This is Scientific American 62nd Science. I'm Ashley Papp.

Imagine a little critter that isn't quite an insect or an animal.

It's about one millimeter in length, shaped like a gummy bear with eight legs, and covered in tough, almost crunchy looking scales.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the tardigrade.

They basically look like more or less something between a worm and a bear with more legs.

They got the name water bears from their lumber and gate.

When they walk, they kind of sway from side to side, which is quite cute.

That's Jessica Emon, a research scientist and former student researcher at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

And she's pretty obsessed with the water bear.

So that's basically when I fell in love with the tardigrade because it's set there.

Under my binoculars and it got off its front of the body and it was waving at me.

Tardigrades have been around for even longer than the dinosaurs by like 200 million years.

And over all of this time, they've developed some pretty nifty ways to survive harsh environmental conditions.

When things get too dry or too cold, a tardigrade can lower its metabolism to nearly zero and go dormit for years.

They take all their arms and they pull them inside and you can't see their arms anymore. They just look like small tons.

And they pull in all their extremities and then they slow down their metabolism basically to a standstill.

And then when conditions are right again, they wake up and go on with their life, almost like sleeping beauty lying asleep for a century before her prints arrives.

And here's why that matters.

Researchers are really interested in what happens to tardigrades while they're in that dormant state, which they call cryptobiosis.

If nearly everything can be turned off and then decades later turned back on and fully functional,

the tardigrade and its internal clock may hold the keys to that Disney princess hibernation palace that we've been searching for.

A previous study from 2008 by some of Emon's colleagues at Stuttgart investigated how long tardigrades can survive in crazy, dry conditions.

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