Well hard bugs..

I found this little science story today, its about some Bacteria taken from a cliff in Devon placed on the international space station (on the outside) and left floating around in space just to see how long it could survive.

Amazingly these little bacteria managed to survive for 553 days before being brought back to Earth to see how in the heck they managed it! If it can be shown that structures incorporating DNA or other self replicating molecules can survive appreciable space journeys on things like rocks and tin-cans, then the number of possibilities for how life originated on our own planet just increased demonstrably.

For those interested in where such hardy creatures could possibly live, they originated from cliffs around a small village on the coast in East Devon called "Beer", clearly all that real ale and clotted cream has produced something quite extraordinary!