The tiniest life forms are sometimes the strongest of them all—that is, they’ll survive anywhere and do everything they can to stay alive. Apparently, this even includes faking their own death.

In 2007, NASA found an entirely new bacterium, named Tersicoccus phoenicis , hiding inside two separate clean rooms—spacecraft manufacturing rooms disinfected to the extreme—each located 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) apart. After years of not understanding how exactly it got there, a recent paper published in Environmental Microbiology finally offers an answer: it hibernates, leading scientists to believe it was dead.

“It is not dead. It was playing dead,” Madhan Tirumalai, study lead author and a microbiologist at the University of Houston, told National Geographic back in October. “I

See Full Page