles tighten the parts of storage thus getting water in legs for movement. This system works like hydraulic pistons in our world. But the diffrence is that the water pressure is used for moving a rod in a straight line in piston, and in here its used to move our creature's legs. These muscles also help with moving water from storage to outer layer with capillary vessels. Oh and it has claws for grip.

3. Receptors:

You see how everything is connected and working together? Yea this is the same. These receptors (the red strings in outer part of the creature) can detect 3 things: moisture, density of liquids, how acidic or alkaline(basic) liquids are. We will explain them one by one, and at the end a feature that connects this with the storage will be explained.

3A) Moisture:

Our creature needs water, lots of water. since it may be hard to locate water in some places, we tought"why not add receptors?". You may ask "ok it can understand when moisture is in the air but how can it locate it?". The answer is simple and is similar to how we locate things by noise. Lets say you are in an open area and hear something from right, how did you pinpoint where the noise was coming from? Simple, first you heard it from your right ear and then your left ear. Even though the time diffrence is minimal we can detect the noise. Same with the receptors, just instead of noise we have moisture. Its much more acurate since we have a high amount of receptors instead of 2 ears. After learning which way to go for water its instinct is to go there. When moisture is felt by receptors in passive state the storage is squeezed through all sides to wet the outer layer thus getting to active state from passive.

3B) Density:

I personally find this quite funny actually. Imagine, humans the most advanced animals in the known universe discovers your species and determines that you are nearly immortal, but one of your biggest weaknesses is that you drown in mucus.

To overcome this weakness, we made the receptors detect the density of the liquid its touching. Tardigrades are mostly drowned in mucus by slowly walking in snail slime trails in wild. Since our creature is too as slow as tardigrades, maybe slower because of the hydraulic leg system. Before making contact with the mucus, receptors feel the density of the liquid ahead, and it changes direction if needed.

3C) How acidic or alkaline(basic) liquids are:

When a liquid is too acidic or basic it tends to kill stuff, so we avoid it. The explanation may be short but this helps A LOT. For example, lets say that you are in a planet that has many acidic seas and oceans. A poor tardigrade could see a liquid, think its a water, and get in it. That would't be nice would it? When our crature gets near said liquid, first thing to enter is its receptors since they are longer than it's legs. With this only thing to get harmed is the tip of a few receptors rather than its life.

3 addition:

As mentioned before, our creature holds a layer of water on top of it's skin. The creature remains in active state as long as the water remains on the skin. The creature wants to stay in active mode so it can find more resources. The hair-like receptors help it hold more water in its skin like fur holds more water from bare skin. If the water that was being hold by receptors is too much it could be stored in storage part.

4. Living conditions:

Our creature can pretty much live almost everywhere but there is a few ideal conditions which is not necessary but would be nice to have. It can live very comfortably in freshwater, humid and places with low salt by weight percentage.

5. and 6. Energy from radiation and CO2-less photosynthesis:

Why do we have these 2 together? Because they make a perfect cycle. Photosynthesis without CO2 has been made by some species of phytoplanktons, and energy from radiation has been made with human technology. If our creature can mimic these it can create food from photosynthesis and use the energy from radiation to break up the food thus getting more energy in return, and the cycle repeats.

When our creature gets into passive mode and doesn't consume much energy. It can use this method to make food for moving in active state, prepearing for the future. This is more like exchanging water for food so it can be a little risky for the creature if done too much

HOW WILL WE USE THIS?

So yeah, we made a being that can live in space forever and is nearly unkillable in earth but what can we use it?

We think of making a chip to put in the empty parts of this creature(the purple painted ones) to collect information. Why would we want to get information from it? This is the fun part. It is proven that light can move things. Like you can hold a small piece of diamond in the air with lasers. Since this animal is very small it should be able to be launched with a high amount of light nearly at light speed. So after launching the creature to space with light, we can collect very valuable data from far places in our universe.

Space Agency Data

Sadly since our project mainly focused on living beings we could use little data from space agencies.

NASA:

https://science.nasa.gov/tardigrade-moss

https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/water-bears-in-space

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/microscopic-superheroes-to-help-protect-astronaut-health-in-space

Hackathon Journey

It was realy fun but also tiring. Our team worked hard, some even got sick in the process but still wanted to work. We learned a lot about how hard it is for animals to live in unusual places and what they need to do for overcoming the hard conditions. We chose this project because it needed both hard research and creativity which i think our team excelled at. We saw this project as a broken statue with tons of cracks and missing parts. What we needed to do was fill those cracks and missing parts, and thats what we did. One by one every solution for every problem, every missing information had been put in its place. Thankfully we had little to no setbacks so our team worked as efficient as possible.

Thanks to selman teacher, cem teacher and everyone that helped us on the way.