Survivors

Here’s one for the books. Survivors of the Columbia crash have been found.

Hundreds of worms from a science experiment aboard the space shuttle Columbia have been found alive in the wreckage, NASA said Wednesday.
The worms, known as C. elegans, were found in debris in Texas several weeks ago. Technicians sorting through the debris at Kennedy Space Center in Florida didn’t open the containers of worms and dead moss cells until this week.

The worms (and moss) were in a nine-pound locker in the shuttle mid-deck. When the wreckage was recovered, nobody bothered opening it up until now.

“It’s pretty astonishing to get the possibility of data after all that has happened,” Sack said. “We never expected it. We expected a molten mass.”