Discovering The Superpowers Of Tardigrades w/ Mindy Weisberger, Brooke Shepard & Sonali Verma (EP01)

Look, up in the sky it’s a bird, a plane. No! It’s a micro-animal that’s going to save planet Earth!

Tardigrades...or water bears...or moss piglets as they’re also called are micro-animals that are extremophiles and bio-indicative species. Their unique super powers are unlike any other animal on the planet.

Amy Hauser, the founder of the North America Tardigrade Research Consortium (NATRC) takes you on a sonic ride to find out how these subjectively cute creatures have the power to save our planet.

On this episode we have an all female cast of scientists, journalists, and #tardigradestans; Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer at LiveScience, Brooke Shepard and Sonali Verma, former and current Research Associates at NASA Ames sharing their stories of feverishly researching them and revealing fascinating fun facts.

Join the NATRC community on LinkedIn and visit our home base.

Amy Hauser

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyehauser/

Amy Hauser co-founded the North American Tardigrade Research Consortium (NATRC) in 2019 to help educate people about the impact of these incredible micro animals within ecosystems around the Earth. She has an MBA from Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, California and now resides in Washington, DC. Currently, she works as the Managing Director for Aha Marketing Strategy and provides digital marketing and strategy services for a variety of clients from federal agencies to start-ups. She enjoys urban hikes and biking around the city with her husband. Follow her on LinkedIn.

Cosmo Sheldrake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCkSr0ugTIM

Cosmo Sheldrake is a London-based multi-instrumentalist musician, composer and producer. Cosmo released his first single ‘The Moss’ in 2014, which was followed by the ‘Pelicans We’ EP in 2015 and his debut album The Much Much How How and I in April 2018. Cosmo collaborated with Bernie Kruase at The Great Animal Orchestra exhibition at Foundation Cartier in Paris and in 2019 he released a series of Wake up Calls, pieces composed entirely from recordings of endangered British birds. He has toured internationally, composed music for film and theatre, and in 2015 he ran a community choir in Brighton. He releases music through his own label Tardigrade Records.

Mindy Weisberger - Live Science

https://twitter.com/LaMinda

Mindy Weisberger is a reporter for Live Science covering breaking news across a broad range of science topics, including parasites, climate change, archeology and paleontology, black holes, weird animal behavior, and artificial intelligence. Her articles also investigate intriguing science questions, such as: Why do grapes spit plasma when you microwave them? Why are flies so hard to swat? How much of the ocean is whale pee (and worse)? Prior to Live Science she produced, wrote and directed media for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Her videos about dinosaurs, astrophysics, biodiversity and evolution appear in museums and science centers worldwide.

Brooke Shepard

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookeshepard/

Brooke is an aspiring space biologist and got her start as a Research Associate at the coveted NASA's Space Life Sciences Training Program in 2018. She’s now a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado- Boulder. Her areas of interest are sustaining life in space, simulating microgravity, and understanding the effects of stress on organisms in space. In her free time, she likes playing video games, ceramics, and vegetarian cooking.

Sonali Verma - NASA

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonali-verma-45074277/

Sonali graduated from the University of San Francisco in 2019, where she completed a B.S. in Molecular Biology with minors in Astronomy and Biochemistry. She started work at NASA in the summer of 2018 as an intern working to understand the molecular mechanisms of radio tolerance in tardigrades. Currently, she works at NASA as part of the Radiation Biology Lab studying the central nervous system’s response to deep-space radiation, and she will be attending medical school in the fall. In her free time, Sonali enjoys spending time with her friends, sharing memes, and imagining all the dogs she wants to own in the future.

View and download the full episode transcript

Podcast was produced, written, and edited in partnership w/ Leah Jackson at